Because Overthinking Kills The Fun

50 days to go...

Where the friggin' heck did 106 days go???

The last week has seen me dragging myself out of bed so I have an extra hour before work to train the dogs. They need to train in different places now, so the equipment has been thrown in the back of the car and I am once again staking out all the parks in the neighborhood (luckily we have quite a lot around here).

First few changes of scenery we lost a bit of focus. The dogs wanted to wander and sniff. One of the MANY things I took away from Lynda's workshops was that if your dog is giving you a behaviour you don't like, i.e. sniffing, barking, you can interrupt this behaviour. (This is one piece of the puzzle I had been missing from my attempts at positive training - what do you do if the dog chooses to do the wrong thing or loses attention?) Lynda's advice was simply to 'interrupt the behaviour', i.e. just gently chuck the dog under his chin to get his noise off the ground, maybe chatting to him like 'Hey, we're working here, we're doing something, let's get on with it!' Incidentally, this has also worked well for Billie's occasionals burst of barking at the dog behind the back fence - simply walk over, interrupt the behaviour by performing a collar grab and removing her from that area. Once she is away she then has the choice to stay with me and ignore the other dog and maybe play with a toy or earn a treat, or she can go back and we can repeat the process all over again!

Anyway, one of the problems I have been having is keeping the dogs' enthusiasm up, most especially Fyre. Fyre usually starts off VERY enthusiastic but after a few run throughs he fades out. This is particularly evidenct when I try to move to more difficult weave entries or as in yesterday when I obviously increased the jump height on the set point too quickly for him and he refused, and thereafter continued to refuse even very low jumps so we had to go back to just a single low bar so as to end the session on a good note. Note to self - get a watch. I must, must, must remember with Fyre that he needs short, sharp and shiny training sessions. Two repetitions, finish. Two repetitions, finish. LOTS of play and excitement. I need to be less finicky. I am not allowing the dogs to make mistakes, in fact I think I have been moving too slowly and they are unutterably sick of me trying to perfect all the basics and not challenging them enough. The other thing I am going to try with Fyre is let him have two attempts and then finish the exercise and switch dogs, then give him another go. I don't want him to 'rehearse failure' and I DO want him to be able to hit those entries when he is at his most excited, not allow him to make some mistakes and then finally get them once he has 'settled'.

So today, instead of doing setpoint again, or weave poles again, I showed them a broad jump for the first time (no qualms there, both went over it first go) then added a couple more bar jumps and even dragged the tunnel out. I started with low (300mm) bars, then left one bar low and added a second bar at 500mm and we just played around going in a U shape. They did knock the bars a couple of times, but I didn't worry about it, we just went back around again and kept going. To be honest, they were probably very close, only just 4m apart, and especially tricky with them blasting out a tunnel straight onto a bar. Plus I have done very little jumping with them having the bars with any height, so this was another new element. All I really wanted though was for them to have fun, for me to see where they are at as far as doing any sequencing, and where I need to work.

FYI - crate games. Definitely, definitely get this DVD and work through it. My dogs LOVE crate games and they have ENDLESS applications. Today for example I was using it to keep them driving over the last bar and straight back into their crates. I recently purchased a soft crate for the sole reason that it is more easy to cart around with me and I can therefore take it when I go out to various parks training. They get very excited when we play crate games, so it helps to keep them 'up' as well.

One of the other things Lynda said in her workshops was that we Australians are so SERIOUS! She said we need to loosen up, to let go and have more fun with our dogs, not be so dead set on getting every handling manouvre, every bar, every contact perfect. We should ENJOY our training with our dogs. That is one of my aims now, to really enjoy every moment with them, not just 'Oh shit, only 50 days til Nationals, better go train the dogs'. (Incidentally, I will be spending 11 of those days in New Zealand so it is actually only 39 TRAINING days left... *gulp*)

I am hoping the dogs will be ready to do Novice Jumping at the Mt Gambier trials. Entries have to go off early this week so I have about another 24 hours to make the decision... then I think also, should I enter them in Open as well and hope they have decent weaves by then? Will that challenge me to do a good job with my weave training the next three weeks? Guess I will see how this afternoon's and tomorrow's AM training sessions go and make a decision based on that. Once thing for sure, no matter what happens I'm going to make damn sure I have FUN with it :) :)