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Hi!
He did a great job driving to his toy! You can add even more distance and more of your motion too. Be sure you are connected to him – it was hard to tell with your head right over his head LOL!!And you can also get him driving to big chunks of food too, so he has both of those in his toolbox 🙂
> I am doing cookies to help line him up since he doesn’t usually have a collar on and he’s not a fan of certain ways of restraint.>
He seemed to be fine with you holding him but because there is a lot of physical pressure, his first step was to the side and not straight – and we don’t want to encourage a BC to move away from the handler to the side LOL! You can keep using the cookie line up and use this as a great way to introduce having a collar on and being touched by the collar! The trick will be to do everything very quickly so he doesn’t think about the collar: cookie line up, slip collar on (if he doesn’t like getting it on), throw a toy, almost immediately. You can even bring him in on leash and work it like that! And then add in a collar hold: cookie line up, one finger touches the collar (no real restraint, definitely no pulling back or moving him by the collar) then immediately throw the toy. Very gradually it can all built up to being held – but we definitely want to get this well underway before he gets into the Big Feelings of adolescence 😂🤣 since collars are a life necessity.
Great job!
TracyThanks for letting me know! Was it this page:
And so I can pass this along to tech: what device are you using, and which server (Chrome, Safari, etc). Sometimes there are updates to a device or server that the software has to catch up to.
Tracy
Good morning! He was a very good boy here, and I love it when pups are clear communicators!!!! And this is why we do this type of game on ‘meaningless’ objects at this stage: to figure out the best ways to set the pups up for success 🙂
This is good to look at, because ideally we don’t want to see frustration/demand barking. Puppies don’t quite have the brain development to handle frustration all that well, so we can take this as communication from him that one of three things (or a combination of things) is happening:
– too many reps (session is too long)
– he doesn’t understand how to earn the cookie/ rate of success is too low
– the criteria/behaviors are too hard (lumping :))I think there was a combination of things happening here –
the session probably had too many reps especially if there was another one before it. When figuring out why things are happening, I count reps/rewards in the video – this one had something like 16 cookies and 11 offered behaviors that did not get cookies… 27 reps. That might be a lot for a baby brain, especially if it was session 2! So while the session did not appear long in terms of length of time, there were a lot of reps which is what made it a long session.And looking at that # of reps/rewards, he was working at about 60% rate of success. Ideally, he should be closer to 90-95% rate of success – not perfect, but very few failures. So that leads us to think he didn’t understand how to earn the treats, and the behavior was too hard (when you moved the barrel away).
So two ways to approach the sessions:
Since we are not going to count and do the math during the actual session 🤣😂 it is much easier to live by the 2 failure rule: if you get 2 failures (total, not necessarily in a row), then it is too hard and you will want to make it easier right away. I personally am terrible at counting the # of reps and # of rewards during the session, but I am pretty good at counting to 2 LOL!!!
Since he got the 2 failures immediately when you moved the barrel further away, that is where you can do a couple of things:
– immediately bring it back to where it was successful (very close to you) and get some more successes
– then you can either end the session and plan for the next one, or you can move it out again but move it out by less than an inch. That way there is a change, but it is still very easy to be correct and much harder to be incorrect
– as you move the barrel away in tiny increments, you can also make the bowls a little more visible on each side of the barrel. That way the bowls are still easy to lock onto as the barrel gets further away. Think of it as making one variable easier (bowls get more visible) as another variable gets harder (barrel moves further away).Specific to the barrel wrapping game: you can split the behavior into even smaller pieces, and that will help! Rather than the barrel which is kind of big and blocks his visual of you and the bowls, do this with a single skinny upright or skinny cone that is very very easy to go around (while still seeing you and the bowls). And you can sit with your back against the couch (or on the couch) so he can’t go behind you (so he can’t offer a behavior that won’t get rewarded).
And then after several resp or sessions where you have gradually moved the upright away so there is daylight between you and it (and he can fit through that spot) you can help split it by leaving your hand on the barrel so he can see the gap between it and you… but the hand helps enourage him to not go there. I think of it as one of those gate/arm things at a toll: sure, he can go over/under it, but it encourages him to go around to get the reward. Then we can easily fade it out.
And also, you might not get more than one session of a game at a time, at this age. So if you get one good session? Cool beans! Do a different game and revisit what you just did in a few days. His brain might need a good sleep to really lock in the learning before you can advance on it.
Even with all of the good planning, sometimes we do get frustration in a session. So what to do? Here are some ideas:
Limit the # of reps by bringing 10 cookies into the session and no more 🙂 and no re-loading allowed LOL! It is very easy to do too many reps on a game like this if we have too many treats – we just keep going LOL And the puppy keeps going til their brain gets tired, and then we lose the behavior.
>Normally with him, I have been doing cookie resets with him if he starts getting frustrated (demand barking). I stop at the first bark and throw a rest cookie.>
This is a conundrum, because while doing this heads off MORE frustration… it might also be rewarding barking. Nothing happens in a vacuum and both of these can be true at the same time LOL!! So while this is not a bad thing to do, we can come up with other strategies to get the cookies involved without pairing them with barking.
>Is this level of frustration ok in this training session or should I be aiming for aborting the training when he teeters into overarousal?>
Ideally we don’t see frustration in training, but we don’t want to abort when it happens because then it leaves the pup with that frustrated feeling associated with shaping.
So if you do get frustration behavior where he stops offering and/or starts barking, you can immediately make the behavior you are asking for easier. In the case of the barrel, you can pull it back close to you or make the bowls more visible so it is easier to be correct and get back into the grove. Then get one or two more reps, then be finished with the session (then watch the video to see what happened).
> Sometimes his brain breaks I do the cu puppy pattern games he first learned instead of tugging and this really keeps him in a good mind set. >
One thing about the pattern games is that they also really increase the rate of success/rate of reinforcement because it is basically rapid-fire cookies. Yum yum! Try to break off the session to do this before he has questions or frustrations. You can also use a snuffle mat for decompression – the pattern game is great but it is still ‘work’ and sometimes we want to optimize arousal with decompression and not more work.
Tugging is probably also a good thing as a decompression – let him tug, then let him run around with the toy if he wants.
> I caused the demand barking at end because I did not give cookie because I said yes inappropriately. Bad trainer.should have given cookie. He demand barked for a little bit till I dropped a cookie in the bowl on other side.>
Ha! Yes, give the cookie, even if it is a handler screw up LOL!!
Great job here! Let me know what you thinK!
Tracy
Re-reading this, you are signed into the site to be able to post to the Forum 🙂 so let me know which link is asking for you to prove you are not a bot and I will check it out!!
t
Hi-
Is this a YouTube link, or the Agility U link asking for it? For Agility U, the sign in might have expired (bot protection software/Cloudflare will sometimes require logging in again) so you can log in on the main page (www.agility-u.com) or on the My Courses page (https://agility-u.com/my-courses/my-courses/). Clicking the Remember Me box will help extend the log in time. Let me know if logging in again helps! Feel free to send screenshots of what you are seeing to the support@agility-u.com email so the tech folks can take a look.If it is a YouTube link, let me know which one and I will check it out over there.
Thanks!
TracyHi! Great question!
>is a threadle wrap a 360 degree tandem turn?? A bit like a lap turn has a double lap variant.>
They are variations on a theme. If I remember correctly, the double lap turn is a lap turn (turn away) followed by a front cross.
For the threadle wrap versus tandem turn:
Yes, the dog’s path is a turn away (like a tandem in that regard) generally followed by a 360 wrap. But the handler’s path is also different:
on the tandem turn, the handler also turns the new direction with the dog (turning in tandem :)) so both handler and dog end up facing the jump/line in the new direction.on the threadle wrap – the handler continues facing the line she is running and does *not* turn with the dog towards the jump. The dog does all the turning away and the handler faces forward, so there is no tandem element to it – and that is how the wrap is created because the dog follows the handler’s line.
Also, tandem turns can be on the front side of the jump as well, so they are not always threadles. Threadle wraps always bring the dog to the backside/threadle-side before the dog turns away.
Let me know if that makes sense or if I need more coffee to make sense of it 🙂
Tracy
Good morning! Welcome back! I am SUPER glad to hear he is not injured and doing great. He is a fantastic little guy!
Because he was already enrolled in MaxPup 1 and wasn’t able to fully work it due to the question of if he was injured, I’ve refunded the tuition for this one – it is Agility U policy to roll things forward to the next class if a dog can’t complete something due to injury or illness or some extenuating circumstance. It doesn’t seem fair to have to pay for it twice!
>Skizzle is now 13 months old. I’m excited to work through the exercises again with a dog that has more training experience and sometimes more maturity. I hope we’re ready to take the next course in the series when this one is completed.>
Yes, a 13 month old pup does bring a new level to the training – it will be fun to watch! I am looking forward to your videos!!!
Tracy
Very cool!! I don’t know a lot about the line or the litter, but I do know Josie and Katniss: they are fantastic! Tribute has great relatives and I am excited to see him! He looks great in the video – I love his little hop when he was chasing the ball across the wobble board. And it looks like he is already very comfortable with sheep! Wow!
Cool! It was so fun meeting your girl last night and your new building is AWESOME!!!! I will get an invoice over to you at some point today, and in the meantime you can start posting if you like 🙂
Tracy
Welcome!!! It is great to see you here and in the live session last night 🙂 It has been way too long! I am excited to learn more about Journey 🙂
Tracy
