Quickie...

Since yesterday was such a busy day for Gimme-girl, I was going to give her the day off.  I should point out that she doesn't consider a "day off" as a good thing.  Her preference would be to train multiple times a day, everyday and with lots of field trips each week.  She thrives on using her brain and doing stuff.

I just got home from teaching a private lesson to Pumpkin, a severely overweight, 4 year old Lab mix.  He's a sweet dog, but completely untrained and very much out-of-control.  This is our second lesson.  The first lesson we spent half the time trying to get some essence of focus - this time only took 15 minutes to really get his focus.  So that is a substantial improvement.  Plus by the end of this lesson he was volunteering behaviors AND some of them involved self-control.  I love that he's showing signs of becoming operant and the glimmers of taking responsibility for his own behavior.  This couple have 6 large out-of-control dogs, of which Pumpkin is the youngest and most ill-behaved.  Anne, his owner, was very enthusiastic about the clear progress we made this time.  Hopefully she will be enthused enough to start applying the lessons to the other five dogs.

Anyway, that put me in the mood to train SOMETHING.  So we did a short session of nosework.  I set out four paired hides, one at a time, and made them all threshold hides.  Threshold is our weakest skill at this point, so thought it made sense to warm up the concept before the trial next weekend.

The first one Gimme blew past a million miles an hour and searched much of the room before coming back to it.  The second one she went by just one-hundred-thousand miles an hour, but came back to much more quickly.  The third and fourth hides she paid more attention to the threshold and got them very quickly. That was all we did - short and sweet.

Now I'm going to camp out on the couch and read the book I got from the library.  I ordered it about 8 months ago and had pretty much given up on it ever coming in.  It is "K-9 Trailing, the Straightest Path", by Jeff Schettler.  I read his book, "Red Dog Rising" quite awhile back and it was great.  This book is supposed to be more of a training manual for man-trailing.  I have no real interest in man-trailing or search and rescue, but I figure there will be a lot of overlap between it and nosework and tracking.  He talked a lot in the introduction about how important it is to learn to read your dog - so if I can pick up info just on that, I'll be well ahead of where I am now.