Sorry I haven't been blogging this last week. I've been busy getting ready for Christmas and have had a bad cold for a couple days and someone ran into my new car and I spent a day helping my Mom. Gimme has been mostly bored to tears with just a couple of walks to keep her from going stir crazy.
Class last week and this week has been at the Sportsmen's Wharehouse. Mostly its just been hides here there and everywhere. The challenges for the dogs are:
First there are lots of interesting and distracting things. There is tons of stuff made of leather, which the dogs all want to check out. They seem to find rough-out leather more interesting. Gimme had a particular fascination for the shelf where all the bottles of critter scent were. And then there was the wall where the beef jerky display was. In all those cases, she checked things out and then moved on.
Second there are customers walking willy nilly through our search areas, sometimes right when the dogs were actively searching. Gimme doesn't seem to pay any attention to them and if she does its very brief. Grafton worries about men, but he ignored them all tonight. Maddie is highly anxious about all strange things, but did well with it tonight. Even little Becca, who is very people reactive, basically ignored them and only let off one woof and then went right back to work.
The third challenge was the type of shelving they have, its got a wire grid backing, so air and odor easily flows through the backing, presenting on the other side - which is a puzzle for the dogs on how to get to source. In this building the air flows consistently from right to left (as you enter the store). As handlers, even though we knew where the odor was, we were mostly letting the dogs puzzle through to solve the problem and find source.
Last week, Gimme's best search was the first one and they she got flitty on the second search as we were in the aisles where the wire grid shelving was, so she was just all over the place and it took her a long time to find source. The third time she did better and found odor must faster.
This week she was kind of all over on her first search - which I tribute to having been so pent up this week as I've been laying around. The second search she was very serious and really worked the problem to find source. The third search the two hides were between gun safes. The first one there was air current coming through from the back and all the dogs found that quickly - Gimme had it in just a couple seconds. The second one was harder because there were giant solid boxes backed up against the back of those safes, so there was no air current. All the dogs found it, and Gimme was the fastest.
While there I bought her a neon green bumper toy. When I first tossed it for her, she spent awhile pushing it around the floor with her nose and then came to me without it.
I sent her to go "pick up" and clicked while she was holding it. Within just a
couple of clicks she was going after it and bringing it to hand. So then I put
it away while she was still excited about it. I thought it might be a nice toy to take to the fort with us, so I can throw it for her to retrieve when we don't have Grafton there to run the pants off her.
No comments:
Post a Comment