The session with my student and her baby Golden was very good. Biddable dogs are so much fun. She's put a pretty decent set of basics on the dog and for the time being, she's very focused. Of course, she is still at that age, so things could change in a few months. Then my 4H students showed up and had several nice sessions with the kids (I give them 10 minutes a piece privately to work on whatever they want). Most had made good progress since last week and I managed to get through this practice without annoying my bad knee.
Afterward I tried to use Gimme to demonstrate something, but even though she got through her check-ins and indicated she was ready to work, she didn't seem to be actually able to follow through. In her defense, she'd been cooped up the vast majority of the day from 10 in the morning until what was now 8pm, with only a couple short potty breaks. When we got home we did some training and she did a good job.
And just so you know, I wondered how consistently I'd been training each of the different behaviors, so I made a matrix (I love charts) and went back through the blog entries and added dates for each of the different behaviors. Don't want to neglect anything. Overall I was pretty close, but did need to catch up on a couple that I hadn't worked as often when we were sometimes training in class.
Peach - head under a chair
There are still some holes in her understanding I think, even though this is on cue. She doesn't seem sure in some places of what is expected. Also, I find that even her well known behaviors are less reliable now as we are working on phase 3, wait for the cue. Its almost as if she doesn't listen closely and just assumes she knows what I'm asking for.
Do note, she offered extra behaviors at phases where she was more frustrated (including the usual grape) and that one of the extra behaviors she offered twice was to side step her rear toward the chair and step under it with one back foot. Clearly this is requiring her to really think and she finds this the more frustrating phase of learning. She's also doing a fair amount of mugging for treats - another sign of her frustration. It almost seems that the offering of extra behaviors is an effort to wrest away from me control of the process, but perhaps I'm anthropomorphizing. Remember, this is the phase the Ursula said is "true obedience".
Grape - dead bug (on back, feet in the air)
As always, she is six kinds of cute when she does her Grape behavior. Nobody does it cuter. Sometimes she gets to flipping quickly and rolling over other times she stops and holds her position on her back. I also noticed as I started adding the cue, she has a tendency to hear the cue and flip back looking for a treat - as if the cue was the marker. It seemed to sort out toward the end, but it was an interesting process to see. I also wonder if I'm adding the cue too soon, since some of the time when I said the cue, she then just flipped over without holding on her back at all - as if she doesn't have a well-defined idea of what the behavior is.
Apple - back into a box, back feet only
Orange - get onto a small perch with all four feet
Melon - push cube with nose
Not trained today.
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