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Okay, I think I just screwed up the link. This one is working for me incognito so hopefully it’s good. If not I’ll try a cut and paste.
https://cdelany.notion.site/c790bbbc62fd4f52ad4a193abd34863e?v=675fc356192247b5bd1aa38bc4ec9704
We’re back after post-neuter recovery time. We did dust off some calm on the mat and some control unleashed pattern games – thanks for suggesting that. We weren’t able to do the ones with leg lifting since it just made him want to bug the healing area but we’ll try some of that now that he is healed up.
He’s a bit hyper here and I brought the wrong treats out so threw cheeseballs and then switched to toy.
I’ll plan to catch up before class officially ends at the end of February.
Looking forward to class tomorrow. 😊
Busy work week (so no video of our quickie training sessions) then I neutered Ripley yesterday so trying to keep him chill for at least a few days.
Wondering if you have any ideas for low energy, low motion stuff to work on while he heals up.
I’m thinking mat work (which he’s already decent at but using a flat mat with no edge – not our regular hop up on cot) and a bit of working on reacting less to dogs barking (kind of a new and intermittent thing) but figure some DS/CC to it can’t hurt. We could do some stays but I like him to pop up out of them so not ideal. We’ve got hand touch, fist bump and chin rest that we can refresh and add some more duration to.
Most of the other stuff I think of is higher energy, faster, moving stuff and trying to think of other things. Open to any suggestions (classmates too feel free to chime in here). 😁
Okay, just a little bit more tunnel threadle and a little bit of backside wrap with new “beep, beep” verbal. My LSMs are not as clean as I’d like. I just need to do a bit more of a walk-through of what I’m training with the verbal cues, body cues and then LSMs in place all before I start the exercise with him. I go out there knowing the behavior I want and how I want to get it but need to do more planning of all of those details. This pup is very smart and needs me to get as much of that right as I can to help him do his part without frustration.
Work in progress!
Backside Wrap “Beep, Beep”
Tunnel Threadle “Chute”
Did a short session of this week’s tunnel exercise. I am wanting to change my tunnel threadle cue from “through” which I’ve used in a few sessions but found myself not loving, to “chute”. That was my word for the cloth chute tunnel in the old days before that obstacle faded away.
I just decided this during breakfast so the words are not coming to me easily and I’m mixing up through, silence while I try to think of my new word and chute.
He’s a bit distracted by the neighbors’ screaming kids (but he’s hanging in there so we worked through it).
The non-flipping arm cue here is new to him and me so not quite fluent but he seemed to be picking it up pretty quickly
Okay, here’s some teenager-level Reverse Retrieve (just a few reps, got to get into a Zoom meeting – darn work cutting into my puppy training time 🤣).
Good feedback and nice next steps. On the verbals – “Push” is definitely our backslide slice verbal. “Back” is his back up verbal on the flat and I don’t really want to change it. “Beep Beep” is fun, cute and nice to say. I’ll put it on my short list. It’s like naming a baby, you want to get it right.
Also, huge LOL on the silent running. We definitely used to play that game with our dogs in class, even though we were also doing a lot of distance work since the place had a bit of a NADAC focus (kind of contradictory when you think about it). Anyway, thank god the dogs are so smart and basically figure out what the hell we want. I’ve always laughed thinking thank god we, the humans, aren’t the ones running full speed and expected to listen and respond to verbal cues and positional cues and do the thing, all without decreasing speed, dropping bars, missing criteria and while also ignoring all of the distractions. It would NOT be a sport. 🤣
Hi Tracy,
Thank you for the feedback on the last videos and we’ll incorporate it into our next training on that set of skills.
This morning we worked on backslide wrap with the barrel (I almost forgot this was in the lecture and exercise demo video but went back and watched and realized I hadn’t done this one yet). I don’t yet have a cue for this and really need to come up with one pretty quick here I think. I’ve got “Dig, Dig” and “Check, Check” for left and right normal wing wraps. I’ve got left and right for take the jump and make a softer turn. I don’t want to use “Wrap” since it sounds too much like “Rip” which is what I call him when I’m running sometimes. I really like verbals with a short vowel sound and some sharp consonant sounds in there since they seem to come out quicker and crisper for me. I’m open to suggestions and will also keep mulling it over (and will add it quickly to my Ripley Glossary once I come up with it – we are at 74 cues/LSMs/obstacle names so far 😝).
You’ve got all of our reps here, just cut out some tugging between reps. The Swissy is talking a bit here once things got exciting but Ripley is okay with that. I did have to put the 13 year old Border Collie away in a bedroom where she couldn’t see us as she could not stand the excitement of us tugging and she DOES distract Ripley when we are training – we’re working on that (on his end, more than hers since she’s earned some leeway and he’ll have to get used to dogs being excited in the real world) – baby steps.
Also did some Reverse Retrieve – but full disclosure I haven’t watched the new lecture yet, just remembered doing some of this with him a few months ago in your Reinforcement class so did what we left off with (and what we do when we go to new locations to help him enjoy the new places). I’ll watch the lecture and do it for real in the next few days.
Also did a little of pivot over a jump bump for hind end awareness and core strength and worked just a bit on him keeping his head lover (mostly just using hand position and treat delivery vs totally retraining his pivot since I still want the head up and focus on me one when we are out and about for moving through crowds and his lineups – not for “real” obedience so much).
Hi Tracy,
Here’s some follow-up of working on this week’s content. I feel like we get so much done during the live classes with your real-time feedback that we get through a lot of the basic +/- advanced versions in that time (which I love).
So, here’s Backslide Slice, Threadle and then Head Turn. This is pretty close to the full session – about 2-3 minutes per exercise with some editing to take out any treat searching, tugging and when he needed to go bark at a vulture overhead. 😝
Backside Slice
Threadles
Head Turn
Hi Tracy,
Great class last night (as always). I really like how you focus on concepts, split things and make sure the dogs work at a really high ROR. It suits Ripley’s learning style AMAZINGLY well.
I saw the Pivot game pop up this morning and so went ahead and did a session on that. Ripley has worked on pivoting before – when I was teaching him a left (Close) and right (Side) line up. He’s even done 1 session with jump bumps around the pivot circle before. But, it’s been a few months since we did this with a prop and asking for more precision.
I started out with the upside-down food bowl we used when he was younger but it was a bit too small and slippery (it would be okay, but it has a ridge around the outside that I think he’s trying to keep his feet inside). I switched to one of the cute little kid’s balance “tree stumps” I got off Amazon (they come in a nested set of 3 of different sizes if anyone else needs something like this). I like that they flare out at the bottom so are more stable than things like rubber mark buckets and have concentric rubber rings on the top that make them grippy.
Anyway, here’s where we’re at with this after not doing it for a while and with just 1 jump bump. I can add in more jump bumps next session (I also have some slightly more narrow jump bumps somewhere that I can try to find – I think these are 6″ diameter and I have 4″ out in the mud I could dig up).
Here’s that other video. Not sure what was going on today but YouTube went back to making all new videos Private again (for a while it was asking about Unlisted when I would upload and now it stopped). Also, not sure why it’s putting link text instead of the actual video into my post since I did it the same as always and it’s been embedding them. I also don’t have my edit options in the post box the way I normally do.
I’ll try clearing my cache next time I come in and see if it’s something to do with that.
Hi Tracy,
We are still battling mud on our agility field and so I tried using an indoor training place yesterday. He’s been here a few times for Puppy Manners class when he was 8-12 weeks old, but not since then. We are in CA so indoor training is pretty uncommon and none of our shows are indoors.
I’ve avoided using this location for his agility stuff because when I’ve seen more experienced dogs training here I notice they really have to slow down because the floor is slippery for them.
And, it was slippery for him. So, as soon as I saw he was slipping I tried to tone things down a bit and not push him for a lot of speed. He had a lot of fun and his focus was really nice for a place he hasn’t really trained in (and especially considering 2 sexy little girl border collies came in just after we arrived and were training on the other side of the barriers I set up). I had a list of a bunch of games to try – mostly for MaxPup but also a couple of things for his IRL class with Nancy.
In his real life class this week he struggled with 2 things (well 3 if you include the fact that the little girl BC we were training with seemed to be coming into heat – at least according to Ripley). 1 was tunnel threadles. We were using the same set up you have us doing, dog on inside parallel to tunnel and sent to entrance where they have to turn away. I did not notice in the moment in class (I call it the Nancy Gyes effect that I lose about 50% of my brain when I train with her) but the difference was she had us using a threadle arm/tandem turn arm with the verbal send to the tunnel entrance. When I’ve done these so far I’ve just said the verbal no tandem turn arm. We’ve only trained tandem turn arm on the flat to his prop so far. In class when I did that beyond about 4′ from the entrance to the tunnel he literally turned and looked at me like I was an idiot and then jumped up onto the tunnel turned 180 degrees and hopped off on the other side. It was funny/frustrating/embarrassing in the moment but after the fact I realized he was completely doing what he thought I was asking based on what I’d taught him – when you see my arm do this, turn 180 and go the other way. He 100% is a concept dog.
The other issue we had was when she had us work on tunnel commitment (not distance, he’s seen that) but with any pressure on his line as he went into a tunnel (like approaching a rear cross) or a front cross visual as he was entering. Again, he just hasn’t seen this yet and we’ve only done straight tunnels in class before. So, I tried a little of the side and backward send to the tunnel during this session to start to show him what that will look similar to how we’ve been doing barrels.
We ended up doing about 2 minutes of each exercise and about 10 different exercises with calm settle on the mat or in his crate between every 4-5 minutes of training (while I pretended to read on my iPad and had him chew on a long-lasting chew).
I feel like my mechanics are a bit dirty here just because I got a little scattered trying to do so much in 1 session on new equipment in a new place, but he was really good and his focus was surprisingly good.
Here’s what you’ve got:
Tunnels (lots of slipping, made me pretty nervous asking him to go fast)
Turn N Burn, Rocking Horses, Running Contact Mat Work and Serpentines
Resting between Games and Outs (yes, I did forget to not send him out and I’m not always on camera 😝)
Parallel Path and Startline Stays
