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Hi!
>>. I was using left/right here because I didn;t feel like this skill was going to be a a very collected wrap turn.>>Based on where you tossed the reward, they were generally soft turns in the beginning but then you started rewarding back on the wrap lap, in which case I would use the wrap verbals.
>>Why do you use a separate switch cue for the flip away out of the weaves instead of a left/right?>>
Left/right or wrap verbals tell the dog how to take the obstacle, such s “jump in collection and wrap to your left”. The switch verbal is a turn-away on the flat and left/right/wrap is not. Plus, it depends on whether the directional info affects obstacle execution – the weaves do not chane based on the exit directional but the jump, tunnel and running contacts do change. So I would use the left/right/wrap before the dog goes into the tunnel because that is useful info for how to turn on the exit, which happens pretty quickly. The weaves take a while so I don’t give the directional before entry (the dogs are unlikely to retain it) so I use the turn-away-on-the-flat cue.
>>And what should I use if this is a DW/Frame flip away to tunnel? I’ve tried a L/R followed by tunnel, a checkcheck/digdig tunnel for a collected turn away, and a flip/turn tunnel with Min and am not sold on any of them. Flip/Turn has also turned into a very solid 360 left flip and right flip (turn) for Kaladin with doing the flips while moving so I don’t want him to spin in a 360 turn at the base of the DW!>>
Those obstacle take about as long as a tunnel thereabouts (weaves take about 2.3 seconds, a RDW is more like 1.3 seconds and the a-frame is less) so I use the directionals because they will be having to set up the turn while executing the obstacle and it is fast so they can retain the info.
Conversely: on the stopped teeter and for Voodoo’s stopped dog walk… I use switch for the turn away.
Kaladin did well on the turn aways! You can begin to ue the RC info sooner, you were moving straight til the last minute so he was turning over the bar on the one jump reps – you can get right on the RC diagonal for those early reps, and when you are fading the RC pressure you can turn your feet sooner. That will get easier as you add more speed into it so you can then start the cues sooner too.
The outside arm did look a little uncomfortable – you can stylize it however you like so it is comfy 🙂 I think of it as a bit of a two-hand tandem turn – the outside arm is a bit of an attention-getter as I start the RC info then it does the swoosh away. And it is higher than the threadle wrap cue. I don’t do the big NADAC-style outside arm 🙂 but many people use it very effectively for this cue! Having my outside arm higher than the threadle wrap and moving differently is keeping away any confusion.
Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
She did well on these, just a couple of questions here and there.
A question for you:
was camera reversed or did you have the left and right reversed here? I think you were saying left for a right turn and vice versa (but I might be hearing it wrong).
Going through the box was really strong! She only looked at the line you wanted. Nice! Sending her to the jump outside of the box was harder – It was not as much of a Go for her, it was more of a ‘get out’ so the pressure on the 2nd rep of trying for that jump really helped her – and then you kept cuing it sooner and it got even smoother. Nice!It looks like she had a question about finishing the wrap when you were accelerating away (she was taking the tunnel. When you made sure she saw the connection, she got it. So you can work that for now in terms of starting pretty close o the cone so it is easy for her to see the wrap, then work back up to accelerating away like you did here. I think you were connected when she took the tunnel (a little hard to see) so it appears that she was reading motion, and that is why she took the tunnel. It is a good proofing game to be able to run away really fast and still get the wrap!
>>. In order to get around the tunnel, should the verbal be sufficient to take the jump, or should I have given a ‘get out’ to get her past the tunnel if I don’t want to get stuck behind the tunnel mouth?>>
Do you mean when you were sending her to the 2 jumps on the other side of the tunnel, when you were also moving with her? If so – yes, verbal is sufficient but also connection will help too! Only ue the ‘get out’ if you think she has to push away on a line by lead changing to get to it (she did not appear to do that here).
If that is not what you meant, let me know 🙂
Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning! Great job with all of these games!!!! Going through them in the order they appear in the video:
Driving ahead – really nice! You had great timing on your releases to the toy (he was looking forward and you were connected to him), and great retrieving! Super nice cookie rewards – you can also play tug like you did when you added motion but the cookie rewards for the retrieve are great to build value for the retrieve, get him to out the toy, and also build value for food in arousal which is not always easy with BCs. You mentioned wanting to play this game with food as the target rather than the toy – you are welcome to, but the toy is going to be the target that yields better results in the long term and he is doing great with it. You can play this with a Manners Minder or something similar if you want to eventually train running contacts.
You can add more of your motion to it, building up to really running. That will require more space 🙂 And this is also a great game to take on the road to help acclimate to new environments!
Drive to handler also looks great! One little suggestion: drop your food hand into the picture a bit later later, after the release and when he is halfway to you. You had it in place when you released, so now I think we can delay that a bit so the deceleration is more of the cue and the cookie hand is less of the cue. And you can put your hand close enough to you leg that it touches your pants. The pivots looked strong, he is bending really nicely!
You can now add more distance between you and him (the throw back cookies to start can help this so you don’t have to worry about the stay) – and as you add more distance, you can also add more motion: as soon as he grabs the cookie and turns back to you, you can be moving fast – then when he is halfway to you, let him see you decelerate (hand can come into the picture at that point) then you can pivot when he gets to you. You can build this up to running full out before the decel, he will like that a lot 🙂
And, you can you can also train this with a toy – it will add more excitement and arousal, so he will have to process the deceleration cue when he is more stimulated 🙂The Prop game looks great on both sides! I like this prop, it is really big and obvious, making it easy for him to commit to it. One suggestion: after the tugging and before the next send, do a longer “ready dance” – when he is releasing the toy and being sent at the same time, he didn’t have as much time to process the cue, so he was not able to be as precise with his commitment and had more errors. Puppies need a couple of seconds LOL! So, after the tug, you can do a ready dance long enough to say ‘ready’ 3 times – then send him. That will get lots of speed and precision, especially as you add more distance.
The wing wrap foundations – also going super well and he is beginning to wrap the cone beautifully!! For the next session: do you have cookies that are smaller and less crunchy? It will speed up the game 🙂 He is now at the stage where he doesn’t need to hear the cookie drop into the bowl, I think he has the rhythm, so you can go to cookies that are easier to swallow and require no chewing LOL! And, because he loves toys too, you can totally play this with 2 toys.
As you continue to build this: you can mix in dropping the treat in earlier, as soon as he is heading towards the cone so he doesn’t try to offer behavior on the cone – if the treat is only coming when he is all the way around for now, he was offering a nose touch and a food smack on the cone 🙂 So, ping pong the timing – you can reward that first step towards it, or arriving at the second bowl, and everything in between so that it is more about the motion around the cone, and less about interacting with the cone. And over the course of the next couple of sessions, you can push the cone a little further away from you, to add distance to his commitment.
I LOVE how he is leading with his head already to turn around the cone – that is an early predictor of great turning skills in the future! Fun!!Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning!
I like the Pony nickname 🙂
And I don’t think Karena posted anything with Kiwi (she might have been auditing or observing) but I believe you are half of the Mike and Karena who I followed your terrier adventures, right?And yes, you can use both toys and good with him – he has good value for both at the moment!! Yay!
TracyHi again!
Aha! Look at his excitement for the game for the toy! That lends support to my theory that food is not yet his favorite reinforcement (again, this is totally normal, you will see that my smaller puppy is like that in some of the demo videos and the bigger puppy was like that but I was able to build his love for food before the class demos were filmed. Both of those pups have a LOT of BC and whippet in them – neither of those breeds are known for wanting to eat while working LOL!
The driving ahead was SUPER nice! Great timing of the release to the toy (he was looking forward at the ‘line’ 🙂 ) and he was perfectly happy to drive straight with you running. Hooray! And the toy is clearly a valuable reinforcement, which is why the behavior was built up so quickly.
>>Should I move forward/advance?>>
Yes – two ways to advance this:
– take the game exactly as you did it here to new places, it helps the pups understand how to play like this in a variety of environments, even if it is a different room at home 🙂
– add more speed to your running – he is going to be a speedy dog, so the earlier we get him used to you running, the better 🙂And you can do the decel to handler game too. The demos have a lot of food use, but you can use toys as well (there are some toy demos in there too :)) Since food love is being built up, you can totally train the decel behavior with the tug toy 🙂
>>Should I post only one video and then wait for feedback before posting the next video of a different game? Or can I post multiple videos of different games if within the same week of homework? Don’t want to overwhelm you!
Thanks for asking! You can post multiple videos like you did here (they looked great!) and you can continue training if everything is going well. If you have a question (like when he was not doing the nose touch) – that is a good time to wait for feedback before doing the next session on that game but you can keep moving forward on the others – there are plenty of games 🙂 so if one is not going as well, you can set it aside for feedback and play one of the others 🙂 But if all is going well, you can post and post 🙂 I try to get to the videos in the mornings and in the evenings, and I will let you all know if there is going to be a longer gap in time between feedback 🙂
Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
I agree, this is hard – not because he is not interested in the target – he seems pretty interested and he also really loves to play with you… I think the food rewards are not high enough in value yet, so building the love for the behavior is harder. Again, this is totally normal 🙂 If you look at the wing wrapping foundation game, my small black/white puppy (Elektra) did the demo with 2 toys – that is because at the time (she was 10 or 11 weeks old) she simply did not love food so the behaviors were not able to be built with food 🙂 Sound familiar? LOL She is a big piggie now (20 months) and I think she even prefers food rewards over toys in many situations. So, it gets built up 🙂
For this specific game, move the target hand away from him rather than towards him, let him come to you on that – then you can mark and for now… tug! You can train the food value separately and train this skill with tugging, then meld the two together (you don’t need to use the clicker for this or for the prop until the food value if very high – you can use a ‘yes’ marker then present the tug party :)) Reinforcement is determined by the pup – so if he says treats are not reinforcing, then we can build behavior with toys while we also build up treat love 🙂 So far we are doing this will classmate Beka and I am sure some of the other BC babies will be doing this too.
Great job! Let me know what you think!
TracyGood morning! There is nothing more fun than watching a baby puppy start his training adventures <3
On this prop game, you had a lot of lovely click/treats for interacting with the hat! A couple of ideas for you to continue to progress the behavior:
When you are shaping, you can make things easier for him by standing still (or even sitting on the ground). Too much moving around is causing him to look at you and drws his focus away from the prop, so we will keep you stationary for now. To draw focus to the prop and get him hitting it with a foot, you can flatten the prop so it is easier to step up onto - that can help him offer lifting a foot onto it if it is not so tall 🙂Also you can make the playing field "bigger" by putting the hat on a towel that is perhaps folded in half, so he gets on the towel on the way to the hat - you can click any stepping on things to help isolate the front feet touching things.
I think part of his question here has to do with the food reinforcement. After watching this video and the next two, I think he is not yet into food rewards in the training context. This is totally 10000% normal with many baby BCs 🙂 I don't want you to think it is odd - in fact, I think it is odd when a baby BC naturally likes food rewards LOL!!! All of my dogs that are BC/herding mixes had to have their food value built up to be able to be used effectively as reinforcement and we have worked this with tons and tons of students (almost all of whom are BCs). The good news is that it will be easy to do that. And the food rewards not yet being fully exciting to him are part of the reason why this behavior and the nose touch behavior are not moving forward as quickly as the driving ahead behavior (which is a toy-based game). So, easy peasy next step: we build value for cookies 🙂
You are not the only one in this class who is doing this - check out Lori and Beka if you want to see another puppy building value for food rewards (and I can add video of my dogs building food value :))
So you are probably thinking: "how do I build food value?" It is pretty easy: get him to swallow a treat, then play tug. Easy! It just takes a couple of sessions of pairing treat-then-tug and he will have it. The key is to be sure he swallows it, delaying the offer of the tug til you are pretty sure he is not holding it in his mouth (you will see him swallow or open his mouth or lick his lips). Then tug party! You can do this as separate play sessions.
And in training, you can create more food value too by getting the simple behavior (like interacting with the hat then give a cookie then give a tug session, on a 1:1 ratio of cookie:tug.
Then you will be able to fade out the tugging and do more cookies.Also, for now, you can shape this behavior using a tug toy - click/tug!
Let me know what you think! He is a brilliant puppy so it won't take us long to pump up the food reward value 🙂
TracyGood morning!
I think that this is really going to help in a number of ways! This session looked really good, pretty much the value building loop that I had envisioned. Yay! Only one suggestion: do the tug:around:throw on a 1:1 ratio for now. One moment of tugging gets the around then throw. #DontBeGreedy 🙂 In the middle of this session, you had 3 reps of tugging then a throw – let’s save that for later in the process.And you can have him tug on different toys too, it does not have to be the friz. Anything you think is high value will work, in short blasts like you did here.
Glad that he likes the new rubber friz! I also use aerobie rubber frizzers with CB and they stand up beautifully to his thrashing lol
I think CB would rub his mouth raw but I don’t do much tugging on the harder frizzers because he is too strong for me.
You can also use other fun activities to create the value – what are his other fave activities? Tunneling? We can use value for that to help build value for the toy (more on that coming on Monday:))
Great job!
TracyHi there!
All of this is looking good! I would say you met your goals on all of these 🙂
The reverse retrieve is doing the trick – he is much less bouncy to the toy and much more about driving into it to drive to back to you. Note how he sets his turn up before arriving at it to be able to efficiently drive out! Yes!
To be honest, I think cheeseball ping pong would be my favorite game too. Cheese balls! Yum! And it is a pattern game, which dogs love love love (we talk more about pattern games in the next set of games). A new study got published recently that basically confirmed what we already knew: cheeseball ping pong is a scientifically good thing. They gave it a fancy name but I like CBPP better. It is not surprising that he finds CBPP to be relaxing and fun in new environments – the pattern of the game plus the action plus the value of the cheese balls all work together to set him up for success! We will definitely be using it more. And i bet you will be able to use it to acclimate him to new environments rather than waiting to for him to acclimate before starting it – I have a meatball variation I play with my young lurcher and I used it at the US Open, when he had to wait in between 2 snooker rings where the dogs were running about a zillion tunnels – that can be really stimulating but the meatball pattern game brought him into immediate focus.
He was much better bringing in the toy with the catch! I felt like he didn’t have any confusion, just lots of engagement. And you can also present a reinforcement for that first step or two towards you, like a second toy for him to tug with. Now, he doesn’t have to bring the toy to you with the catch, but it sure is nice and makes things really efficient!
>> Praying I didn’t drop any f bombs or similar at any point. I think I got a little bitten at one point because the toy we are using here is smaller, harder for him to grab (tennis ball on a rope) but we used it since it throws farther than his hollee roller on braided fleece. We have been working on more accurate bites and he’s doing well but this was another level of difficulty. Apologies for anything inappropriate in here. 😁>>
F-bombs are always welcome LOL! As long as we are not cursing AT the dogs, we can totally curse:) Have you tried the tennis ball in the Hollee Roller? I also put frisbees in them and then put the Hollee Roller on a bungee. It is high value for the dogs and great for finger preservation and for throwing.
Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
>> Because he’s a little older than some of the pups and does have some foundation behavior stuff I think my goal is to work through the exercises and see if we can get to the Advanced versions in most cases. Also, where possible I’d like to keep in mind things to add in like speed, distance and location where it seems like that’s the best next step for him.>>
Yes – he is a little older but mainly he has a ton of reinforcement procedure in place: so we can definitely have a bit of fun adding things! The Advanced level will start to get more complex in coming weeks and I will definitely be sliding in ideas to keep building on anything that is too easy 🙂
He was brilliant on these videos, of course 🙂
For the driving ahead, we can turn them into Toy Races by having you try to win 🙂 A little competitive spirit will even more speed and get him lower to the toy too 🙂 Basically, if you get to the toy first, it is yours 🙂 You can be silly and let him see it and tease him a little, but don’t let him have it – after a few seconds of you partying and showing it to him, do a quick transition into the next toy race. He will smoke you on that one LOL! I have videos of the handler winning, let me dig them up for you to see. It is really fun for both – but, disclaimer, you might have to cheat to win (I have a video of me cheating to win with the BorderWhippet by throwing an air cookie haha! But mission accomplished, he learned to accelerate and drive ahead to get the toy). And winning and a bit of teasing does not have any negative fallout for toy play, because we are still super engaged with the pups 🙂
Decel to handler looks great, he is decelerating and turning with you on the single pivots and the doubles. Good boy! If you think his stay is strong enough, you can move away faster, release with more speed (building to a full out run) then when he is halfway to you: decel and pivot. You started this a bit at the end and I think you can exaggerate it even more because he was great – working up to really running, then decelerating (be sure to decelerate when he is halfway to you so he has time to process the decel and doesn’t end up going past you). And you can also reinforce the stays for when you move away with more speed – running on lead outs before you release is a very helpful skill to have eventually, but we want him to be successful so move only as fast as you think he can handle successfully.
Great job here! Let me know what you think!
TracyHi!
>> Yep, want to build food value! For me it’s so weird to have a BC that isn’t that food motivated.
It is more normal than you realize LOL! It is a little unusual that all of your BCs have been foodies so far 🙂 The food value you see in the videos with Voodoo, Contraband and Elektra? That is all built, not natural (now they are all piggies 🐷) They are all heavily BC (and whippet, a breed not known for being great eaters). You will see in some of the early videos that I don’t use food at all with Elektra because value was simply not in place yet.
I think this was a far better session! You don’t even need to click – you can just mark the moment she touches it, toss the treat and when she gets it and swallows it, have the tug party. And separately from “formal” training, you can totally just hang out and toss a treat and when she eats it, play some tug or toss a ball or let her go do something fun. What is her favorite activity? Eating a treat can be the gateway to it 🙂
Great job! We will continue to build it up, and you can of course use toys for the other games 🙂
TracyHi!
>Quick question about the Goat game….Do you want us to use an object that they can stand all four feet on, or just front feet?
For now, all 4 feet is great – you can use something big enough that is it easy for him to get all 4 on it.
>>Thanks again, we had a great time in class last night, I’m thrilled I got over my nerves and went for the working spot!
You two were AWESOME! The entire class is filled with talented puppies and their mommas. I am so excited for you all!
>>I think it’s going to help me a lot to have another set of eyes, since I normally train alone. I’m sure Dice is thanking you already>>
I totally feel that!! I train alone, and plus the live concepts were developed when everything was shut down for the pandemic – we started this format in April, 2020. That first wave of puppies is now adult and they are competing successfully 🙂 Yay!
Have fun!
TracyThanks for the kind words about the Open! I won’t miss those 5am course builds – I love agility, but maybe not that much LOL! I was thinking of you and Enzo…those courses would have been great with him! Something to consider for next year 🙂
Bummer about the energy level, totally understandable! It is a good choice to wait til you feel the energy – you can post stuff here if you want, the site pings me 🙂 Definitely hope to see you in person too, fingers crossed!!!!
Wishing you a peaceful and relaxing holiday season and continued success in the ring with Enzo 🙂 Talk to you soon!
Tracy
