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Good morning! I just saw the videos above this, I’ll look at them right now 🙂
I think maybe the problem with the blinds was that you were standing still, like on the 2nd rep – then it will feel super unnatural.
When you were in motion on the 3rd rep, for example? Perfect!
So the more you move, the better it will feel – just keep reminding yourself to start on one shoulder then look back to her across the other shoulder and run forward the whole time. If the toy placement across your body ends up being a pain in the butt, don’t worry about it 🙂 just worry about moving forward the whole time. 🙂 and don’t walk, try ro jog or run because moving faster will actually make it easier.And if things were going wrong and you kept motivating her with cookies and toys so she stuck with you? That’s a great resilience exercise. 🙂
The hardest part of the wing wrapping might have been releasing the toy LOL!! You can add tapping the other toy to help at first, as a bit of a lure. When she dropped the toy, she needed a moment to remember what she was doing, so tapping the other toy can totally jumpstart the behavior after the tugging moment.
As she gets quicker to go around the barrel (lower latency, as in not faster in her speed but quicker to move around it after the toy release :)), you can change your position to standing. That will lead us in nicely to the turn and burn game 🙂
Great job! Let me know what you think!!
TracyHi!
>>I did some latent learning overnight myself LOL. When thinking about this (in the middle of the night LOL) I’m envisioning how this will look on course and it clicked with me that I don’t want to be bending down while moving forward so to fixate on him hitting the target in my hand isn’t possible. With the fixation in my head of not worrying about him hitting the target the whole exercise started to make sense to me.>>Yes, another proven psychology thing about learning: we stop thinking about it actively, but the brain continues to process it passively – so latent learning gets involved and we also remember things (I think that sudden recollection in the middle of the night is called “passive search” but I need to look it up). Either way, the brain is amazing!
>> I want him coming in to me and then continuing on in whichever direction our motion will be carrying us.
Correct! Which is why we are using something salient like a target and the consistent placement of reinforcement – and it doesn’t matter if he hits your hand or not. That is why we could lump – I mean, fast track – to have you standing up and using the jump last night 🙂
He did a great job on the session here! The hardest part was eating the cookie at the beginning LOL! He definitely has the in-and-out of the serp from the different angles. He did fine with the cookie rewards and REALLY likes the toy reward! You can now move the reward to the ground, placed out a step or two from your feet (close to where you were tossing the cookie reward). It can be an empty food bowl to start, the toss the treat to it. Then try the toy on the ground! That will be a lot harder but it really helps mvee the behavior to the next level.
So about the cookie in the beginning…. as soon as the food starting movon when you tossed it, he was happy to eat it. So at the beginning, try tossing the food for him to chase as a motivator (rather than rewarding in position after the sit) and see if that turns him on to the food faster 🙂
>>Enjoy my wet mophead puppy LOL.
He is adorable as a mophead but I am ready for this rain to be gone! Ha! But it is still far far better than snow 🙂
Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi! I am glad you are feeling better each day!!!!
>>Usually, I use Get It for everything cookie related, whether it is in my hand or on the ground. So I will modify my words and work through the resilience games.>>
Perfect! I learned from my dogs that if I use the same word for a variety of placements, they will default to looking at my hands or coming towards me. That caused too many errors 🙂 The different verbals help the dogs know where to look and it totally speeds training 🙂
>> I will have to keep a note by me for a while to remember which position goes with which word.
I can relate! I have a google doc with all the words in it LOL!
He was VERY HAPPY to participate in this session 🙂 All sorts of free and easy cookies LOL! And each one will eventually get paired with the word, so now it is all about being as consistent as possible with the words.
>> And… how do you teach a puppy to catch? Casper has no clue. LOL. I’ve never thrown food toward him before to have him catch. And with toys I’ll toss a small light toy but he doesn’t catch it yet. I’m thinking he may need to mature and have more coordination to actually catch. I use a slow arc so he can see the treat coming.>>
I don’t require the catching, I just use the word LOL! So when I say ‘catch’, it is more of a ‘the reward is coming to you, don’t move forward’ marker and not a ‘you have to catch the thing’ moment 🙂 For flyball, I do try to teach a catch: I start with the dog in front of me. show the cookie or toy, and do a 1-2-3 count before I throw so the dog can predict when the throw is coming.
Great job adding these markers!!! Hope you are back to feeling 100% soon!
TracyThink of the rear cross line for you as a line that creates an extension rear cross, as if the flag as a jump. That can help!
Since she has a solid stay, you can show her that parallel path side change in a way that takes out the motion so there is less to process. Note the 2 dogs in these demos are spicy girls like Muso LOL!
Have fun!
Hi!
This was a good choice to balance the turns! His parallel path commitment looked really strong, and you were able to add more distance pretty easily. Nice!My only suggestion is to mark and throw sooner: you were saying get it as he arrived between the uprights, so he was looking at you and watching the throw. In the interest of getting him to look straight the whole time, you can say “get it” when you see his intention to drive to the jump (might be 2 strides before the jump, or more!) and throw the reward so it is landing before he arrives at the jump. That should keep him looking straight 🙂 This will be especially important when he is driving ahead of you.
Great job on all of these! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
This game is going well, you were smooth and clear, and he was reading the decel just fine on both the lefts and rights videos. Super! Two things to keep in mind:Be sure to mix in a lot more reps where he does get to drive to the hollee roller as part of the combo! Otherwise, it just fades into the background and loses value. You did one toy race to it on each video, but he didn’t get to see it in the context of switching from handler focus to line focus. So you can do a FC on the cone and sometimes just accelerate to the toy. Or, do the FC then a decel and turn… then send to the barrel, FC, accelerate to the toy. Or sometimes do what you did here and do the FC on the barrel, decel/pivot, and reward. Mix it all up and keep it spicy! We want him to be on edge for the thrown toy, not thinking it gets ignored when you are playing the game.
The other thing is to keep the reinforcement for the decel/pivot out of the picture until just before the moment of delivery, after you mark the behavior. You were tending to cue the decel/pivot with the toy presented the same way each time: two hands, up high at around the center of your chest. That was becoming the cue, and we want him reading the motion change and not looking high for the toy. So, easy fix: keep the toy in your pocket the whole time and just use physical cues for the decel and pivot – that will DEFINITELY be spicy because the only visible toy will be the one on he ground 🙂 I think he will do fine with it!
Great job!
TracyHi!
>>I think she needed the sniffing break because I was getting frustrated.>>
That still counts as a resilience flex! We are human, we are going to be stressed, frustrated, nervous, etc…. allowing her to see it and process it as part of a bigger picture is actually incredibly useful. Outwardly, you appeared calm to me 🙂 But I am sure she could smell/see changes in you when you were frustrated and that is part of building resilience! And even if you were frustrated, you were still motivating and made it a good experience for her. I score it a big win in ways that are more important than RCs.
>>I know when she is going to turn the wrong way, but I feel like I set it up the same each time and I just can’t get there before she starts turning; she turns her butt as she’s eating.
it is the line you were moving on (the 90 degrees versus the parallel line, like in my super fancy artwork LOL!). Change the line and you should see the RCs percolating more. There are other ways to show her this game but this is an excellent challenge for you both!
>>For some reason, this one is bringing up some rage. It’s really not that complicated.>>
Actually, it is far more complicated than we give it credit for!! I spoke to the neuroscientist DVM about this game and the sighthounds yesterday, and she totally agreed that it was hard AF for dogs in terms of the multi-sensory integration- especially for sighthound types where the brain prioritizes motion. It goes well beyond the operant conditioning way that we look at it, but it is sooooo good for teaching the dogs to process and through things. So if it feels hard – yup, it is because it is hard 🙂 I find rear crosses to be one of the hardest agility moves to really solidify with youngsters 🙂
T
Good morning!
This is looking really good – really nice exploration and engagement here! Yes, there were some distractions but definitely nothing overwhelming: smells, noises, etc. You can use this game when you enter a training area and when he engages, you can start the training. It is kind of a sign from the pup that he is comfortable and ready. He did this at the beginning and at the end, in the area closer to the camera. If you didn’t want to train and just wanted to wander around like you did here, playing this game in different parts of the building is great!Only one suggestion from the processing perspective… tape his tags together so there is a lot less noise from them. It might not seem like a lot, but his brain still needs to devote bandwidth to processing the noise, and with teenagers we want that bandwidth devoted to processing other things like the cues and training 🙂
Great job!
TracyGood morning! I love your training yard!!!
Really lovely session here! She is showing good commitment to her prop 🙂 which will allow you to move through the games quickly!
One thing to add across the board will be a couple of reward markers. You can use the ‘yes’ marker when you hand her a cookie, but I think a ‘get it’ marker will help for when you are tossing it. Both markers tell her she was correct, but they also tell her where to look for the reward which helps develop even more independence. When you were using yes, she was looking at you before going to the tossed treat – a get it will help her look forward and not at you.
And with the toy, you can use a “toy in hand” marker so she knows where to look and when she can come grab the toy (versus a softer mouth for a cookie) – this is especially important when you have AND cookies in your hands LOL !
>>Once thing I notice when I’m using the toy, it looks like I need to get it lower for her.>>
Her tugging looked strong here, and the nice long toy was an excellent choice: you gave her the option to grab the fancy end of it and kept that end nice and low… but she wanted the skinny boring part of it that was higher up LOL! So yes, I agree in general that a lower toy is good but she was choosing to tug higher up on the toy, so don’t worry about it too much 🙂 As long as she is close to the end of it and not grabbing at your hands, it is fine for her to play how she wants to play.
A couple of small details for you:
The tug break was great after the cookies in the beginning! Try to pick up prop during tugging and keep it up during the transition from tugging to the cookie reload, so she doesn’t start offering behavior when you are not ready – she had a great hit during the transition at :51 and we don’t want those to go unnoticedThe various positions looked really good: forward, sideways, backwards 🙂 On the sideways sends, you can be further to the side so she always turns the correct direction (she did a rear cross a 1:24 because it looked like you cut across her path behind her).
The backwards sending all looked strong!! She had one question at 2:07 where her hit was not as strong – it was still rewardable even though it was not as strong of a hit, because the cue to go to the prop was not as clear there. So remember to engage with her with eye contact and a bit of ready ready… then make a clear and snappy indication 🙂 On that rep, you didn’t have the engagement piece so the indication to send was not as clear.
Based on her value for the prop here, you can add more countermotion/moving away as you send to this game, as well as the parallel path games and rear cross games after that.
Great job! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning!
I love that you do a trainalong during the class!!!
Strike a pose with cookies looked awesome! It looked like she was giving a strong nose hit to the target for most of the session – that is great but if she gives a cheek hit, that is fine too because it means she is understanding the turn (based on the placement of reinforcement). You can see that happening towards the end of the session, and that is fine because we are going to fade the target soon anyway. She only had one little blooper but I think it happened because she picked a treat up on her line, then forgot what she was doing LOL! The rest was perfect.
So the next session on this can be with a toy instead of cookies as the reward (toy in hand) and if that goes super well…. you can move to the reward on the ground, on the line she wuld be turning to if it was in your hand. That will either be the easiest thing ever, or a head exploder 🙂 So you can start the concept with an empty food bowl on the ground (to drop the cookie into) or a MM. And use your markers to help her know when the reinforcement is available.
Barrel racing: The rocking horse game is looking strong! This game is designed to produce the balance of super high speed and super gorgeous turns, so your methodical approach here was perfect. I am glad you ended up putting the toy in your pocket at the beginning, because her question at :13 was legit: it was not clear if it was a toy moment or a barrel moment.
When you have the toy in your hand, keep is squished up and don’t switch hands – partially because the switching hands delays the info and causes her to look at your hands, and partially because it is good for her to learn to read handling cues even when there is a squished up toy in the hand (which is different than the dangling toy at :13 :))
The next step is adding more distance and then more motion (the advanced level of this game has more of that). You can do it in the snow if she has really good grip on the footing and won’t slip or slide, otherwise you will want to maybe take it to the barn if it isn’t too cold.
Onwards to rear crosses!
You’ve got definite progress on these!!! She is reading your position/motion perfectly: if you are in her line of sight on the “new” side, she will do the RC. If you are in the line of sight on the original side, she will do the FC. The first video reps all had you in her line of sight on the original side, so they were all front cross responses. On the second video, you set the mechanics up a little differently and got to the line of sight on the new side for all reps except the last two, so she got the RC on all reps but then (correctly) did the FC on the last two.Keeping all the other mechanics the same, all we need is an adjustment in your line on motion then you should be able to get her to do it just about every time. And since it is really hard to describe in writing, I made pictures LOL!!
Basically, you are moving at a 90 degree angle behind her, which does not always get you into the line of sight on the new side in time. So if you can go to her other side and move on a parallel path forward, you will get to the new line of sight more easily.
On the video, when she started on your right, you were coming towards the camera when you wanted her to turn right (on your left side). But if you could switch sides, put her on your left and then move along her right side towards the wall (towards the well-placed Canadian flag :)) then you will be more in line of sight.
So go to this link to see the drawings about your path, plus screenshots of when he got the RC versus when she did not (based on what she saw in her line of sight):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17PKEDdvmQruWCyOCz0oGQkSk3d5exiHJF0MB8bJKpIM/edit?usp=sharing
One other thing to note that I could see in this second video in particular – it is a really hard skill for her! She needed a little decompression moment (sniffing around) midway through video 2 of the RCs – check out the decompression stuff posted last night. That is fine, and also great that she did it! You can let her do that for a few seconds, don’t call her out of it… then she will come back and be even more ready to learn the skill. She just needed a moment to clear her head because this is a really hard skill to process 🙂
Great job on all of these! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
>>One, is IYC now passé?
The two reasons that I don’t use those IYC exercises anymore are:
– too much failure for the pups, too much frustration. Those exercises often set things up so we tell the puppies they are wrong wrong wrong a lot more than we tell them they are right. Bleh.
– they didn’t translate to impulse control in the real world. They translated to some fun tricks where we decorated the dogs with treats (not sure how fun it was for the dogs, though), but for real world stuff? The dogs had no clue and were again told they were wrong a lot.So…. I approach things differently by using more of the ‘real life’ set ups by stealthily sliding the impulse control into the games, and finding ways to tell the pups they are correct! It produces better real world impulse control and a whole lot less frustration for pups and their humans 🙂
>>Two, where do I find the recorded seminars from Brain Camp to buy? Maybe they haven’t had time to post yet on Clean Run?>>
I don’t think Clean Run has had a moment to post them yet – they were trying to get everything done for the Christmas rush and then the owner went in for a knee replacement. I think they will be posted in early January.
T
Hi!
>>Your timing on marking the second rear foot is impeccable! After trying the raised mat myself with a clicker (below) and then re-watching you with verbal ‘yes’ with Electra, I am going to ditch the clicker and stick with verbal.>>
The trick is to stare at the mat and not watch the dog – then it feels like it is in slow motion and you can see the 1-2-3-4 footfall pattern of the dog – then it becomes 1-2-3-mark-toss. If you watch the pup, you will really only see her front feet and it is all a blur 🙂
Also, you can switch to a ‘get it’ for tossing treats, to reduce looking at you even more. The stronger these placement markers got, the less I used a clicker (and the dogs are really good about NOT looking at me too much).
>>So how long do you continue with elevated mat?>>
For eons LOL! It teach it to a pup, then I put it away until the pup is fully grown and muscling up (13-14-15 months, approx). Then I do a quick refresher… then I start the progression for the RDW or the flyball box turn. The problem with doing too much with a baby dog is that they are learning to move and use a body that is very different from the body they will end up with, which causes trouble! So it is better to get the concept going, then put it away for a bit – then come back when they are more ready for the grown up stuff. The 2 demo pups in MaxPup didn’t have their contacts or flyball box turns completed until they were about 2 years old and wearing their adult bodies 🙂 and now they look AMAZING! And the behavior is holding up in competition, no deteriorating or criteria shifts.
The video is marked private, can you reset to unlisted?
Thanks!
Tracy
Good list!!! I also use a “wanna catch” verbal to see if Contraband will give me the frisbee or not LOL!!!
The Say What session will add more directionals for jumps/tunnels to this list – and Amy has a TON already in place with Promise, so I am sure she can help with ideas!!! It will be fun 🙂
This is one of my absolute favorite pieces by one of my favorite composers – I conducted it at my senior recital about 150 years ago LOL And of course Marin Alsop is an icon!!!!! What a great way to start the day 🙂
This was so fun to watch!!
Yes, she is a puppy genius and also you did a GREAT job of ignoring foot smacks and nose bops, both of which she offered 🙂 I think out of all of the offered behaviors, there was one reward for what was probably a nose bop: but everything else was open mouth behavior of approaching, touching, grabbing and then lifting the toy. SUPER!!! And the jackpots for the lifting were great because they were probably a bit of a surprise (in a good way) – which produces a LOT of learning (hello, dopamine!)! Yay! So definitely keep going down this path, she looks great!And I loved that she made sure the camera was filming her brilliance. Ha!
>.And I *swear* the music at the end was just what was playing on the radio in real time>>
What song was it? I could only hear the very beginning!
Great job 🙂
Tracy
