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I’m back with a big video dump! Between the holidays and one of my dogs needing emergency surgery the other week, I’ve found myself with limited time. I’ve made sure to work with Blast a few times a day still, but the time to record, edit, upload, and post just hasn’t been there. But I think I’m back on my normal rhythm, so I’m eager to have our work evaluated so I can plan for the next few session.
We’ve continued to build his wing wrap skills. I didn’t realize until later that the wing isn’t really in the frame, but you, can see a sliver of it there! I thought it was really cute at 0:30 when he caught himself from cutting across and then had a brain fart. I rewarded the effort because he had to expend a lot of his little brain on working that particular problem out.
We progressed with the prop game and he’s starting to understand sending behind me to build him up for counter motion. I am seeing a lot of focus on my hand, and he does kind of try to bite it in the air sometimes. My older boy is a big biter when he gets over-aroused in agility, so I’m very cautious about building up another one like that. I love seeing enthusiasm and speed, but not at the expense of my clothes and arms. The session I did tonight (not recorded) didn’t have any biting from what I recall, so maybe he’s understanding the game a bit better, but I still want to talk about it some.
At the trial last weekend, which was his first time at this location, we did some…I’m not sure. Some type of resiliency walk/goat tricks hybrid. He’s a pretty easy-going dog and is not very environmentally sensitive, more-so environmentally curious (which is something I’ve found common among my field goldens before). Not much bothers him at this time, but I walked him over to the cafe that had a bunch of chairs, tables, benches, and structures that were new to him. I figured it was worth recording and sharing to see if I should focus on something else or not be too concerned about games like that when he’s already relatively confident. We took him to the cafe again this past weekend and he was climbing all over the retaining walls and raised planters on the way there, so he’s either adjusting to that particular space, or just feeling more bold now.
Now that we are a week out from multiple days of heavy rain, the ground is more workable, so we revisted decel work last week. I did some quick warm ups with him and then towards the end faded the lure and relied more on the hand target. Didn’t seem to phase him much, so overall happy with his work on this. Anything we should adjust?
Blind crosses also got the dry yard treatment. I had some good success using a food bowl to drop the cookie in, and that gave us a more seamless transition from cookie eating into the game, and eliminated any foraging behaviors. He’s starting to pick up speed, so I feel his confidence is growing here. I don’t have any questions here, just want to make sure we’re on track with our progress and if there is anything I need to clean up or pay more attention to.
We spent some time focusing on our toy play by going through the Build Up Your Tugging and Toy Races module.
The multi-toy game for building up tugging was interesting. I think it helped us at least narrow down which toys he prefers and are easier for him to grab at this age. You mentioned something longer and skinnier, which I had used previously but it was a bit cumbersome both for me to handle and for him to target and grab. He seems to like to grab close to my hand no matter what type of toy we’re using though. And that’s something all my dogs like to do, so did I unconsciously support that behavior with my toy skills? Hence why I liked the bigger, fluffier options. Either way, which toy(s) do you think I should stick with for now? I think he liked the brown braided one and the white fluffy bit bar the most.
While we were already playing with toys, we did a little bit of Toy Races. No problems here, but we are inside and there’s very little to distract him. I’m sure we’d hit more challenges in the backyard (more of the backswamp with all the rain), or out at a trial or park or something. But I was overall happy with this.
Later on we did more wing wraps. I transitioned to standing up, and he still understood the concept. We had a small failure towards the end, so I moved forward and finished up shortly after. But I am curious…are the bowls supposed to move all over the continent while doing this exercise? lol
Finished off with the next level of sending to the prop with the other hand/leg to start creating counter motion. I’m not sure he has all the puzzle pieces just yet, as there were a few times he stopped just short of the prop. That tells me he isn’t quite sure yet what is being asked. Should I back up to the baby level again, or should I just do very very close sends until we’re seeing better fluency?
Also, I feel like I’ve put “ready ready ready” as a cue for food scatter or something. Several times I would get him ready to go and as soon as I said “ready ready ready” he would snap his eyes to the floor. Any thoughts on that one? I didn’t mean to do it!
I didn’t want to move on without cleaning up some mechanics, so here’s some repeats of some of those exercises.
I really simplified the game and worked solely on toss cookie-run back to me quickly. The main issue is that, right now, his cookie drive is way higher than his toy drive, so he will sometimes disengage from play in favor of hoping for a cookie. Wondering if you have any suggestions or games we can play to allow us to switch more easily between rewards.
Revisited wing wrapping, this time with a cone. He picked up easily, but there were a few failures. Not a big deal as I had been upping the difficulty and I listened to that, but I guess my question here is how to restart the game when there is a failure and if I am doing it right. Waiting him out usually results in him disengaging and walking off, because there’s no guidance as to what he should be doing. I just started dropping cookies in the bowl to restart the game for him, and that worked well.
I know you said I could up the difficulty on one side and continue working with the other, but I felt that would be too confusing for me to keep track of, so I just redid the whole exercise. I feel like this was much more fluid and clear for him. His arousal was at a much better level, but still on the high end. I’d feel comfortable moving on with the exercise after this session.
I’m going to be playing a bit of catch-up here! Found time to record stuff the last few days but not enough to edit and post haha. There’s a lot of rain for us from now until Monday, so I’ll be trying to work through stuff we can do indoors in a smaller space. Hoping we can do some goat tricks or resilience games while at a trial this weekend!
I condensed most of the videos down to just be the action parts. You don’t really need to spend 90% of your time watching me walk back and position him for the next rep.
First is the decel and turn foundations. Once he got the concept, he was all in. I apparently only did it with him on my left side, not sure why. I don’t really have any questions about this one, so if there’s anything you think I should change or adjust, I’ll work on that, or we’ll move on.
Then we did blind cross foundations. I was running out of daylight and I didn’t want to overwork him and make him tired, so this was just a few reps. It was originally hard to get the timing on this because the cookie throw ended up being him far more invested in the floor, so I tried to work with the sit-stay position instead.
We worked on building sends to the prop. I think we need to work on this a little bit, but we also struggled with getting him excited, because excited at his age means biting, and that kind of takes away from the work there. Maybe I should just hold his collar loosely and verbally get him excited versus using physical play?
Lastly, worked some wing wrap foundations. We’ve done a similar exercise already with cookies in my hand versus cookies in a bowl, so he took to this one pretty quickly. I’d like to know if there’s anything I should adjust here or if we should up the difficulty for him.
I wasn’t sure if I should video more on the foot/nose target games, but I’ll be working on those over the weeks before we get to the games that really need them.
We worked a little bit on driving forward and forward focus before the sun went down (darn time change). Blast is also in training for field work, which is where a lot of our focus has been the last few weeks. A lot of it is working away from me, so he took to this game like a fish to water. He’s also starting to teeth, so despite his strong grip and urge to tug, he did have an ouchie moment during our tug session. He went right back to play though, so I let it go. I think we’re going to need a bigger space really soon…
