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Hi! It was good to see you there for a few minutes! I will be putting up the recording in a few minutes.
Thanks!
TracyGood morning!
>>, might try tossing with my off hand for a bit to see if that helps and then go back to the dog side hand.>>
Yes, totally try that! And it takes a bit of time for the markers to lock in, so we do get some looking at us in the early stages especially with simple behaviors.
>> I’m seriously starting to feel like I am falling behind on course work – Week 4 has started and I have only got a couple of things worked on at all in Week 3…
Things build on each other a lot, so you’ll find that you can layer games on top of each other and you won’t feel so behind. Like last week’s collection sandwich and turn and burn build into this week’s Handling Combos 🙂
On the videos:Wobble board: Yes, I agree that it was too much for her to start with nothing under the wobble board at this point, you were smart to go back to the easier level for now. It might have also been that she has an expectation of how much it will move on that first approach, and it was very different here – too much change on that first rep.
>>Thinking for the next session that I will remove only 1 of the 4 mats and see how that goes. Probably one of the mats on the side that touches the floor. Not sure that I need to replace it with a towel as an extra step but will probably have one handy in case. Then remove individual mats until they are all gone.>>
For the next session, start her with a very comfortable first couple of hits, back track a lot so there are no surprises – put all the mats back in and maybe a couple of towels like you mentioned. Then after a little bit of play to gauge her comfort zone, take one out. Her success and confidence (and your session timer :)) will guide you about how quickly you can remove the stuff under the wobble board. And each session should start with whatever was really comfy from the previous session, rather than with anything that might surprise her.
Turn and burn is going really well! One suggestion that should help get rid of what you were saying about her looking at your hand or not being able to go: give her a moment between taking the toy out and the sending, your transitions were too quick for a puppy 🙂 You were basically taking the toy an starting the send in what was practically one motion, so sometimes she did it and sometimes (like at 1:21) she was like, “wait, what?” So – tug tug tug, try to either tug her into position or have her follow your hand to line up, try not to physically move her into the line up. Then either do a moment of ready dance, or hold her collar for long enough to say “ready…” then send. That will be cleaner and will help her a lot.
Only one other suggestion: keep your line of exit to the 90 degree L shaped angle – on the 2nd session, you were doing U turns which are good but don’t present the same amount of countermotion.
Prop Game – a lot of this prop stuff is about mechanics, which si why we are using a random object 🙂 so looking at the mechanics here, you can take that extra moment before the send, same as with turn and burn – it was all moving to fast for her to be able to switch her focus consistently (like at :15 where she was not ready, or at :54 where she started without you). That is why I ask people to insert that silly ‘ready dance’ into this game: give you and the pup a moment to get connected, get ready.. then a clean transition into the send.
>>Dropping treats for Beka almost always gets her focused on checking the floor for treats which causes issues as it lowers her arousal,
I liked what you did at the beginning which was toss a treat (be sure to use your get it cue) then immediately tug, as that will help teach her to get that one treat and re-engage for the tugging. And use boring treats to reduce the smells 🙂 There is a lot of movement in this game, so boring treats should be fine at this point.
>>t I feel like I need the treats to toss on the bag for the time being to build more value for touching the bag. T>>
I think she was waiting for the cookie to drop on it in order to go to the bag, so that might have inadvertently been keeping you closer than you wanted. So for now – don’t drop the cookie on it but also don’t add more distance yet – you can be very close, get her hitting it and also slowly moving away as she is moving towards it. Then if you want more value on the prop, you can toss the cookie back to it.
Handling Combos – these are going well! As you noted – the decel is really the only thing to add in.
The baby level is going well – I think she likes this game LOL! And yes – add a decel as soon as you finish the blind so it is blind/decel all at once, for now. That will help her line her butt up earlier.And to make it easier to get the blind and the decel (she was moving FAST! LOVE IT!) – Both of you can start closer to where you want to end up on the other side of the room – hold her collar, toss the cookie all the way away and send her to the cookie from there so you have a nice long head start.
The advanced level is also going well! On these, you can start further away and toss the cookie all the way across the room, and focus on the decel here too. And a longer head start will give you more time to get the eye contact on the new side after the blinds – she was flying! I was really excited to see how well she drove away for the last cookie on each rep!
For the bouncing cookies:
If the treat bounces away, just give her another one in that spot right away so she gets the reward and doesn’t worry about the wandering cookie LOL! Would little bits of cheese be less bouncy?You last one was your best one, great combo of all the things! Yay!
Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning!
>> I’m left handed. But, I learned most things with my right hand.
That is really interesting! It might be a combo of both of your comfort zones 🙂 And I am lefty too – lefties rule! 🙂
>>More rain predicted, so we shall see on the tunnel.
No rush – it is a ridiculously easy behavior 🙂 And fun! But we don’t want her to wipe out in a wet tunnel.
>I dug out the ladder. She’s definitely staring at my hands more than I’d like for the reward. But, I wasn’t using markers as it’s basically a pattern game. Should I add in my bowl cue?>>
I think you can mark the balanced trot with your bowl cue, towards the end of the ladder. I think that is is a simple behavior for her, so she looked forward nicely and then towards the end, she looked at you and your hands for the cookie. For this type of thing – that is fine 🙂 Marking the bowl will help as long as she doesn’t catapult herself to it and splat all over the ladder (my guess is that she will not do this). You can also add challenge by raising the ladder another inch or two – you can put books under each leg to do this. The harder it is, the less she is likely to look at you. But, overall – the looking at you at the end is not a big concern because almost all of the behavior is strongly in place. And this ladder behavior doesn’t need to go anywhere on the ladder, it will remain like this – so using your bowl marker when she is finishing will help, or if you have a pivot bowl or something she goes to step up onto will help too: she can do the ladder to step up onto a pivot bowl.
Nice work! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning!
Great job on these! And excellent taste in background music, the brass was very triumphant at the end! LOL!The prop sending looks terrific. Before adding more distance, add in the sideways sending. And if that goes well, add in the backwards sending 🙂
The wing wrap foundations also look really strong. I like the fire hydrant you used at the end because it was tall enough that she was able to really turn her head and neck into it (which is the precursor to amazing turns on course :)) She did well! Yes, she had questions when the cone or hydrant moved further away (I think the question was: this is the shortest path to the cookies, why would I go around it?” LOL!) and also when you were more upright. But, that is why we work through it like this – to answer all of those questions before we go to the real wing.
So on your next session, work one variable at a time: start taller like you ended here, but get her into the groove of it with the hydrant closer to you, close enough that she cannot fit between it and you to get to the next cookie bowl. When that is rolling along nicely, you can move the hydrant out a little but don’t change your position (that might happen in that same session, or might take an additional session).
Then, the next session can be introducing something even taller like a laundry basket – I am thinking ahead to the turn and burn game where the hydrant might be too short.
Introduce the taller thing with you in the same position and the thing closer – then in that session or the next one (her rate of success will guide you for that), you can work to standing (the object still pretty close) then work the object a little further away. The wrap object does not need to be more than an arm’s length away, for the purposes of this game which is all about offering the wrap and resisting the pull of the cookie bowls 🙂Great job! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning! I am glad the feedback made sense!
For the Strike A Pose game:
I realize that I need to make adjustments to this game for the really small dogs so the handlers don’t have to spend the whole session bent over LOL! You can do this sitting on the couch, as long as you get the correct pose – that way the target is lower and you don’t have to bend as much.The food session was strong and starting from a stay was MUCH more helpful for him!!! Plus it is great to teach him to hold a stay til you are in position and release, very useful for future course running 🙂 Getting the target in nice and low before the release really helped him (and nice cookie reward placement after it too!) He had a little trouble in the beginning ignoring the cookie (adorable!) so two things:
be sure you are looking at the target and not at him, and feel free to shake the target a little so the movement helps draw him to it.
Same thoughts on the toy session – I think starting from a stay will help here too. These were from cookie tosses, and he didn’t know where to look on all of his returns to you.
When he is on the way to you and you have both hands out and you are looking at him, there is not a lot of information about which hand you want. So, as he returns to you, make a dramatic display of looking at the target hand 🙂 I think starting him from the sit gives him the moment to look at what to do, so definitely start there before going back to the cookie toss starts.And when he is really comfy with starting from a stay with the toy reward (he consistently hits the target then goes to the toy), you can go back to the cookie tosses and use where you are looking as an indicator of where to go 🙂
One more thing to add: a marker that says: that toy in my hand is now available for you to take 🙂 So rather than saying ‘yes’, do you have a marker that tells him to turn to the toy? I say “bite” 🙂 That can help him understand how to ignore the toy until he hears the magic word! I have one for cookies too (‘snacks!’). We haven’t discussed it yet in this class, but I am thinking I will need to add a game for it because everyone is ready for that!
Great job! Let me know what you think!
TracyHa! He is very smart but we already knew that 🙂 The finger wagging is funny and also you do a little wrist movement/flick right before you say careful so that is also indicating that the food hand is now available (I recognize it because it is something that I also do, reflexively, dammit. LOL!!!)
So for pure verbal – keep the hand totally stationary until after you say the word and he takes a step to it.
I also think that he was not sure what he was supposed to be doing to earn the ‘careful’ moment here, so he was offering a lot of different things – which might result in him getting more stimulated and less ‘careful’ with his mouth. You can set up the environment so there is something really obvious to do (or you can cue something) so he can have the ‘aha!’ moment of ‘this is how I get the “careful” hand to present the food’. Because I think part of what you were looking for here was for him to stand still and back off the cookie hand a bit, you choose something like standing on a balance disc. That is a stationary behavior (stillness is really hard!) and he won’t be near the cookie hands… and a balance disc will require enough concentration to, well, balance 🙂 that he will have to center himself, offer stillness, and is less likely to come in hard to the cookie hand.Let me know if that makes sense! Nice work here!
TracyGood morning!
>> So struggling to see a difference between quiet means doing a good job and just good building of duration? >>
I think it means good job AND helps build duration. Being stationary, quiet, facing her… that is all you continuing to engage in the moment which is all basically a “nice job, keep going” signal. And if she has an error – you would probably not be quiet, facing her, standing still 🙂 You would probably reset her or something. So the quiet position and continued engagement in the behavior is both the “woohooo!” And the keep going to build behavior.
>> I really liked most of this session 🙂
Yes, me too!
>>Her release is great and she did well with remote reinforcement. >>
Yes, and yes 🙂 Yay! I think you were changing things too frequently, though – you went from a stay with the stuff in your hand, to on the bed, to swinging it around… from the human perspective, I stopped thinking about the “don’t move” element of it and starting thinking about “where is the toy going next” element. And I have not had a lot of coffee yet, so that was my lizard brain, which is more like how my dogs would think LOL!!! It made things a little less predictable, and I have found predictable reinforcement to be a great way to train stays.
Since your training goal here is stay duration while you are quiet, think of the different toy presentations as criteria: and do a short session with each one, separately:
– building some duration with you holding the toy, then a catch cue
– next session – put the toy on the bed, cue the sit, build duration with toy on the bed and then you can use your remote reinforcement or you can pick up the toy and release her to get it from your hand
– separate session – building duration with the swinging toy.At some point, you’ll have all the elements introduced separately so you can meld them all together but for now, keep them a little more separate. And by separate, I mean just a couple of minutes apart. A few reps of one set of challenges, take a short break, reset to the next set of challenges, and so on.
One other thought is to be as clean and quick as possible in the transition from the ‘catch’ and ‘careful’ back to the stay – sometimes you were very quick to ask for the next sit and I think she was very strong in those moments. Sometimes you were quiet and didn’t ask for anything, so I think she was not sure what you wanted there – you can totally cue her sit behavior to get the next rep started, as she seems to have a really good response to it (if she had a poor response to the sit cue, I would suggest letting her offer but I think she is doing well with the sit cue :)) This is especially important after the ‘catch’, which is generally a release cue so she will need to be asked to begin the next rep.
>>I think I started tossing for the catch once or twice early…but I caught myself in my head and quietly said Bad Beth without it impacting the training 😂😆
Ha! You were really good about having to multi-task all of the cues, markers, placement, and trying NOT to move the reinforcement too soon LOL!
>>I also should probably have used remote reinforcement word instead of careful…>>
Do you mean when the reward was on the bed? You can choose before the session – will you release her to it and then pick it up off the bed? If so, remote reinforcement. Or, will you pick it up then mark the behavior? If so – careful or catch or however you want to place the reward.
Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning!
>> Antecedent:
Play tug toget revved up.
Perhaps chase a ball.
Followed by 1 or 2 obstacles into the WPs.>>This is more of a look at the sequence into it, and not as much about the antecedent which is more specific to the cue for the weaves (with the weaves being the focal point of the training)
>>Behavior:
A. WPs and reward at first near start of WPs.
Gradually move reward back to start of seq.>>With the weaves as the focus, I think you can isolate them more for now – working only the weaves, reward near the weaves to start then move the reward further and further away, so he has a frame of reference regarding the poles before you put more stuff before it. Isolating the weaves will make a bigger impact in terms of reinforcing them, specifically.
Then you can add an obstacle before the weaves, and so on.
>>B. gradually add more obstacles after the WPs Before getting the Reinforcement.
Yes – bearing in mind that you are no longer reinforcing the weaves, specifically, at that point. The reinforcement is more of the ‘general’ remote reinforcement for the entire sequence and not the weaves. In that situation, the reinforcement for the weaves is the cue to continue.
>>Place reinforcement after an obstacle, and sometimes, pass by it before releasing Nuptse to the Reward
with “Get it!”>>This is good for teaching him to ignore remote reinforcement until you mark it and go back to it – just make sure that the reward is not on his line, I don’t think it is fair for the dogs to have to run over a reward on their line. I think it makes things muddy: if I say ‘weaves’ there is also an implied possibility of reward on the line after the weaves, and then if that reward is NOT in play all the time, the dogs have to think about it too much and will make mistakes. So, I do leave reinforcement around to ignore but I don’t put it directly in the dog’s running path.
>>REinforcement Procedure:
Usually Get it!>>Is this for weave reinforcement behind him? Be sure your reinforcement is specific as to where the reward will be – I use ‘get it’ to mean out ahead, so it might get confusing if sometimes get it also means turn back behind you for the reward.
>>Returning to the Start of Sequence:
If we are notthere, then using engagement of eye contact and/ or tugging and/or tricks.>>Yes – you can cookie him back to the start with tricks, or you can cue him to get the toy and as he is doing that, go back to where you want to start again so you can get the toy, play, and then it is an easy reset : )
>>This is our winter project along with leash tugging.
Perfect! Time is on your side, so you can really break it all down and build it back up 🙂
Great job planning! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
>> What do you mean by remote reinforcement marker inplace of the give cue in you above comment?>>
The give cue in the moment of tugging means that tugging on the leash is the only option for reinforcement, which is fine… but we can also build it up to mean that if he goes to the leash and plays with it, that it can earn him the opportunity to get the cookies outside of the ring. That might be more valuable that leash tugging in the ring for him, and easier to transfer to the trial ring too!
>>How long after next Monday, will you be answering our posts? This has been a terrific class.
Glad you are enjoying it! I looked at the calendar, and we can go til just before Christmas – December 23rd 🙂
Tracy
Hi! It sounds like it was just a weird day, hopefully an anomaly. So, have fun on Saturday and let me know!
TracyHi!
This is going really well! She was very happy to move with the cookies and toy! It is easier with cookies to get the reset part of it, that looked really good! You can use just the marker when you are rewarding the behavior, rather than praise then the marker, to make the most efficient loop. The praise tells her you liked it, but is not necessarily specific to location or what to do next – so the dogs just generally come to us. You can use the marker as both praise and a ‘do this next’ moment, so you will be able to reward the behavior you like both by marking it and placing it usefully, then reset easily (I praise after the reset and before the next cue, because I find it hard to keep my mouth shut LOL!!)
You were using the marker as the praise with the toy as well, it was nicely timed! I think she was not sure if she should come to the toy or continue taking the jumps, because the toy was small and the body language was continuing to present jumps. So if you want to use the shhhhhh with a toy to reward the moment on that jump, you can move away from the other jump and reward. This friz was harder for her to see, so you can use a longer toy or tie this one to something longer to it is easier to chase 🙂Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning!
Great job here, it is a good choice for a rainy day! The targeting element went well, particularly in the face of all the distractions (toy on the ground, cookies in hand, get it cookie with a toy on the ground) – he was great!!! You did a great job of mixing up the angle of entry to the target, he came into the hand from a wide variety of angles and then ended up on the correct “bend” to face the reward each time. YAY!!
Since I know you have done lovely work with markers, little details to get him to turn without moving your upper body because when we put this on a jump for a serp or threadle, you will not want to ‘close’ your target-hand shoulder forward to indicate the next thing (that can mess up the next line on course):
– is ‘yes’ your cookie-in-hand marker? You used it consistently so if it is, great! If not, use your cookie-in-hand marker – and then let him go to it without really moving much. On the cookie placements, you generally kept your shoulders in position, which is great, just dropping the cookie arm a little lower so it was easy for him to go to.
– with the toys – you can use a strike/bite marker when it is in your hand, or the marker for the toy on the ground. There was a lot of praise mixed in when you used the toy, so I wasn’t sure which marker it was – you can reverse that and mark first, then praise when he gets to the toy – and don’t move your upper body at all to help him go to it (it will feel weird LOL!!!) The goal is that he can do the in-and-out without your upper body movement, because that is the open upper body serp or threadle shoulder position he will see on course where we will want him to turn himself away. Let me know if that makes sense or if I need more coffee 🙂Nice work here! Fingers crossed for nice weather ahead!
TracyHi!
For the leash stuff – only ask for the tugging if you are really quite sure that he will tug. You’ll know that by using it in play first, not as a leash, and then with it on his next. But you can use the leash as a way to get to the remote reinforcement cookies: leash on, marker for cookies, run out for cookies 🙂
TracyYou can reduce meals if he gets lots of treats that day, and up exercise 🙂 It is a harder balance for food-driven dogs but definitely fine to do 🙂
Hi!
Lap turns looked great! I think she looked a little less comfy turning to her right (your left hand) but it might have been that you were less comfy using the left arm and leg so you were a little later starting on that side.Tandem turns on the flat also looked good! On. The very first rep, you had a lot of outside arm showing but then on the others the cue became more of a low, two-handed cue with less outside arm. You stylize it to whatever feels good and works for her – you might want to split the difference and do the two-handed cue but with a little more outside arm visible, so she can really drive in to you. It was not an issue at all here, but the outside arm will be more visible when you are up and running the big courses 🙂
>>Hen I added the hat target I notice that she’s still watching me and not really focusing forward. >>
Yes, she was looking up at you especially when she was on your right in the tandem turns. When you started with the lap turns and also with the tandems when she ended up on your left – she was doing really well with looking ahead. I think the best set up for that was when you did a tandem turn so she was several feet from the hat as you moved forward, ending up on your left – she looked forward really well there. So you can do the lap or tandem turn so she ends up further past the hat and has to drive forward to get it.
I watched to see if you she was watching your cookie hand and that is a possibility – you tend to reward more with your right hand, but not always from the right. There might a slight bias towards wanting to look at your right hand because of that. Also, the behavior of moving to the hat is very simple at this point which means we often get looking up because there is nothing else to look at 🙂 So you can either throw sooner with your find it marker to mark the moment she looks ahead (before she looks back, she doesn’t have to have a perfect prop hit in this case) or have a food bowl out past it and send her to the bowl and then drop the cookie in (makes it a little more complex which leads to less looking at us :))
Great job here! Fingers crossed for the mud to dry quickly!!!
Tracy
