Thursday, May 13, 2010

Barking

The GCC this week is barking on cue.

This is scary. Megan is mean.

Blaze...we never got it on stimulus control. Granted, he has brain damage and is very abnormal and barks a lot as part of his problem. But my fear of not getting barking on stimulus control is a bit unreasonable.

Luna has it on cue but not stimulus control, but in a good way. She won't always bark on cue. Her barks in the morning are the most cute. They're silly dog noises.

Griffin...is good at barking. He has a very loud, deep WOOF! And he knows how to use it. Easter weekend, I was taking my brothers (and dogs) to a park for play/training. Griffin happened to bark. I had extra humans available. One clicked. One treated. He barked. A lot.

Now, this is both good and bad. It's incredibly annoying. It's close to my ear. It could be causing permanent hearing loss. It's made him more barking in the car overall. But, I'm hoping, until it's on stimulus control, we bark in the CAR and do NOT offer the behavior elsewhere. I am not reinforcing it anywhere else. Only in the car. And we'll see what happens.

I started adding the cue last night. But I need to wait for a pause. Initially we had a very poor ROR, 1 or 2 reps per minute, but we got up to 5 or 6. Still poor, but it's improvement. If I cued it right after I fed him, he would bark, but it was more of a patterned behavior than a cued behavior.

Tomorrow we have our first training day for a new-not-quite-yet-official club! I'm so excited! I get to train my dog, what a concept!

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