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Hello and welcome!! I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you at the Open, I was running around like a crazy person LOL!!! I’m excited to hear more about Mini!!!!
TracyHello and welcome! It was great seeing you for a moment at the Open, it was a bit of a crazy weekend 🙂 I’m excited to hear more about Grumio!!
TracyWelcome!!! I’m excited to see her work – she is adorable!!! I think you’ll find that MaxPup has changed entirely LOL!
Have fun 🙂
TracyGood morning! This is a great list! I especially like the detail of the environmental aspects – that is such important info!
And yes, why is that dogs love something from a different person or dog when it is not as “good” as what we have to offer LOL!
The food hierarchy looks good – a really nice list of different values.
>>•Presence of something of higher value, such a favorite toy, or a special person
So she might not eat kibble, for example, if you are holding the ball?
The other environmental aspects are really good – since you have so much detail, you can break it down more – will the highest value food/toys also lose value with strange noises or when you are nervous?
For the parts when you are nervous… I personally do a ‘fake it til ya make it’ in those situations LOL! If I am nervous or stressed or just not in a great move, then I will pretend I am the happiest camper and make all the silly play noises and so far, my dogs are fine with it LOL!!!! No changes in reinforcement values when I fake it 🙂
One last thing – about the storms/loud noises – does she have a fear response and she down/want to leave, or does she just not want to eat lower value foods or play with toys? My Exie had severe storm and loud noise anxiety so I used reinforcement procedures to help him be able to overcome that and compete (and live!) happily 🙂
Have a great day! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning and welcome!
I am glad to rear Spy is doing well!!!!! And I am also excited to har about the tadpole/puppy 🙂
Yes, you can upgrade to a working spot if you like. I can set up a PayPal invoice? I am driving home from Jacksonville today so I can do it tonight or tomorrow morning. In the meantime, you can start posting! And this is our ‘break’ week so you should be able to catch up 🙂
TracyGood morning!
Nice work on the backwards starts here – we actually saw one this morning at the US Open! The dogs over 2 years old totally think we are a bit nuts to release with the directional but then they get it. – both Chief and River were picking it up nicely! Plus you got waaaaaay ahead which is great 🙂You can line Chief up on a slice facing the landing spot more, rather than to the center of the jump, so he more naturally finds the turn – plus he can turn tight without collection, so the slices will be faster for him (he has to collect when he is facing the center of the bar which is slower than letting him rip :))
He did really well with the backwards steps, I think there was a little extra motion and he liked that 🙂 The backwards step created extra collection so it depends on the context – I would only use those for him if you needed a SUPER tight turn on 1, otherwise the forward sending will be perfect! For example, the one we saw today would be a forward send.
River also thought the release with the verbal was a little odd – so start her closer for now. The further you started her from the jump the more she thought you were nuts 🙂 You can even start on just a wing because it is a more natural impulse to go to a wing, then build it back to a jump.
As with Chief, start her on a slice so she doesn’t have to collect as much if the sequence calls for a not-so-tight turn on 1 – she will only have to turn a little tight with the forward sending. The backward sends get REALLY nice collection for her, so definitely consider those when you need a tight turn on.
On the backwards sends, you can use a bigger arm/leg step back so that you don’t have to lean back, that will get you up the line nice and fast too 🙂 Yo can start with your arm and leg in front of you or even pointing to her, then you can ‘swoosh’ them back to indicate the jump.
Threadles:
At the very beginning with you relatively close to the jump, she had a little trouble with the pressure of getting in next to you on the threadle wrap. You can release her and have her come in to your cookie hand for a cookie. When doing that, because there is no default to the wrap, you can use call her name 🙂 And for the wraps, you can even pull away a bit from the wing so that she sees a different line of motion and has a little more room too. To jump start the behavior, you can use just a wing to be able to add motion: the bar there is very much a slice inducer so you’ll want to isolate the skill as you add more motion, because you’ll definitely need the skill in motion. The slice threadles are looking good! I think you had a clearer line of motion, arms and footwork on those to help her out as well – all those factors work together.
Great job with Chief – you were clearer with your feet and arms for sure! Be sure to keep taking that extra step across the bar for the slices so he can really differentiate – when balancing back and forth, you were starting to ‘proof’ the slices a little by not stepping to the bar (and moving forward like you would on the wrap) and he had some errors. But he was *flying!* and I think that is great – he threadle value looks fabulous!
Great job! Let me know what you think!
Tracy
Good morning!
>>I hope you’re having fun at the Open!! It’s fun to take the young ones for the first big event. >>
Yes, it has been fun – I didn’t enter much because I am on the work crew here, but it has ben cool to see every single challenge we worked on here show up on the courses, sometimes almost exact to how we trained on them LOL! And yes, I totally believe the UKI trial had similar challenges even at the Novice level. Very cool!!!!
On the video:
He is doing well here but I think we can clean up the verbals to help him understand the lines better. You are using ‘go’ and ‘over’ in ways that dilute them a bit, so that is part of the reason why he was asking some questions (the other part of the reason is that he was still sorting out that it was OK to have the verbal override body language :))At the beginning:
Try to resist saying ‘go over’ – because it is diluting the go (it was often followed by right or here, so he was learning to ignore go).To clarify for him: do your left/right/here also mean take the jump? I think they do – so you don’t need th ego over as commitment cues because the right cue, for example, will be both the commitment and the directional: you can start it when he lands from the first wing jump (riiight, riiiiight….) as well as pull away. At first you were using her and go over, then the right or here was happening over the bar so it was a little confusing for him. At :52 and after that, the right got sooner and it helped the turns a lot!!
He was having trouble realizing that he was fine to ignore the body language and go to the tunnel like at 1:18, where you were not moving as much, plus the go had lost some value you because it doesn’t always mean go in this session 🙂
And when balancing with the GO TUNNEL lines, keeping the go for the true go lines will help a lot. And also , for example at 1:32 to help him drive to the tunnel, you can get closer to the first wing jump so you can move forward for a couple of steps. He is not yet having the go tunnel override the pulling away motion he needs a little more acceleration – the go cues can start as he lands from the first wing and you can accelerate more to help him feel very confident that it is perfectly fine to leave you for that tunnel 🙂
When reversing it and having him exit the tunnel to carry on to the jump, he did find it nicely, he just needed you to start those cues. Before he entered the straight tunnel so he could exit looking more forward.
Overall, the main thing he needs is experience that it is OK to layer 🙂 This will also help those wicked ASCA Gambles!!! So keep supporting with more body language for now, moving along the lines a little more and then we can fade it out 🙂
Great job! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi again 🙂
Toy games:
Nice quick out-then-take, it keep the value of he out very high with the quick reinforcement, and her out was very quick considering how engaging the tugging was.
Get it looked great, and she has lovely forward focus to the toy. And lovely self-control in that she did not go before you said get it and also she did not try to grab the toy until you marked that it was available. Hooray! She was showing a really lovely balance of being thoughtful but also in a high arousal state.
I love that when you said ‘catch’ at 2:20 but did not immediately throw, she did not move forward, she stayed in place waiting for the toy to arrive.
She started to get tired after about 2:30 and you can see the ‘out’ getting a little more sticky. That is great info, because you can end sessions before that so there is no mental fatigue in training. It was a tiny sticky but really – still great especially on the new toy at the end. I think more high arousal precision sessions are in her future, because that will bubble over nicely into the trial environment! G
Great job!!! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning!
This is going really well! One little reminder for the search and snacks cues – be sure that you use the word then move your hands (I remind everyone AND myself of this all the time LOL!) – sometimes you were really clean with the mechanics of word-then-hand, sometimes they were simultaneous and sometimes the hand moved before the reward. Since search and snack are both S words, try to have them delivered in a slightly different tone so they don’t sound the same especially in the same session.
The follow the cookie noise was fun and exciting LOL! She liked that! I bet that will be useful outside the ring to get her into a good arousal state.
Catch – were you cuing back up? We don’t want her to offer it too much 🙂 She did well waiting there for the catch!
Nice job experimenting with food and toys in the NFC runs! As you both get more experienced, the answers will get clearer 🙂
>>For non FEO/NFC, she knows her toy is back at her crate and wants to tug when we come back after a run. She usually checks to make sure I’ve left it. 😉 She definitely knows where her toy is at – either on me or at the crate.>>
Onwards to getting started with both the food and toy for the remote reinforcement. I think the dogs are in a better arousal state when the reinforcement is right outside the ring, rather than at the crate, so we can work up to that 🙂
Great job!
TracyGood morning!
I think this is going really well – definitely NOT nails on a chalk board!!!! And it is funny about editing out the lengthy toy retrieves – he was REALLY great about a lot of the retrieves, so be sure that retrieves are always reinforced with play or a 2nd toy or a cookie. If the dogs find that we take the toys away when they retrieve them, even if we are setting up to do something else, we often lose the retrieve because taking the toy away can be perceived as negative punishment by the dog, which will suppress the retrieve.
On the video:
He did really well with the bite cue as a new marker! To continue to help build the bite, you can say it then move the toy, wiggling it as added ‘permssion’. He did not seem to understand it when you had it directly in front of you or perhaps he is not comfortable driving into you like that – he was much better off to the side. So you can get it really strong off to the side and then gradually (eventually) move it in front of you. Keep working the bite cue in – the occasional ‘git it’ slips out but that is because you are very used to saying it 🙂For the ‘hand’ cue of following the toy – you don’t need to face him, you can be turned away and moving away, as if rewarding on course while staying in motion – this can also help keep it really different than when you use cookies, and it is more like how we would use the hand-toy procedure. You did a variation on it at 4:45 with the ‘shhhhh’ noise and that is more like how I use the toy in this scenario (chasing the handler for the toy reinforcement, after a great FC for example)
For the mine cue – it was hard to tell when you were using it – I heard it sometimes but it was after he had dropped it on the ground and you were whisking it away. It should be more of a cue for the out behavior, while it is still in his mouth (he had his back to the camera so it was a little hard to see) You can tug with him then relax your hands while still holding the tug and then say mine and just wait for him to let go, so he lets go of it while you are still holding it. If that is what you were already doing… carry on 🙂
“Git it” went well and I love that he brings it right back on a lot of those!! Good boy! he also had a strong forward focus to the toy. And he was offering good stays for the catches – this will definitely help his stay behavior overall because we will be taking this procedure into the ring.
It looked like you might have also had some food rewards happening too, but the camera edits cut that out – you can totally work the combos too! And onwards to the remote reinforcement as well.
Great job! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning!
>>I accidentally used my backside wrap verbal and after a few reps they seemed to be ok with it. Can you foresee an issue with that since the verbal still means: take the backside and wrap the wing? >>
I think it should be a separate verbal, because the verbals differentiate which side of the wing the dog should be on relative to you, plus the push-wrap is a turn-towards-us behavior and the treadle-wrap is a turn-away-from-us behavior. And those threadle wraps are getting really popular now! And they are happening in situations where we are not close enough to help with physical cues – eek!
Nice work with both dogs here!!! They were able to have a lot of success on 2 really challenging cues and also balanced to the front side really nicely.
I think for both dogs a couple of little physical details will help them differentiate the cues as well and answer any of the questions they had:
for the threadle wrap, I like the lower hands that you used. Positionally, it helps them both when you pull away a little from the entry wing, and they also did best on the threadle wraps when you kept your feet facing forward the whole time.To differentiate that set of physical cues from the in in threadle slice, I think you can use a higher arm on the threadle slice – those arm cue was also low-is and by your knees, and it looks liked maybe both arms were in play? So you can do a higher arm for the threadle slice (especially with River) and a 2 lower hands for the threadle wrap. And for the threadle slice, positionally, it helped them both when you were closer to the entry wing and stuck closer to the jump in general, turning your feet to the center of the bar and taking a step to it, kind of like what you did with River at 1:16 and 1:30. When your physical cues looked like these, I think they both got it right every time. Yay! When your physical cues were too similar or you moved too far away from the jump, they had questions.
That is important when you add the tunnel and there is more speed – the positional cue really helped them! For Chief, a strategic thing to consider: run closer to his line in the tunnel, so that when you are cuing the threadle you are up ahead at the wing, but so far ahead that you stop and wait for him 🙂 You were ending up a bit too far ahead so you either had t stand still, or you got past the jump and he was unsure. With River, your timing of getting up there was good! She probably needs you to stay in motion but not at a run yet, as she sorts out the difference between the 2 cues.
Nice work here!! Let me know what you think!
TracyThanks! This session went really well – Cody seemed like he was suspicious if how easy it was and he felt perhaps he should be doing more to earn the treats LOL!!!!
For the Get it tosses, you got into the nice mechanics by rep 3 – it looks like you had a really solid timing of marker-then-move (he did think he needed to offer behavior, but that is fine because it won’t always be this easy LOL!)
Cookie is a new cue and it went well – his history of getting cookies from your hand will make this easy 🙂 You can have cookies already in your hand and visible so he can hear the cue and you don’t have to move or dig them out. I think this will be a SUPER useful cue because looking at the very beginning of this video, he was jumping up at your hands looking for the treats (poor starving dog haha!) until you got to work. If he knows that the only cue is ‘cookie’ to look at the cookie hand, you’ll have an easier time getting him to look at ‘work’ and not at your hands 🙂
Catch looked great! He immediately figured out that the cookie was coming to him, so he didn’t need to come close to you, probably an offshoot of ball play. Really nice!!!
Onwards to the toy play! Great job here!
Tracy
