Nosework (4/12)

Tonight we had class in a realty office downtown.  The hides were more like NW2 level hides and as always Gimme did well.  She was very busy, but found all the hides and fairly quickly.  Nothing about the environment fazed her at all.

An interesting thing is that her tendency regarding paw alerts in classes is much more forceful than what she does in practices or at seminars, matches or the trial.  I just took a few minutes and looked at the vehicle and interior videos from the match.  Then I looked at all the lengthy videos from the converging odor seminar.  In doing so, I verified that my impression matches reality - Gimme's paw alert on the videos is well within the acceptable range.

I freely admit her pawing on containers is over the top and I do realize that we'll probably get a fault for it.  But, the rules say we can only be assessed one fault of a fault type, per element... so even if she assaults each odor bag and/or the distraction bags, its still only one fault.  You can have three faults overall and get your title.

Joyce is practically obsessing about it and the more she obsesses the worse it gets during the space of one class.  Which leads me to believe that its something about the class situation that exacerbates Gimme's pawing tendency.  The two possibilities I see (probably a bit of both) are:

• Joyce talks to me while we are searching, thus distracting me so that I'm not as responsive - so Gimme dials it up a notch to get my attention.  No one talks to me at trials and I'm able to focus on every nuance of what Gimme is doing.
• The things about class that annoy me make me tense, which Gimme senses, feels frustration and reacts by going over the top.

In any case... I came home and did a little exercise with Gimme.  I got out odor in a menthos bottle and presented it to Gimme and then "yes" marked her paw and gave her cheese.  We did it over and over and over again.  As long as I was holding it, there was a paw and hold.  When I put it under my foot, there was mostly paw and hold or two whacks.  When I tried it in other places - she started getting wound up and pawing more, so I stopped.  She often finds repetition a bit frustrating and thinks that if a little is good, more is better.  I'm going to set up some more exercises of this type.  I'm not really worried about it, but it never hurts to cover something.

BTW there are now three of us in the upcoming trial (someone dropped out and that opened up a spot for another gal from our class to get in).  Joyce instructed the three of us to email her before next week's class and tell us what our biggest concern was for the trial and that she'll plan the class around exercises to address them.  Seriously!  The week before a trial???

In my experience of years of agility competing - one thing I learned is that you NEVER introduce something new or change something the week before a trial.  Fortunately Gimme and I have been working on my greatest concern for a month... so it won't be new and different for her.