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Hello and welcome! I am excited to see more of you and Nox 🙂 She is so fun and the perfect age to get into the bigger courses now! Have fun!
TracyGood morning and welcome! I am looking forward to seeing Watson tackle these challenges! And I bet there are some things that Levy can do too, he is looking great 🙂
Have fun!
TracyWelcome back! And yes, the heat has been a lot recently 🙂 I bet we are all going to be working around the heat this summer 🙂
Have fun!
TracyHello and welcome! I am looking forward to ‘meeting’ Whistle! And I bet there will be some stuff you can do with Fritzi too 🙂
Have fun!
TracyGood morning!
> It was like giving her a cookie and then cuing the frisbee toss. Just giving her the idea like teaching them a clicker. I was literally asking for nothing!
Thanks for the context – I think asking for nothing was the reason she has the big emotional response 🙂 I have not found teaching food value as a straight 1:1 pairing like charging a clicker to work for most dogs and, as you saw, it can elicit a big emotion response.
I take a different approach to building value for things that are undervalued (such as food, an more recently – balls!). There is movement, excitement, an environment that is already drenched in happy emotions, and no pressure – all of this ends up building up nice value while keeping things funs and maintaining. For example: you take the wing-tunnel setup, a couple of frisbees, and a meatball or a big piece of string cheese. The wing-tunnel setup has value, based on her response to it (FAST! Engaged!). So you do wing-tunnel and then toss the big piece of food. If she even engages with it in the most minimal form: throw the frisbee. Wheeee! No pressure, you are not near her, she can start off without even needing to eat it: just engage by chasing or sniffing it. Then frisbee fun. We are basically inserting the food into a big joyous loop without demanding a lot of the dog in that moment.
It has been an absolutely great way to happily build value for things we need without any pressure or stress or big emotional responses. I will get it on video today so you can see what I mean (I use the joyous loops to insert a lot of behaviors and build them up and it works every time :))T
Hello and welcome back to you, Wager, and perfect-never-naughty Spot 🙂 I am excited to see you all again!!!!!!
T
Hello and welcome back! I am excited to see her again now that she is all grown up! Fun times ahead 🙂
TracyHello and welcome back to you and the Schnauzer crew! I cannot believe Mali is 15 months already… time flies!!! And Lit’l Bit is 5!!!
I am looking forward to seeing them!
TracyHello and welcome! I am very excited to see Coal in action – 17 months already, that is really exciting!!! And of course Cody can join in (or just get free cookies haha)
have fun!
TracyGood morning!
>>I started trying to work with treats and she had a pretty aversive reaction. I was basically trying to give her a treat and then mark and throw her frisbee. She did not want to take the treats, but she did reluctantly
What was the context of this? Was it a ‘eat the cookie’ training session, or was it something like you tossed a meatball when she exited a tunnel? Reinforcement strategies are a tricky subject and with BCs, context is important!
T
Good morning!
>> When you say 4 reps is that including the bits of backchaining or practising the key move before trying the whole sequence? While I did a bit of that today during the session I would do it again when I do the Wee2 stuff for ‘real’>>
It is all about not doing tooooooo much with baby dogs. So, in general it is 4 reps of the full sequence unless something was challenging with the warm up/break down of the smaller pieces. Breaking it down is kind of a warm up, but also there is no need to do each warm up moment more than once or twice. So thinking of yesterday’s live class where we broke down the last sequence – we did one or two BCs on the jump to the tunnel, and that was really good, so we did a quick reminder of the send to the middle jump… then I think all of the dogs were ready to do the full things twice or so. So it totalled out to be relatively few reps (more than 4 total, yes, but still relatively few) and not a lot of jumping for the youngsters. What we want to avoid is: 4 reps of each warm up element on each side, then 4 full reps of the sequence. That is a lot for youngsters! So if you get it roughly right, repeat it maybe once more, or just move on to the next thing 🙂
Week 1 – One Step Sends
These look good! She is reading everything really well and your connection looks fabulous 🙂 On the reps you left it, it looks like she was bringing the toy back quickly and was getting rewarded with the 2nd toy. Yay!
A couple of ideas for you: When sending to a wrap on the wing, you can rotate sooner now too: try to send and when she is past you and maybe halfway or 2/3rds of the way to the wing, rotate into the FC to both tighten the turn and challenge her commitment.
When adding the FC on the middle wing, you don’t need to send to the first wing and send again to the middle wing – you can keep moving for the first wing (letting motion/connection be the cue). Then as she is arriving at the first wing, decel/send to the 2nd wing so you can also FC and move away sooner. That is a trickier commitment so let her get maybe halfway between the 2 wings before you FC. That decel into the send and FC will help her predict the FC is coming too: at 1:15 when she zipped into the off course tunnel, you hadn’t decelerated into the send and ended up moving backwards (momentum!) and backwards motion is the same as forward motion… so she read it as “go to the tunnel” good girl LOL! Compare it to the last rep at 1:25 where you did decel into the FC… that made the FC crisper and she knew it was coming, so she never looked at the off course.
Because she continues to pick up speed (yay!) feel free to spread the wings out more so you actually have an extra heartbeat to try to get the timing 🙂 It will be easier when she is jumping because you’ll have a heartbeat of hang time 🙂
Great job! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning!
You and Tali were fabulous! She was fast and independent, it was so fun to see! I posted the link last night, it should be available on the course syllabus. I will add some rear cross games today.I think Tali liked how you rewarded her yesterday – but also the lotus on a tug is great to have to keep building more independence because she won’t need you to open the toy up 🙂 I also really like the treat hugger toy for throwing food because it is easy for the dogs to chase and get the food from, and most of the dogs like how it feels so they pick it up and throw it around 🙂
T
