Grafton did well, but he's so soft and needs more confidence. Mary and I have talked a lot about ways to boost his confidence and make rewards more meaningful. He likes food, but it doesn't completely excite him. He likes touch and "good boy" and playing, but won't tug much. We discovered he really likes the paper bag treat delivery method... and that really got his tail wagging. I've downloaded his video's to a different blog, so if you have a burning desire to see them, the link is: Grafton 051613 There's also other entries there for Grafton and Tucker at our last practice.
These are Gimme's videos:
Exterior 1: The breeze was coming from our right as we entered the search area. Gimme did a great job finding the first hide in 30 seconds. (ignor the blips - camera person Mary is "trigger happy") The second hide she found was very hard. The dogs could only smell it low to the ground unless they were right on top of it and it was hard to source. Gimme did a nice job there. There was a nice change of behavior at 2:40 for the third hide and she sourced it in five seconds.
Exterior 3: This was a series of open sheds, only three of which had odor in them. The thing I was looking for was how Gimme would react to the sheds that were blanks. As we get to NW3, for interiors we could have a blank room and I need to know what she does. I have to admit, even though I set those hides and the sheds are all different colors, at the time I couldn't remember which had odor and which didn't. (Dark Tan, Lt Tan, and Green had odor) You'll note she totally ignored the red and light grey blank sheds. The tan shed she went by twice - the odor was waaaay at the back of the shed and had only had a few minutes to "cook" - whereas at a trial it would have an hour minimum and the first time she was moving pretty fast. I thought it was interesting that the second time she passed it, she went into the shed next to it and then came out and turned right to it. Who knows what they smell. I did note that after she's found a couple hides, if the search continues, she is more inclined to check out blank sheds...
Exterior 4: This starts with Gimme going to the grass intending to pee, but I saw it in time to interrupt her. Our routine is a pee-break before each search and we came from the sheds right to this one - so it was my bad. I was pleased that she was ready and able to get back to work The hide is tucked in the sod and Mary set it, so I didn't know exactly where it was. At 1:46 she paws right where the hide is, but in the course of moving in, I edged her out of the way and she ends up pawing on the next one over. When I asked her to "show me" at 2:04 she put her nose right on it. She's that good...
BTW that sound when I bumped into the shed was me catching my face on the edge of the corrugated roof - to which I have a shallow 1" cut right in front of my ear. Its the price I pay for keeping my eyes on my dog, eh.
Today we went to the lake and practiced loose leash walking again. I'm working on duration using a modified version of the 300 Peck method. The method is: take one step and click/stop/treat if she's in LLW position. Each trial you add one step (or one second if you are working on a timed behavior). Any time the dog fails, you stop and then start over back at one.
What I found is that Gimme found 1 thru 5 the hardest. I think it takes her that long to figure out what my pace is going to be and I'm just notoriously inconsistent in my walking speed. Once we got past that, she progressed to 10 steps very quickly and from there fairly quickly to 15 steps. However, any time we had to go back to 1, it was just so frustrating for us both. So once I saw the pattern, I only went back to 5 and worked forward from there. About halfway through the walk I moved the restart point up to 10. She stayed between 10 and 15 for a long time.
At one point we stopped and talked to a lady for awhile and Gimme got to veg out. After that she progressed again and by the end of the walk we were consistently up at 20, so clearly she had needed a break. The other modification I made to the 300 Peck method was to repeat certain iterations as much as I felt she needed to get solid on them. So we did a lot of repeats at 8, 10, 12, 15, 18, and 20. We ended with eleven 20's in a row, which I was happy with.
This is a substantial improvement in LLW duration from what we had been doing.
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