A Week of Training: Monday

Blaze:

• A track. It was short, we went across some brushy areas that normally I walk around. He only hesitated a bit, checking other options before going through. We also had two places where we crossed a road, and he seemed to do fine there. It almost seemed too easy. I'm really worried that I might be accidentally cueing him!

Luna:

• Handling: I've abandoned her claws for two long. We did a bit of work as I clipped her nails. As I well know/knew, she needs work on that. She will tolerate it and that's not really good enough, we want our dogs to love handling
• Tricks: Going over and under Griffin. Over is easier, it's what she learned first. Under goes okay if she's Down and I use a target stick

Griffin:

• Agility: Monday night is advanced agility class, so after lessons, I run Griffin on all the courses. He did well, I didn't. It was sometimes harder to get where I needed to be. However, his behaviors were good, turns were efficient, and he was very, very enthusiastic
• Greetings: We didn't intend to use this and I didn't have food ready, but he did some really really great greetings with 3 different people. They're people he knows and love, I wouldn't do public trips without food at this point, but I'm still impressed he didn't think about jumping at all.
• Stays: While I ate lunch and did computer work, Griffin was sit-staying about 3' away. I'd reinforce at intervals from 3 sec to 25 sec. He did really well, at one point he offered some stands and chin targets to a chair next to him, but we soon got back into the sitstay pattern.
• Cue transfer: At training group, we did a practice of cue transfer (new cue, old cue, behavior, click, feed, and soon the dog is responding to the new cue. We played with transferring his temporary go out cue (Go!) to his new cue (Run!). It went well, in 5 reps he was offering the behavior on the new cue, we did a few other behaviors (spins, downs etc), gave the new cue, and he still responded properly. This got me off on a tangent about our stand not being able to get on a verbal cue.... and then how this is probably the result of too good of stimulus control.

Today I was better about being more specific with each session. Tomorrow we have the morning to work on our own, an afternoon meeting with a newish training group, and then time after evening classes.