Monthly Archives: January 2011

Clicker Training Monday

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I don’t work on Mondays, so I’ve been making a point to find some time to do some clicker free-shaping with the dogs. I say dogs collectively, I actually mean Kim and Dylan. Mollie doesn’t understand clicker training. I can teach an old dog new tricks, but she was introduced to clicker training late in life and she wasn’t that bright to begin with.

My one vague idea was NOT to have a fixed end-goal. I find an object and dog is invited to interact, and we see what happens. It’s been a lot of fun so far. Dylan has done clicker/free shaping since he was a pup so he’s generally quite quick to come up with things, he is really over enthusiastic and tends to focus on whatever we’re doing. Dylan makes a lot more progress in one session, but I’m afraid Kim is cuter x1000. She tends grumble and rowrl and make all kind of supercute little noises, and she goes off on tangents where she tries every trick in the book. It is adorable.

We originally started off and did a couple of weeks with a box lid, which Kim chose to stand in and Dylan chose to flip over his head. This time we used a blanket, which had a bit more thought behind it. Dylan has worked with a towel before and I was hoping he would transfer, and I was also hoping that I could encourage Kim not to use her paws. Dylan doesn’t use his paws very often, he tends to use his nose to poke, or picks things up with his mouth. Kim is the opposite, she tends to push with her paw, or grab/hold underneath or inbetween her paws. Probably so she can use her mouth to bark at it as well, I don’t know. I have no idea why they both have such a strong preference for one thing or another, but it’s interesting.

One day I will post the videos.

Chase

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Kim believes in kicking my ass when we’re doing these chase-the-handler flyball runs.

Photo by Jess Norman (SportySpottyGang)

It was a little too slippy underfoot for major improvements, but still some good stuff from Kim and Dylan. Dylan has started stuttering into the first hurdle again though, which is really irritating. I’m hoping it was just the muddy ground as he was 80% fine, but it’s something I’m going to have to watch for next week.

Mollie is laid up at home, at the moment. One of her muscles (I think it’s the tricep, but I’m not exactly brushed up on my canine anatomy!) is cramping after exercise and although she’s more than happy to keep going, we just can’t let her. She’s having acupuncture next Friday to hopefully ease the tension and get her back to normal, so she’s having a few weeks off.

Tactical Waits

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Dylan and I are trying a new approach with waits. Or at least, I am. I haven’t outright told Dylan about it, it’s more of a sneaky tactic type thing.

Dylan’s wait has gone right out of the window in the past 6 months, although he’s always had a shufflebum wait. I’m not very good at training waits, I don’t know if anyone has noticed. Kim definitely doesn’t have one, Mollie’s is too sticky (and I can’t even take credit for that) and Dylan’s has been deteriorating for about 3 years. I’m also very aware that Dylan doesn’t have Kim’s acceleration from a standing start, so I can’t use a running start with him, especially on the more difficult G5+ courses.

What I have also struggled with for the past few weeks is that Dylan will wait for hours, providing he’s on the end of a contact plank. He understands the concept of waiting there, at that point, but not in generalised terms. I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s just trying to be sneaky. He knows I can see if he’s moved from his wait on a contact point, but of course, if I leave him in a sit/stand/down and walk away, how can I tell if he’s moved when I turn around? This sounds to me like Dylan’s kind of thinking. It’s why I don’t speak Dylan very well sometimes; he thinks in straight logic lines, which don’t always quite match reality. I’m not very logical, hence why I have only just — possibly — figured out this wait problem. Incidentally, Kim is more with the sneaky bitch thinking-around-corners tactics. I don’t know what it says about me that I can see exactly what she’s thinking, quite often before she’s thought of it herself.

The new plan is to be really boring if Dylan breaks his wait. If he holds his wait, we get to play race-chase games all over the golf course. I am not convinced this will work in agility, to be honest, because I don’t want to have to be boring at agility. On walks, it works, for the moment. Dylan breaks, I tell him he’s an idiot and we wander on for a bit, and then we try again. He holds his wait, we get to play.

It is really hard for me to watch him break his wait and then acknowledge him, albeit in a boring way. For some reason I’ve always had it drilled in to me that if he breaks his wait, take him back immediately to where he started from. I have no idea why I persisted with that method, because, again, I’m not very good at training waits. You’d think I’d have realised by now.

I’ll see what happens at agility training next week.