This morning Gimme and I had a great practice and its been one of the best since things deteriorated post-seizure. We did each behavior from the course (at least twice), as well as the four I've decided on for our Free Choice stations. Many of them Gimme did remember and was able to do on verbal, without needing a reminder first. Sure is good to see this coming back.
After the paw lifts (not included in the course) I was most worried about the sit-stand station, since we don't have it completely on a verbal. However, this morning Gimme nailed it on a verbal, though
we did have to repeat it several times to get her to stick the stand. She would
pop up into the stand and then just move forward, which would be points off,
though not as many as using a hand cue to get the stand.
We also did her "can" for the first time on the
actual can (step rear feet on a platform and then pivot around, keeping back feet on
platform). Its somewhat smaller diameter and twice as high as the practice can,
so we had to work on it a bit. She was tending to step one foot off, then back
on during the pivot, so we had to back up a little to get rid of the step off.
Oddly I still can't find the foam bottom for the can. I'm sure its around here somewhere, but can't spend the time looking for it, so I made another. Ron glued it on for me while Linda and I were quilting.
Nosework class tonight was a good one. We started out with a large interior search with six hides. Gimme was the fastest of the four dogs in class and she really liked having so many hides. There was another dog who was almost as fast as she was, but her owner does a lot of "guiding" the dog with her own movement. I always just follow Gimme, since I'd never know in a trial where to guide her, so I don't want her looking for hints from me.
From there we went to a four vehicle search, with two hides. One of them was really challenging, because the scent was kind of swirling around in a space between the four vehicles. Gimme caught the drift of this one really quickly and then just focused on it until she knew where source was. From there she went directly to the other one, even though she'd not gone anywhere near it before.
Then Dorothy moved the second hide to a place on another vehicle in an identical space as the first one. The idea was to see how these two rather similar vehicles, with a hide in the same location, made two completely different challenges. Both were white vans, but one was a minivan and the other was a extended full size which also sat higher off the ground. So the spacing around the tire and the wheel well was different, the tire size was different, and one sat higher off the ground and there was more air movement. The minivan had these "scoops" on the front bumper, while the full size had a solid bumper.
Gimme quickly found the hide on the full size. From there she went to check where the second hide was before, though I noticed her nose tilt toward the front end of the minivan as we went by it. After verifying it wasn't where it had been, she went straight to the front of the minivan and quickly got to source. Because she approached it from the front, she caught odor coming from the scoops and got to source much faster than the other dogs, who all approached it from the back of the vehicle.
So now our couch is calling us...
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