Day 3:
My car makes noises. About 2 miles from the facility. A mile later, I'm at the exit and stop at a gas station. I look under the car...and parts are dragging on the ground. Important parts. I debate going the last mile. End up having AAA take it home....I call and beg someone to come pick us up. It works perfectly as there was an emergency run to the store to get untouched wood dowels for a scenting exercise!
We do some shopping (literally running through the store!), and then hurry back...quickly cutting up the dowels. The morning is spent on some scent article training. I was happy to see their method...it's VERY similar to things I've recommended before....but with a few more steps. In the afternoon, there was a combination of obedience and bitework.
Today, we started with obedience (some more article training) and positions/signal exercise, stays, and a few other things. And I had a working spot!
Our first session... Griffin and I did some walking, lots of reinforcement for attention on the first step forward (we were doing that as a demo in class the night before...yay). This would change to backwards walking (me, moving away) when he lost focus. I had trouble with that, I wanted to maintain my front criteria but that piece was NOT about the front behavior. We did some stays, lots of little movement away and back, but specifically watching his tail for stillness and that his eyes were on me. I had some training on being slow with my reinforcement delivery. We did some nice playing, he switched well to the toy and hten played with one of the presenters... I was really surprised that Griffin did that without any initial greeting/enthusiasm...I thought he would be too distracted!
Our next session: The start of their articles...I'm going to hold of on more until he's better with his other scent work, but I liked that the session was on creating interest wtih play retrieves (not using the final object) and then fake hiding the item (dog watches while it's placed just out of sight).
Our last session: More stays. Outside! The stand was VERY hard, his tail would not stop moving. We talked about doing smaller sessions, breaking him out, not recueing the position (it was reinforcing). I was also told the Stand For Exam is ridiculous....apparently they don't have an exercise like it!
2 comments:
Are you doing bitework with Griffin?
There was a discussion on one of my forums recently about some Canadian Tollers being "hard enough" for bitework, and while I'm certainly all for crosstraining and don't think that bitework would necessarily ruin a retriever for retrieving, it does feel discordant to me. Heck, I can't even tug with Marsh, as soon as he feels pressure on his object he gives it up.
Also, I've written you an e-mail about 2Q field work, but I can't find an address to send it to. You can get me at myfirstname.walter with a domain of gmail.com
No... I don't have time and it would be a lot of work to get him proficient. He sounds a lot like your dog actually.... it took a TON of work to get him tugging and it's been SO worth it.
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