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Hi! He did really well here! The ball replacing the MM was higher stimulation but not a problem… YAY!!!! He was still really successful which is very happy-making 🙂 And no worries about the throws not being perfect, he knew to look straight (my youngest dog just keeps running forward looking straight and up, because she knows my throws are crap but will land out there *somewhere* LOL!!!)
Two little suggestions –
on your very first rep, don’t run as hard. Let him warm up for a heartbeat so that he can remind himself how to use his hind end so he doesn’t get tangled up in the poles. After a ‘calmer’ rep or two, then you can add back more motion – he was great with all of that after the first rep here where he caught his back end.The other thing is that you don’t need to be restricted to using the wings as entry points – yes, you can use them but you can also send from the harder entries around the clock, so he can hit and hold the weaves from anywhere 🙂
You can add those in on the next steps, which I think he is ready for 🙂
>>Do you think we are ready for the 6 and 4 game?>>
Almost but not yet. Since he was on 4 poles here (I think by the end they were completely straight) – Next step can be adding poles 5-6 for a couple of sessions til they are basically straight as well. Then do the Find Em 3 game for a couple of sessions to make sure he can find the entry and stay in, with the temptations of the tunnel and the motion 🙂 That game requires 6 poles, but the poles can be a little open (don’t need to be straight).
Then when he is proficient at both of those for a couple of sessions each… onwards to 6-and-4 🙂 6-and-4 is easy for the dogs so getting 6 poles great and also the Find Em is more important: I figure you will get to the 6-and-4 game next week at this time because now that the poles are straight, a session every other day so we don’t overwork his body puts us into next week. But that is perfect, because 6-and-4 easily builds to all the straight poles.
Let me know what you think! Great job here 🙂
Tracy
Good morning!
Things are going well here! Some ideas for you:first, with both sessions, the frisbee is both a great reward and the biggest distraction. It elicits that ‘run out’ behavior because he is used to it being thrown. So in order to be able to use if more effectively as reinforcement, you can change the way you play with him for it. Ask for thoughtful, control, tight-to-you behaviors then reward with the throw. For example, leg weaves, or chin hold, or even a stay. One of my dogs is completely insane for discs so the routine is that he offers a sit stay, I lead out, I release him and do a short throw. That way he gets the joy of frizzer without any of the flanking or running wide without thinking about behavior other than “WHERE’S THE FRIZZ” LOL! I have not taught him to go around me and then run in anticipation of the disc throw, even though the disc instructors want me to teach that haha!
So take a look at how you play with him with the disc and we can change that so it becomes more effective as a reinforcement but still have a great time with discs.And we can use the disc to raise the value of the MM – carry the disc with you but reward with the MM on most reps, then he can have the disc after eating the cookies. That helps balance arousal and will also help him love the MM more because it is paired with the disc. And you can ‘up’ the value of what is in the MM by mixing in stinky delicious stuff with the treats – I mix in stinky cheese with the kibble so the kibble smells/tastes a little better 🙂
On the weave sessions – the setup for the channels was good, I think you can tighten them even more 🙂 And the MM can be a little further away so he can take a couple of extension strides to get to it after leaving the poles. Because he has a harder time on your left side than on your right when arousal comes up – start the sessions on your left as he tends to be less aroused at the start, then move to your right side when he is more stimulated later in the session. That can help you get a higher rate of success!
2 other things that can help make the success rate even higher:
Move on all the reps at this point (here and in the 2×2 games too), no more standing still 🙂 He is getting used to you *not* moving so we need to be sure that he sees moving all the time now, because you will be moving 99% of the time while he weaves. Slow moving, and carrying the frizz but rewarding with the MM. And be otherwise pretty calm 🙂>>Chapter was running wide to the right when he was anticipating the frisbee throw and ended up weaving the three poles on that side of the channel.>>
I think he was vortexing a bit, meaning anticipating the throw so popping out and then trying to resend himself. So after a success, you can reward with the MM then have him come tug on the frizzer or do a short throw or grab. And after an error, call him back and reset either between your feet or with a chin rest or trick – then reward with a cookie from a pocket. That will help him balance the arousal which will raise the rate of success overall too 🙂
On the 2×2 session:
>>This was also a new location and direction for him to weave in.>>
Great! And the angles were good too!!! We are starting to see real weaving here!
A couple of ideas:
As he is balancing the arousal with the frizzer and learning the tighter poles, you can clarify the line ups and sends – when you are on the 1-2-3-4-5 side of the poles, make sure you start on your right not on your left for now. Same on the 11-10-9-8 side – start him on your left on those. He is confused when you send from between your feet or on threadle entries and fails on almost all of them. So, since the variable is tighter poles and also motion, we don’t need to worry about the threadle side sends, those can go back in later on.At this point, move on all reps 🙂 No more sending and being stationary 🙂 Send and start walking up the line so he gets used to the movement – and if he struggles, not worries: don’t take out the motion, you can open the poles up a little for a session or two.
And as with the channels – build a routine of line up, send, MM, frisbee tug, line up, send, lather rinse repeat 🙂 And if there is an error, skip right into the line up/reset and give a cookie so he can maintain the state of arousal and doesn’t try to fix it without you sending him 🙂
I think for now that this routine will help: he is getting the poles when you throw the frisbee and you don’t really move… but I think we need the opposite where you are moving a lot! So for now, just carry the frisbee (that is plenty stimulating) and reward from the MM then he can have a little frizzer moment with you.
Let me know if that makes sense! I am excited to work out the reinforcement here because it will help him learn to weave but more importantly, it will help you figure out how to balance his arousal and that will transfer beautifully to trials!!!
Nice work 🙂
TracyMM then disc will raiset he value ofthe MM
Hi!
She looked great here! This is exactly what the goal was: get her going fast TO the poles and not thinking about it at all. Yay!I think the angle of the poles should stay the same as they were at about :23 for now. She was blasting towards them. When you got them straighter like at :42, she trotted. Since we don’t want any rehearsal of the trotting or thinking hard… I suggest staying with the slightly open poles like at :23 and just throwing them into a sequence for multiple sessions over the week. It can be straight line sequences like this, or curved sequences – anything where she can recognize the poles and blast to them. If we are getting repeated blasting… the next step would be to add poles 3-4 at the same angle. But the main thing is to let this percolate without changing any variables that might make her think about being accurate 🙂 Depending on weather and schedule, I recommend 4 sessions similar to this over the course of the next 6 days or so. Then if we like what we see… poles 3-4 can go it. We already know that she is fine with the angles of entry and staying in, so we can isolate the drive to the poles and let it percolate before adding back the stuff she already knows 🙂
Let me know if that makes sense! I love her speed here!!
TracyHi! These were two really interesting sessions to watch back-to-back.
On the first video, I was really excited by his success – he was consistently getting it right, even on left side angles he was having trouble with previously. He did have an error here and there – sometimes not quite enough connection on the wing exit so he was watching you and not looking at the poles, or at 2:02 you did a spin and that distracted him a bit so he missed. But overall – really nice! And with the poles at this width, definitely add more motion so you can build to running. We want to be sure he understands how to get the weaves while you run, before we make the poles tighter.
On the 2nd video, though, he was avoiding the weaves more. I don’t think it was because you tightened them, but maybe it was enough of a change that he couldn’t get it? It was not because of too much motion or bad angles – but he was definitely avoiding (offering wings instead of the poles). And I don’t mean avoiding in any ‘naughty’ way – he was not sure of what to do so he was trying to be correct. Good boy.
So, why was he doing that? Hmmmmmm…. could be that the poles were a little too tight. Could be that he was getting too stimulated by the MM (he was flanking out around the poles on the left side and looking at it while he was doing it). Could be that this 2nd session woke up some soreness or whatever was bothering him previously?
I went back to the video from April 16th – it looks like the tightness of the poles there was the same as the tightness of this 2nd video? If so, we can game plan – it might be an understanding thing of how to use his body. Also, if I recall correctly, you mentioned he doesn’t love it when things touch him: maybe we have reached the tightness where he will feel the poles and he doesn’t like it! Let me know what you think.For the next sessions: We can focus on getting him to do the tighter poles with you moving and the poles touching him 🙂 I suggest 2x2s for that, because only have 4 poles is easier and it gets the rewards in faster. Looking back at the last 2×2 session here, it looks like the first base was at about 1&7 and and the 2nd set was wider. So keep the first base at 1&7 and angle the 2nd base to 1&7 as well but make it maybe 2 feet away so he has a little extra room. You don’t need the wings for this (plus no wings means the weaves are the thing to offer :)) And do angles plus have your motion going too – fast walking, jogging, and then eventually we will build to running. If he struggles, we can widen them. If he is fine with it, we can tighten them 🙂 And when they are pretty tight and touching him, we can go back to channels but the 2x2s will help for now 🙂
Let me know what you think! We will get him figured out 🙂
TracyHi!
I relate – I spend a lot of time checking the weather LOL!!! He did really well here: each time you get him into the outdoor environment, he shows massive improvements in being able to ‘find’ the poles. His focus and engagement looks great, like usual 🙂 Yay!Bearing in mind that the outdoor environment is so powerful – you don’t need to try to close the poles to where they are indoors. You can leave them pretty open while you layer distractions. The outdoor environment is a biggie, and so is your motion 🙂 So before closing the poles, leave them at 1&7 or 2&8 (wherever he is most successful) and add both harder angles AND work up to you being able to run. This took 4 or 5 sessions with my dogs, spread out over a couple of weeks (because, well, weather LOL!)
Then you can tighten them gradually – and with more experience outdoors, it will allow him to more quickly match what he can do indoors in his home base training center. And you can move forward indoors to straight poles and other challenges (like going to 6 poles) – it is kind of lime 2 separate training tracks 🙂Great job here!!! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
:>You are so funny. Eekk! Yea. At least she is not at the low end of that jump height. She’s right in the middle. Yea. Perfect. She really isn’t as little as she looks sometimes.>>
She is basically the same size as my Export was in his prime – he was super competitive in USDAA and UKI, and also did really well in AKC against the bigger Border Collies 🙂 She is going to be very competitive!!
T
Hi! Wow Joni she looks great, this is a lovely session! Great job with all of your connections and verbals and running lines and throws and all the things. SO AWESOME!
All of the Go reps looked great, she is smoking you and that is what we want. Yay!On the RCs, I watched in slow motion – you got her head turned before takeoff on all of them, right AND left turns. I don’t think you were helping too much, it looked good to me. There was one that was a little wide but I think that she was looking at something out ahead – no worries about it, they were all great.
On the backsides – great connection! I don’t think you were blocking the wing when she was a little wide, I think she was just feeling the wind in her hair and all of the rewards are thrown out ahead LOL! So one thing to do is to slow down your motion a little so you are not as stimulating. And one more idea: throw the reward to the landing spot as you move through, so she realizes that we want her to wrap tighter as the momma moves ahead on the line. That means dropping the reward in behind you a bit so she looks there and will therefore turn tighter 🙂
Great job here!!!! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi! These look great! So much speeeed and her commitment looks great! The choice of reinforcement looks pretty perfect – you had a really nice balance of speed and thoughtfulness. Yay!
All of the GO reps looked great. One thing you can do is start right next to the wrap wing and wait there til she is done wrapping… then run up the line with the Go cue. That will give her the feeling of driving ahead and leaving you in the dust 🙂 You were sending to the wing from a bit further away so she was driving the line a little ahead – so now we can get her going a LOT further ahead. Wheeee!
This will also make the RCs easier – if you start close enough to touch the wing and wait there til she finishes coming around it, you can actually get on the RC line sooner. Then it will feel less curved. There is a good view on the RCs on the 2 reps starting at :45 – by sending and getting a little ahead, you had to curve the line to be able to let her get past, then you moved into the RC. She read the cross (yay!!!) but it puts you a little stuck behind the wing, which makes it harder to get the next line when we get to running courses. So by setting the RC from closer to the wing, you can cue it sooner and it will actually get you further ahead after the cross because you won’t be stuck behind the wing or as far from the next line. And my goal on all rear crosses is to try to get back ahead of the dog as soon as possible haha!!
Great job on the backsides!!! Those are hard with youngsters because they really look for the bar. You ran strong lines – you were taking a moment to look forward for your position for a heartbeat, which she saw and created a little bit of a zig zag. So try to be even more connected, trying not to look forward at all – easier said than done!!!! She did really well committing to the bar on the backside jump too. So the next step would be to keep moving forward towards the takeoff side, so she does a full circle on the backside (it includes countermotion, which is harder, but she is ready for it).
Great job here!!!!!
TracyHi!
I have found BC tails to be a good barometer of internal state. That is not the case for many other breeds – some just wag all the time regardless of what is happening, and some are tucked all the time too. BCs have a very ‘honest’ tail 🙂
On the downhills:
He looks super happy on his downhills here, tail in the “this is cool” position. Yay! And it looks like you had toy play before and after. Perfect! He was generally driving across the board too – he wasn’t super fast on the last rep but I think he was just chill, not worried. Food is chill for him 🙂 So – add more tip. Yay! We will be able to get this to the ground pretty soon.Cooking With Lennan aka uphills:
Your presentation is lovely! You have really upped your plating game here. 5 stars! I feel that when the border re-opens we are all going to meet somewhere and have ice cream (maybe train dogs but definitely have ice cream). Ha! And your ice cream holder didn’t look as uncomfortable as the previous holder did haha!!! You can add more tip here too – he looks pretty comfy, do you agree? And you can try for 2 hit wonders: one run up for a big bite of the cone, then another run up for the rest of it. That 2nd run up the board will let us know more about how he feels 🙂Bang game – thank you, neighbor dog, for providing a trial-like distraction even if we didn’t want it LOL! You can try getting him into a higher state of arousal with more tugging before the send into position. It seems counterintuitive but works really well! And if the moving forward on the teeter is hard but the distraction is valuable (and not controllable :)) then you can try it on the plank instead of the teeter. I think the toy out ahead is a contributing factor (more on that below) so you can also try it without the toy on the ground.
He did well here on the reps where you were not moving and also when you moved a little bit. Looks like River was on a stay near him and he was fine too in general, which is a great distraction to add! And good job sending him ahead. He is not yet perfect on the pounce markers but that is fine – he is getting the idea to focus ahead then get released to it. Yay!
Wobble board games looked good too! Just when I was going to ask about a toy out ahead, you tossed it out there – that changes all the things for him LOL! That is where we started to see errors, so it is possible that the toy out ahead is very difficult… add in the neighbor’s barking dog when you were outside and it was too difficult. So you can split the behavior a bit more – instead of a toy out there, try something less stimulating like a cone (traffic cone, not ice cream cone haha) And do everything the same: when you release him to the cone, he can wrap it then get the toy. Then we can add the toy back and fade the cone (or layer in a wing). Let me know if that makes sense – it might be an easy way to bridge the gap to add more of your motion moving ahead with less distraction out in front of him.
Great job! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi! Sounds good about the one hit wonders and the lesson! I would leave the rebound game alone for a bit – she is feeling sensitized to it at the moment, so we will take a detour into ‘all things fun and running and getting off the board quick’. It will be easy to reinstall the rebound game soon 🙂
Tracy
Good morning!
I was trying to track the reps to see if there was a motion issue that caused the crime of passion – were you doing something differently there versus when you got the stops? I don’t think so – I just think it was a discombobulated rep with a massive distraction out front 🙂 He definitely finds it harder when you are moving, so keep adding motion 🙂
The tip/height of the board did not seem to bother him. Yay! And to prevent the offered behaviors of the bang game or running back up the board, you can have him do something during the reset moments – a stay, or sit on his mat, etc. When you are in a bigger space, you can have him chasing the ball but for the smaller space, a quick hop onto his bed will allow you to get ready so he isn’t teetering without you LOL!
This is going well, so I think you can add more height to the drop. At some point, when the weather cooperates, you will move the teeter outside – but start at lower tip there due to the new environment, to see how he does with it.Nice work! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
It is great to take this on the road! He totally needs that! And it is so fun to see him aroused for the teeter!One suggestion is to flip how you work the sessions in a new place to raise the rate of success – he was working at 70% rate of success here, which is too low overall. Ideally we want him more like 90-95% (I am sure you would not be sad about that LOL!!)
You started with the downhills right away, but he failed a lot right away. I liked his speed across the board on those, which he lost after the rate of success got low. So here is a way to get the best of both worlds: speed and accuracy!On every new teeter, start with an end behavior game – you did the elevator game reps here at the end, but I think those are where you should start. Then you can establish a high rate of success, get lots of rewards in. After a warm up of 2 or 3 reps of the elevator game, if you like what he is doing: then go to the downhills. I bet those will be successful too – and the structure of the session will keep him up at the 90-95% success rate 🙂
I also like to start that way as it lays the groundwork for when we transition to trials – you can do some elevator games in the ring at a trial (like in UKI running NFC) and you will be super happy with how well it transfers! More on that coming on Monday 🙂
Since he had his dog friends there, you can also use them as part of the rewards: when he has a successful rep, you can release him to go party with one of his dog friends 🙂 You can give a cookie then release him, or just release him if he considers it really reinforcing 🙂 It will keep him aroused (which starts to transfer the understanding to a more trial-like state) but it is also a super high value reward 🙂
Great job here! Let me know what you think! When is your next teeter field trip?
Tracy
Good morning!
>>using your suggestions of a very high value treat at the end of the board, and getting her to start from the very end of the board (using a low value treat). It took a bit of organizing to get low value and high value treats and toy all to hand for the exercise – I left the beginning of video unedited so that you can see that I really did put the liver on the target plate.>>
It sometimes feels like we need 57 arms and 35 props to play this game LOL! Great job convincing her to eat the cookie, good choice of value because she was happy to stop and eat it even as you ran past with the toy. That is kind of a pre-cursor to stopping on the teeter in the middle of a course: running is more fun but we can raise the value of stopping by making it fun AND by making it the gateway to the other fun stuff 🙂
>>Once we got started, I thought it went alright, and she was quite happy stopping to gobble that treat, before going for her toy>>
I agree, it went REALLY well! That will also help raise the value of food in training when toys and running are present 🙂 For planning purposes – I recommend one more session just like this. Then lower the teach it a bit so there is more tip for a couple of sessions – that will bring it almost to the ground at which point we will merge it with the down/end behavior.
Great job here!
TracyHi!
She is doing a good job here! Be a complete stickler for her foot position – check that all 4 feet are where they should be before rewarding LOL! She sometimes has a back foot off or slides off 🙂 She has enough body awareness that you can ask her to shift more to get into position precisely, that will transfer over into the teeter nicely 🙂
She had trouble with the motion – it is hard to stop when the momma is moving fast! For the next couple of sessions, use more of the arm-pumping fake-fast-running rather than actually running fast 🙂 The arm-pumping is stimulating enough that she has to think hard, but I think she will be highly successful (closer to the 90-95% range). You’ll feel dorky but that is fine hahaha Then if she can do 2 sessions at that 90-95% success with all good foot placement and weight shift, then you can start to add in more actual running 🙂
Great job here! Let me know what you think!
Tracy
