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I started by putting the cookies in a little sooner and she was so focused on the task of eating the cookie in the bowl she didn’t seem to notice the sound of the other cookie. Once I waited for her to refocus a little then she was able to hear the other cookie and start the back and forth better.
I think with the toy I used the one toy we use only for MaxPup and special reward play after training that is a favorite and the other was a little ratty scrap of an old mink stole of Patrick’s grandmother’s that the dogs find irresistible. She had never seen the mink scrap before so she had a hard time switching to her old standby favorite. I just got a new real fur toy from Clean Run that I think will be similar in value to Old Faithful so hopefully that will make it easier to go back and forth. I am really excited she is able to get this game now. It is amazing to see how much she has grown and changed in just a month! The whole way her brain works is evolving. She is such a cool little pup. But yes, impulse control is tough. And she is hyper focused on some things, which is absolutely perfect for a whippet, honestly. As you know, they are supposed to ignore all distractions when in the pursuit of their objective, so I expect this one to be hard for her. I am excited that she is moving forward.
Also, I can’t find the mat I was using for our object so I am starting over AGAIN but now that she knows the paw touch on the target behavior, I think she will generalize fast to the new object.
We’ve been working on this one since week 1 here and there but she just wasn’t ready to put the pieces together. But I am excited by how well she did today! She did stall out in the beginning with not understanding the back and forth. She would get distracted by the cookies in my hand or insist that she shouldn’t have to go all the way over THERE if clearly the cookie was going to show up back HERE in just a second. But she got there.
Oh good thought about the arm.
*She* can switch between a tug and food. I am not confident I will do well with it without screwing up my signaling too.
I left the start of our session on this so you can see how “sticky” she is in sit (and now down because I built value for it) to start. Once she gets warmed up she does great. I think I screwed up with my signals a couple of times by not making them very clear.
A couple of things. Her breeder started her on Puppy Culture, but is a nurse in Florida and they got swamped with COVID-19 cases. The breeder’s adult son helped with raising the puppies and he did a great job. I suspect that she learned the “manding” part of Puppy Culture but they didn’t get to the clicker/shaping parts. So she tends to sit and offer attention rather than behaviors until we are in a training loop. Then she anticipates the loop! So in the “prime the pump” stage, she will sit and mand. Then once she is warmed up, the “ready” cue makes her anticipate what is coming next and offer something. So I am struggling because with my other dogs, “ready” is a “prime the pump” type thing but I am struggling to adapt to her style where sometimes she needs priming and a cue and sometimes she doesn’t.
I varied my reward placement and didn’t reward from hand. I tried switching up her starting location before the send. I wasn’t sure if I should reward her offering the go to mat behavior or not and that got a little muddy. She is definitely realizing that “mat” is now a behavior card she can try to play to get a reward and that is huge!
We’ve been stalled out for a little while because Teak didn’t under stand the paw target with the prop. I decided to make it an easier prop — a big rubber backed bath mat instead of a slippery metal lid. And we did a session with 7 year old Uncle Rhae so she could watch him and race him to the mat and see if that made the light go on.
She didn’t understand the go to mat behavior and then she didn’t understand why she should leave it, so I mixed it up with “go to the prop” and then “come back so we can play position changes for cookies” and then send back to mat. When she didn’t know what was coming next I think I got a little more understanding and less stickiness to the mat. This was something that took all this time to figure out, but she is so little, we are learning how to learn too! I am super proud of her problem solving in this session. I think I could clean up my reward placement, but first she had too little value for the mat and then too much so it was hard to adapt in the moment.
Gosh this baby dog has a lot of gas in the tank for this stuff! It is hard to keep training sessions short because she wants MORE MORE MORE!
I did the blind cross game, the drive ahead game with racing to the toy, and a little of the deceleration game. (She played games in the yard with the big dogs before AND after this!)
Here we are playing the deceleration game. She seemed great at this one!
We tried the start of the wrap a jump pole game and I think she is just too little for this one right now. The noisy treats take too long to eat. I then tried to make small soft treats make noise by putting them in and flicking the bowl with my finger but the mechanics got awkward. I need to think about this one. She also just wasn’t savvy enough to pattern the movement yet.
