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I guess we have a good excuse for being behind now lol. Good news is she seems to still be doing great.
For first session back I figured something nice and easy was in order. I did the find the jump exercise with the jump at 15’ from the tunnel (in hindsight, could have even started at 17-18’ and I think still have had pretty good success). Video is 4 minutes, however there are 2 minutes of her having a meltdown about the FedEx guy towards the end. You don’t have to watch the whole 2 minutes worth if you think that once you’ve seen 20 seconds of a meltdown you’ve seen plenty. There is one rep after it and she did refocus well for that one rep so definitely was time to call it quits then. Meltdown was maybe less dramatic than a few months ago, but still a meltdown I don’t really want her having in public or where she doesn’t have a fence stopping her access to the creepy thing.In all honesty, I was tempted to end the session after working the first direction, which would have been right at the 2 minute mark (but quitting after two failures would have meant quitting after the first two reps, which would have made this feel like a pretty meaningless session. I DID make my handling very easy and obvious at that point, knowing she now also had a person hovering behind her). I knew I would not have another opportunity to work the second direction for probably a long time, and since by then she seemed to have figured out the game we were playing, I expected the second direction would be super quick (it wasn’t). I guess I just can’t help but feel behind on everything, haven’t even made it through most of the week 3 stuff. Trials and new places may be the majority of the chances we have to do training for the next few months.
I fit in a session or two this weekend while I was at a trial. Two rings, pretty noisy. Didn’t film yesterday, but did some wraps around a barrel with discriminations of wrapping either direction on the verbal which went well other than the one time I had to make a quick grab for her harness when she suddenly noticed the dog running in the ring. Prior to that, she hadn’t even looked.
So today I played it a little safer and worked her while they were doing a walk through instead. The walk through is to the right of the camera view. The other end of the building there were dogs running, but she couldn’t really see them from here. Video is a bit long, but I left in her working through quite a bit of stuff. She did well with that first person who came up to watch and the Golden hanging in the background, but not the second person who walked past while she was in a stay. Not sure if this was just too much for her right now? Not really sure how else to test the waters with giving her some chances to work in this type of environment without risking her making that kind of mistake. On leash she hadn’t made any mistakes either day, and only got distracted while off leash (and pretty much within arms length of me the whole session) by the fast running dog the day before so I thought I was setting her up better since there weren’t any dogs running.I tried to warm her up with just some static serps, but she was confusing it with the threadle cue. A while back I did feel like she needed a verbal cue, “push”, for the serp cue to help differentiate from the threadle cue, especially when doing it statically. Might not need it once doing it in sequence, but I know some people have needed a verbal cue for the convergence and just thinking about how BW run, I thought it might be worth it, even with me trying to minimize my verbal cues!
Another exercise with no verbals, set point. Other than a few sneaky broken stays, I thought it looked rather nice. Fair warning: as her whippet side is completely unproven in sports and the BC side is herding lines, I’m probably going to obsess over watching her jumping form for ETO until she’s 4!
Figured a game without any verbals required would be a good one to take on the road today. Had to get creative about the pill bug setup, but I think this works. I could feel when I wasn’t turned back far enough with my right arm on those where she cut behind me, totally my fault. (Agility is so much easier when it’s warm enough to not need a winter coat!) That first one was funny too when she had no idea what the game was and went “WHEE! I’ll just send to this weird looking ginormous jump wing over here.”
That is a great suggestion about the verbals. I DO mentally walk through each exercise before running it (you saw me do so in the live class, and of course I still made some mistakes) and sort of mumble the verbals quietly as I picture the movements in my head. But this is clearly not enough because even after several years of trying and being open to training them, I am NOT getting better with verbals and it’s been very frustrating. With the movements I feel like I can picture that easier in my head and then just DO it (even when I was still learning them), but the words this really hasn’t been the case. I feel like I need to make the pairing a bit more automatic- do the movement AND the words (and make sure that the verbal comes BEFORE the physical cue from a cleanliness of training perspective?) I like that this might serve a dual purpose to teach her to ignore words and cues not directed at her while I have her on a boundary or scatter feed while I do the walk through!
Last week was a bit of a bust for training, and then I was judging for 3 days straight. Only just started some of the week 2 material. Here is a first try on some tunnel turns. “Jump” and “hup” don’t really make sense as tunnel verbals, so I’m going with “gee” and “haw”. Luckily “jump” is right and “hup” is left, so gee and haw weren’t that far of a leap to make! I didn’t really introduce these verbals on the minny Pinny, this is her first time hearing “gee” and being asked to turn out of a tunnel. Pretty comical I think!
When she did finally turn out of the tunnel and I tried to cue that jump wing, I did not mean for it to be a wrap away to the left (ski) I just said the wrong word (gosh this is going to be so hard!) I don’t think she wrapped left because of the verbal, I think the physical cue was also late so she had curled in and by that point it was easier to wrap that way.
Those first reps of just doing wraps to the tunnel, I think I need to remember to remove my hat. I noticed years ago that with that style hat it hides enough of the side of my face that from the dogs level they can’t even see my head turned to the side. Whoopsie!Sorry for the slightly long video on this one as I left in quite a bit of the resetting. It was us doing the smiley face game, and she definitely caught on quickly, after some initial confusion about the tunnel being under the a frame (just where it happened to be). But it’s the first training session I’ve done where I really noticed the stays being a bit of an issue and also setting up had her sort of wandering and offering obstacles (hate to say it, but like a BC, terriers don’t do that!) I think there were two more reps at the end of this that I cut out that were very similar: trouble setting up, a few breaks, me rewarding the stay a few times before finally getting to do the sequence. Guess I’d like to prevent this from spiraling any further?
Couldn’t really do the gentle turn on the jump wing to other jump wing on this set up as the dog walk was in the way. Oh and there is another tunnel under the dog walk about 15’ out of view to the right, plainly visible to her past the jump wing on that side and she didn’t try to take that even once, so a tiny bit like the discrimination exercise.Ideally, yes I’d want the other dog further away as well. He nicely minded his own business pretty well until then and when he did come over, pretty sure it was to ask for treats and a food scatter. From his training perspective I didn’t necessarily want to reinforce that action prompt. I’m pretty sure if the session was to go longer, he would have returned to doing his own thing and I might have tried to step in and reinforce that. Come to think of it, the other day I was using him as a distraction for an exercise (out in the training yard, but not doing agility) with Roots and I was encouraging him to come in close to add some pressure (which Roots can handle just fine from his brother), so that might have been why he was being a tad pushy on this one.
Just a little wind in her hair game. A bit more distance (and better footing and handler path for me) than in the live class and she did well finding the jump. I’m not overly concerned, but I think she is one that will need to be taught jumping form given her “dock diving” style on one of these reps. I also tested out letting my old guy be free to watch, he’s usually employed with a bully stick or scatter feed to keep him out of the way. She’s a tiny bit afraid of him since he’s a grump about being bumped by a clumsy puppy so those last few reps where he was quite close to her running path represents quite a bit of pressure for her. I’m not brave enough to try this with the other two that she isn’t afraid of though as there would at best be toy stealing or at worst collisions or chasing.
At last! This was a good one to end this block on! We only did it from the very easy starting line, not even on the landing side of the jump, but she seemed to finally understand. I’ve done quite a bit of the strike a pose game indoors without the jump bump with the toy on the ground and it seems she finally gets the concept! And when she broke her stay a few times, she wanted to default to the wrong side of the jump, which to me says she is actually following the cue when I do release her. Hurray!
Here is the second video. iPad was definitely acting stubborn and glitchy yesterday about copying and pasting the links so no surprise it messed up.
And I’ll try adjusting her setup distance to be closer for the minny Pinny next time. One of my other projects is teaching a line up at my side so I can be more precise about setting up without so much luring.
Balmy but still snow covered today. Set up the minny Pinny exercise and added the jump bumps. I thought in the session that going left looked pretty good, but to the right she was having a hard time figuring out the striding, but watching the video back she wasn’t always bouncing going to the left either. Don’t know if maybe I should try making the pinwheel a little smaller next time? I’m also not 100% certain I see which “jump” is the 90 degree turn as each is a 90 degree turn and by the end they’ve done a 270. Or is that the goal? Do 3 90 degree turns in a row, and later we can gradually expand it out into a real size pinwheel?
Then we did some more with the spins and added the forward send without the spin. I was pretty happy with this session until I noticed how much she was sliding around. This section of the yard is all pine needles, which is why the snow is melted, but pine needles don’t make the best surface for doing tight turns. So might have to limit what exercises we do here going forward.
And the birds were just as active today, but I think she seemed less distracted simply because the exercises were easier. I think she’s an “if I know my job, distractions don’t matter” kind of dog, but if she’s unsure about a task, then she will find a distraction to displace onto. Which is good information, if she’s distracted then she probably needs some help figuring something out.
Not exactly perfect footing but figured anything she did in a training session wouldn’t be worse than she’s been doing playing in the snow on her own.
Finally made a little progress on the tunnel threadle turning to the right. What finally helped was being able to do it from a sit stay, sort of whispering the cue (which is already a low “shoo” noise), then releasing with the full verbal cue when she looked at the tunnel. We’ve done some work indoors with a focus forward cue while maintaining a stay which I think helped her understand to look forward without releasing. Started very close to the tunnel, and worked back. Then the double whammy part went much better. I marked a few times when she turned the correct way and she pulled out of the tunnel, but I was still pleased with those reps.
Threadle wrap on barrels I thought was going to be a breeze, since she’s really made those seem easy indoors in a small space, but she said otherwise. I never even got to working on the harder side as this session was quite a bit longer than this edited video: I cut out a bunch of her just offering to go around the wrong way over and over regardless of what I did. So I guess threadle wraps are just going to go on the list of things we aren’t going to figure out before the end of this class. 😞 This part of the yard is a bit more distracting and we dont work here often, but it was the only snow free area. In hindsight I don’t think it’s any less slippery with all the pine needles and pine cones. I don’t think the distractions or the footing was any part of why she was struggling so much though.
Rocking horses with spins went well. Waiting for the cue to start is overrated in her opinion though.
Unfortunately threadle slices for the manners minder are still not going well. She still does not seem to understand. Even that first direction that went fairly well, she really didn’t want to come in to the hand and does some avoidance. This is probably our third attempt doing this with the MM and it’s not getting any better. 😔
