More Guides

Its been a busy couple of days.  I was invited to a Veteran's Day celebration in Auburn that was set for early today, so we went up last night.  We were supposed to resume nosework classes last night, but our instructor had to make the decision to euthanize one of her old dogs and obviously wasn't up for class.

Today after the celebration, I went back to my parents' and performed some minor repairs.  If only I could get them to stop trying to fix things themselves, it would be so much easier not having to fix a twice-broken.  After that Mom and I spent a lot of time burning brush, getting kindling made, yard winterizing and other outside tasks.  I'm very tired. 

Gimme was her usual angelic self...  She had her first experience seeing fire and found it spooooooky.  Naturally within minutes she was acting like an old hand and swore me to secrecy (I had my fingers crossed behind my back).  Her help with the brush burning (stealing many of the things I was trying to get into the fire) was, shall we say, less than helpful.

Here I have two clips of training with the guides.  The first one is practicing the "around" behavior (clockwise circle around me).  Gimme still tries to jump out now and then (edited out of this clip), but I'm encouraging her to come back in and believe that will fade once she realizes that inside the circle is where the rewards happen.  You'll notice the first click it looked like she was thinking of jumping out, but since she had moved in the right direction, I preempted her exit with the click/reward.  I think I may have pushed her a bit too much for more and that caused the barking.  You'll see I was able to demonstrate spinning the opposite direction and it didn't faze her at all.   Note: This was only 8 repetitions, but when I watched the timing... it slowed down between reps after the fifth one.  Again, I see evidence that 5 good repetitions does seem to be optimum for Gimme.

This second clip is a short sample of how you could teach the dog to go around the cane.  I've edited this down to just the best repetitions.  I realize it was far too soon to introduce Gimme to this idea (I just did it for demonstration purposes), since she'd only had two sessions with the simple "around" using the guides.  The first thing she did was get "stuck" sitting and I used a click of her stretching her neck out to get her moving.  Once we got past that, she seemed to think I was shaping her for position relative to the cane.  I can see in the video that I missed a few good click opportunities.  I used treat delivery to get her past the hump to move between me and the cane.  Clearly Gimme hasn't made the connection to moving in a circle inside circular guides.  Still once she figured out what I wanted, it seemed to go well, which I think bodes well.  Do note that her tail never stopped wagging, no matter how confusing she thought I was being.

We have a lot on our plate for the weekend.  I plan to drive to Elma and let Gimme watch some agility from the stands after class on Saturday.  Then on Sunday we are going to an obedience/rally training session where you can buy personal ring time (PRT).  I'm buying 15 minutes and have asked them to break them down into three 5 minute sessions.  After that I plan to come home and do some winterizing of my own yard.

Monday is the one year anniversary of my nephew Josh's death.  Its going to be a hard day.