Gimme was insisting that if I wasn't going to play nosework with her, then she needed more training... she does love it. So we dabbled with some behaviors. Then I decided to see what it would take to change the cue for her left and right high-fives.
I tried the traditional method - new cue, old cue, behavior, then reward... After a dozen attempts, there was no sign that Gimme was getting it. I tried another half dozen times with the treat in the new cue hand, to draw her attention to it - still nothing.
So I decided to just reteach the behavior, using the new cue hand. She offered the behavior after just seeing the new cue, on the third try!!! We did it a dozen times and by the end she was offering it 80% of the time on just the cue.
Too damn smart!
Follow up - The next time we worked on this... it seemed really confusing to her, so I've decided to leave the behaviors' cues the way they were. Just means I'll have to work harder on getting them to a reliable verbal -- which is a good project to work on, especially given our difficulties with stimulus control.
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