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We finished up our training for the week with scentwork travel class at Home Depot. After Brodie and Darby completed their searches we did some resilience training and pattern games on our “tour” of the store. People, children, sirens and lots of weird Halloween and Christmas stuff for a puppy to take in! She did surprisingly well. 😊
It’s a little hard to see in this video but I’m finally starting to see her look ahead and focus forward in this exercise. I know it did some of this without a sit stay early on but probably should revisit.
This is another exercise where I have some trouble with reward timing. Still proud of her!
Good morning!
Trying not to inundate you with videos but headed out this afternoon for an agility workshop so if I don’t post now it might not happen!
I spared you the part where I was cueing the wrap in the wrong direction, closing my eyes and visualizes how it would look on a bar. 🤣🤣🤣 Poor Rory. This flatwork is a struggle for me sometimes. lol.
Anyway she did awesome on my right side but had an incredibly hard time on my left. We know what our homework is!
I’ve spent a lot of time overthinking directionals today. 😆😆😆 So if I need essentially a left and right for wraps do I also need them for backside wraps? Threadle wraps? Soft turns? HELP….
We did get in some more practice on our SERPs and parallel path. Here are our Serps:
I was happy with this work on parallel path commitment but again I’m unsure about my reward system and placement. Throwing food in the grass just doesn’t work so I used two treat huggers. Does this work? I have two treat and trains but putting them out there seems like setting a target. Is that ok? Or do I keep throwing the treat huggers? They work ok it just takes her a little time to work the treats out.
Today I rolled out of bed and before I even went downstairs I built a new ShPile! I worked to place some things so that they would move and the hula hoop has beads in it so it adds a little bit of noise to the equation. No big scary tippy board in this one either.
I made sure to get her amped up with some tugging first this time too. I’m sorry the video is a little long on this one but it thought it was really cool to actually see how much braver she got throughout the exercise. By the end of our session the movement of objects beneath her feet was almost a non-issue.
Added BONUS! Darby and Brodie also thought this game was a BLAST! 🤣
I have to say I feel like this was latent learning hard at work! We haven’t worked a ton of backing up recently and I’ve felt like we didn’t really make tons of progress in the sessions we’ve done.
I think there was a real lightbulb moment here when I turned the mat up against the shelving and she realized she could back up and actually feel it under her feet! In addition to the backing up I could really see her thinking more about her foot placement! 😊
Here’s our 2nd session of Rotated Sends…. Here’s where I start to overthink things. 🤣🤣🤣 I don’t know why I tried to send her in both directions with the same hand and clearly neither did she….
That said I was really very happy with her backward sends which I feel I managed bit to overthink.
So this class has really helped me better plan my training and find opportunities for short training sessions. I’ve been trying to do a few minutes every mornin morning before I get too wrapped up in my work day. I’m also writing in my planning and training journal again after nearly two years of going dark! So thank you. 💕 …. Enough of that let’s get back to class!
Finally got a few minutes to work on some Rotated Sends. After watching this first session I made some observations. When I was doing these I don’t think I knew why she was going in different directions around the barrel. When I watched it seemed when I sent with my dog side arm she wrapped away and when I used the opposite arm she wrapped towards me. There were a few exceptions but I think body position may have impacted this. I find this pretty interesting to watch as I had been wondering how I would ever get her to wrap away from me…. I could not seem to even get her to do it around a cone.
This brings up some questions…. Should I be sending her with a particular hand in the rotated sends? Should she be going a certain direction? Should that direction be different based on the hand I use? When do I start using directional verbals? …. And of course *ugh* do they have to be absolute? I’ve always taught relative directionals….
Anyway here are our first session:
Wow!!!! Thank you for this! The slides were so helpful in seeing the differences with proper connection and timing. 🤩🤩🤩 …. And I feel a bit less like I broke my puppy. 🤣
…. And lastly for tonight one of our first sessions of Rocking Horse Games outside. 😊 I don’t know why she wants to just keep zooming around like we’re post turning. I just can’t seem to connect for the front cross between the barrels! I feel like we did this better months ago b and now she has so many questions!
Hi there!
We did some more work on our Turnaways but I feel like maybe I’m using the wrong hand to turn her with…. You videos look like you are using your opposite arm, not the dog side arm. 🧐 Am I even doing it right???
Twigs and paper! 😆😆😆 I can’t imagine having a whippet for just that reason They sure look FUN and FRAGILE!
A social of that many Bostons would be a bar room brawl. 😂
Anyway here is concept transfer 1. I finally got the pool noodle rigged perfectly…. Started off well and then she thought maybe she was supposed to foot target. 😅 In her defense that’s what the frog hat was for!
So as you can see, I removed the noodle and now have a naked bar. I know that isn’t what we really wanted but now she is trotting over it again instead of foot targeting. Should I attempt to put the noodle back? I can also use a small jump bump if that’s better.
Finally we worked a bit more on backing up to an object. The session I didn’t record was actually quite good and then I got this…. Avoidance and still won’t back up straight. I guess I should go back to working on the flat? Can I use my clearview panels to straighten her out?
Thanks for all the feedback!!!
We went out and did some handling combos yesterday before the storm rolled in. Thought of you as they were having a big whippet social at our training facility! So many whippets running, flying and catching discs! It made for a great training distraction. 😆
Rory did well considering all the environmental factors and a different barrel type. Honestly she was mostly unphased! She was still “offering” the barrel a bit so I tried to do some restrains to keep her on track with what I was asking for. In general she’s been weird about letting me restrain her so this in itself was actually great progress and she seemed to find the release pretty fun and drove out of it nicely.
Afterwards we did plenty of toy play and later did a second (unfilmed) session with a LONG tunnel. Verbal sends and tunnel threadle held up well and are a fun way to end our session. 😊
