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Hi! Are those dog food tubs? Clever way to prop up the board! And it is fine in terms of height, she was challenged a little but definitely not over-faced.
Hopping on? Easy! Hopping off? Easy! Turning around? Almost easy đ Just cue it slowly so that she balances in her hind end a little more – the hand to cue it was moving fast enough that she was not thinking about her back feet as much. You can also try slowly turning her away so that she does a full 360 circle!>> No issue backing up to a target. Thatâs how I knew to teach it. Took a class and instructor wanted it shaped. Took her awhile t get it, but she did. We can easily add the target back in. Just adding fluency with different ways to get the behavior.>>
Perfect! Playing with different mechanics and shaping is always good! I think shaping the backing up without a target is actually pretty difficult, and you are doing a great job!
Nice work here! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
>> Regarding wing wrap-I do need to step towards and point like the pregame when we get further with distractionsâŚis that OK? Iâm training in between runs.>>
For now, stay really close so she offers it without pointing. We will add the cuing in soon but the offering it will make that much easier when we add it.
>>I canât get the alternate arm thing, reaching around. I did much better just doing the blinds with the side hand, I wanted her on. Like I do with chaz. I had her squeaky ball and she was coming to the ball hand. I was stopping do need to keep running.>>
That is all good! As long as you make eye contact AND keep moving after the blind (I know, I am a pain haha) then you can have the ball in the dog side hand so you donât feel too twisted up đ
Ë>I really need to work on confidence with noises and moving things. She does recover great, except with table/wicket fear.>>
This is good to know! The most important things to remember are:
Proceed very very very slowly, try to make it so easy that she barely notices noises and movement
Use incredibly high value food or toys – stuff that only comes out when you are working on noise or movement đ>>her sire is Finnegan with Jennifer Goldberg. Sheâs a thinker like him.>>
Small world! I love Finnegan and Jennifer!!!!!!
T
Keep me posted! We want the backing up behavior so HOW we get it is not as important as just actually getting it LOL! Export was trained with shaping it… but Nacho didnât understand that, so he learned it with the between the legs thing. Contraband didnât understand the shaping or the between the legs, so I did the backing up to a bed thing. And Hot Sauce didnât understand any of it so I just lured it with a cookie on her nose for a few reps – now she is great. LOL!!! So we donât need to lock into any single method, we can find a way that makes sense to her and to you đ
THi!
All of these looked good! And I figured the hockey analogy would make sense LOL!On the videos:
For the first goat game video here, I think he has all the confidence in the world which is great! The big wobbly peanut was just so tall that he couldnât easily get up on it. So if there is something you can pile up a little so there is a middle step to help him climb up more easily, I think it will help. When he is a little bigger he can just6 jump up there, but he is small and young so doesnât quite have the size and strength yet.
He definitely was thinking about the contact trainer baby teeter setup! You made it easy for him but I think you can make it even easier by putting some towels under it for now. Puppies have a bit of a pendulum with their confidence on these moving/noisy things, so dampen the noise and tip for now til he is back to normal confidence on it. The other thing you can do is feed him less in the middle – he might have been confusing it with standing in the middle of the plank, so was offering staying there. So when he gets on, yu can toss the reward off the end so he runs through it, then just kind of develop a back and forth pattern of running through it and slamming it around for tossed treats (or toys!) That will all help him think less about it all đ
I think a little step up onto it will also help here – maybe it was hard to jump up onto AND have it move, so having a something between the floor and the board can help him feel really happy to get in it.On the plankrobatics – I know you said you felt awkward, but this went well! You can have 4 or 5 cookies ready in your hand for quick rewards rather than reaching into your pocket for them. And you can also toss them when he gets on to help make it fun to leap off. For the turns – use your cookie lure like you did, but do it slowly so he doesnât lose his feet in the haste to follow the treat (because he is SO HUNGRY hahaha)
Wing wraps – this is progressing very quickly, actually, he is doing great!!! He is âleadingâ with his head, which means he is setting himself up to turn really nicely and bend through the turn. Perfect! When he made the little errors, I think he had gotten busy eating some crumbs then lost his train of thought… so he lost the rhythm for a minute. But then he got right back on track and you were smart to break it off for some play.
For the next steps – you can move the bowls back to behind your hips a little so he has more room to be able to turn around and wrap again.
And you can change your position to sitting on a couch, or in a low chair… working up to standing.
The distance that the object is away from you is not that important right now, it is the understanding that he should go back and forth – and he is nailing it! YAY!!!Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
>> I did go back to the same small plank and she did better on the turning around. And with both exercises, I released her and waited for feet on the ground before giving her the toy.
Perfect!
>>For backing up, the hand signal is the cue to do it. I started to work on getting the verbal more solid on its own.
I htink the hand signal falls into the âif it ainât broke, donât fix itâ category đ You can still work on getting the behavior to be more of a verbal-only skill but the hand signal is working fine for our needs at the moment.
>> I think I have had definite categories of toys â the throwing/fetch ones and the tugging ones. She will fetch and tug on the udder tugs, so I should get those out to use too. We played around with the tossing and tugging with multiple HR. She has such a strong preference for chasing that it was not always easy, but I think we made some progress.>>
This is an important insight! Rather than 2 categories of toys, you can work to have different markers that apply to all toys. So a frisbee can either be a thrown toy or a tugging toy and the marker indicates which, in the moment. That will get rid of the conditioned responses you are seeing (the stalky, sticky stuff) and will give you greater freedom with your reinforcement choices!
I feel like we are nerding out a little in terms of sorting out reinforcement and stuff, rather than just training little agility things – but the nerding out is going to be SO much more useful for her in the future. The agility part is going to be easy for you to teach her đ
Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
>> Can I have a holder for the bond cross and racing her?
Yes đ That will give you a better head start AND she will be even faster đ
>>And I canât use a toy for the blind cross, can I just treat her? I need to work the lotus ball, then maybe that would work and I give her the treat from it Or maybe have her ball and when she comes in to hand, I throw it??>>
Yes, and yes đ You can reward from your hand as long as you keep moving. And you can also throw the lotus ball or regular ball out of ahead of you when she catches up đ
Keep me posted!
TracyHi!
>> On the wing wrap, when can I drop the bowls and reward from hand. I did a few that way at the end. Just easier then bringing the bowls.
You can drop treats on the ground if she can find them. And you can reward from your hands if you want – we will be adding more about motion and reinforcement in the next couple of weeks đ
T
Hi there! Both of these sessions look great!
>> I have to confess that I struggle with using a toy to work and keeping them interested in it. Its just so much easier to use food.
Yes! It is so much easier to work with reinforcement that the dog actually loves – it makes the training stuff go faster and is more fun too. And he DEFINITELY is very fast in his training!
>>So moving to another room or insisting on toy play while shapping or working is tough for me.
Definitely donât insist on it – that is a fun killer for you both. You can move to a different room and throw a toy around, or just carve out a minute or two during the day separately from training to just hang out and play with the toy. If you feel like you are insisting, then you can stop đ It is more important that the toy is fun for you both! So play with it separately. I have found that reducing the pressure with toy play and bringing the toy into training later, when the pup loves it, is worthwhile and effective.
On the videos – his wrapping looks great! You can sit on a couch and even try standing up! It was hard to tell – how much distance between you and the basket did you have? If there was not a lot of distance, you can add more đ We will be moving this to a jump wing soon too.
He is VERY driven for his food, so I am confident that you will have a ton of speed on course and in his training – so there is no pressure to bring toys in, you can build it separately as just something goofy and fun then add it in to agility eventually đThe backing up cracked me up – you placed the start cookie just far enough under the chair that he HAD to back up. Brilliant! LOL!!!! Keep going with this approach, gradually adding in more distance and more steps away in the backing up. You can also add in starting him on a target or dog bed, and have him tak a step off then back on… building up to all four feet off then backing up. Then, the bed or target becomes a useful destination for backing up and hind end awareness.
Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
Backing up mechanics can be adjusted to the âwhatever worksâ category! This is not necessarily working, so we can play around.>>Itâs hard on my back and one hip because I have to bend over much more than with tugging and hold the position for a longer period without moving.
On the left side of the screen here, it looks like there is a ledge or something to sit on – you can sit on that with your legs extended (which will act as channels!) and so you do the same procedure without bending over: cookie right at the base of the ledge you are sitting on, then next cookie between her front feet. Low hands – yes. Bending – no đ
>> I canât toss a treat through her legs as she doesnât really move from between my legs until after I toss it and I canât really do it while she is still between my legs (plus the whole she has no chest yet â LOL!) and once she takes a step back out from between my legs she simply turns around to go find the treat so I donât think she has backed up more than one or two steps at most.>>
I am not worried about # of steps backing up right now, it is more about sorting out the mechanics. So you can reach your reward hand forward and place it to where you want the cookie to be – this will help her back up and NOT turn around. I would place it just behind her front feet.
The other option is to use a target:
Start her all four feet on a low dog bed. Lure her to bring her front feet (only front feet) off the bed. Then reward her for stepping her front feet back on by placing the cookie on the bed between her front feet.
Do that a few times and if you think she is getting it… lure her to get all four feet off the bed… then reward her for stepping even just one little foot back onto it.
And to make the bed/target salient, you can put it in a crate, or between X-pen panels, anything that makes is easy to step back and hard to turn around. I like starting with front end awareness for this with baby puppies, because it helps get the concept going while they are growing up a bit to be able to realize they have back feet too đLet me know what you think!
TracyHi!
Ah yes, I can see she was a little questioning at first! You can pack the underside of this with towels so it is more supported (moves less) and also the visual of the towels under it will help her confidently get on the raised edge of it. Then we can fade out the towels, over time.
Question – what does she love to chase? We can get her to think less about the movement of the board and run back to it quicker by throwing the reinforcement as a click-then-toss strategy. You can do something like thrown cookies, or even balls if she loves those. She might not love a tug toy here, or maybe she will? The action of the movement of getting on then off builds the love of the wobbler very quickly for dogs that get thoughtful about it.Backing up is going well! Since you shaped it – we can get her head lower by lowering you hands by just having you sit on a chair or couch for this session (and donât have the wobble board or anything else nearby, I thought she was going to offer getting on it even though it was leaning on the wall LOL!!!) It also looks like you were ping ponging distance, that is going well too. You mentioned having shaped it to a target at first – was there a question from her that caused you to leave it in favor of shaping it? If not, you can add it back in as a hind end awareness game. If there was a question, let me know – we donât need to add it to the backing up but we can game plan separately.
Great job! Let me know what you think!
Tracy
Have the board not there
Sit on a couchOMg he is growing so much! This is looking really good! On the first session here, I think he lost his chain of thought for a moment when the cone got further away LOL Great job moving it back in and then keeping it close the next day, for 100% success. NICE!!! He is doing so well! Yes, keep inching that cone out, bit by bit. But also, you can change the picture a little bit sitting on the couch instead of on the floor. That will get us moving towards having you be able to stand up đ
The other thing you can do is change the object from a cone to a laundry basket to a…. whatever you can think of đ that will help generalize the behavior really nicely too.
Great job! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
It was hilarious when the person in the chair handed you the clicker without taking his eyes off the TV. Ah, what the other people in our lives do for us when we are training puppies HAHAHAHA! Love it đ
He did well here with his front feet but I think he was telling you that he is not comfy with his back feet on this yet – he was doing a whole lot of things NEAR the board but not ON the board, after the first hit of the back feet. It is possible that he does not love the movement at the moment. So in case that is what he is thinking, you can break it down to build up the back-feet-love by putting it on something really big that makes it barely move but easy to get his back feet onto. You have those big lovely dog beds right there, maybe plop it right into the middle and see how he does with getting all feet on the wobbler without it moving as much? When he is very happy to get all feet on, we can fade the dog bed support and just put some towels under it so the tip is there but minimal. Youâll know how he feels about it based on how much behavior he offers on the board, versus near the board.
Nice work here! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi! I mentioned stuff about planks above, I am excited to see her do so well here! I really love her confidence!
The plank on the ground was easy for her, so she wants to go fast when you elevated it. For now, with the elevated plank, stick close to it so she doesnât try to go fast. You can even straddle it or step over it, so she turns slowly – we need her to slow down for now so she can keep all of her feet on it, then you can click for her keeping back feet on when she turns. You can even have her do a full 360 degree turn, a complete circle – you can step over the board to help her do it.
Because she likes to do everything fast, she was happy to drop a back foot off here and there. So by saying âPearl, slow down for a minute and follow the cookie and think about your feetâ she will learn to keep her feet on and then she can go fast again đ And hopping off the middle as it gets higher will help her learn how to be safe on the big tall DW.And if you do have a 2nd plank, working with 2 planks side-by-side can allow you to add speed AND click for her back feet staying on as she does a circle.
Great job on these! Let me know what you think!
TracyPerfect about the fit paws and wobble board stuff – keep revisiting it as she grows, so she is always being reminded of where her feet are and how to balance. The more you can show her, the better – you can set aside a once-a-week session for âwhere are Pearlâs feetâ on all of the âstuffâ đ
T
She totally has no fear! I love it! She is still sorting out how to get her hind end involved but she did a great job hopping up on the thing, even when it was a little unstable under her. YAY! When she is on it and balanced, you can lure her around in a circle so she gets used to moving and balancing.
Because she is a larger breed, her âchassisâ might end up to be as wide or wider than the dog walk plank – so in the beginning stages, have 2 planks side by side so she learns to place her feet on the wood, turn around, jump off. Then we will get her on a normal width plank, teaching where to put all of her feet and how to dismount safely (just in case she loses her balance), then we add speed. She will be amazing!
Great job here!
Tracy
