Parkour Walk for "hands"

Today we walked on a different part of the Chehalis West rails-to-trails and did 6¼ miles.  As I said, I planned to focus on our 2-on "hands".  Here are two collages of the things we found to do "hands" on. 

I started with a focus on tall stuff where Gimme would be unlikely to offer 4-on "table".  Several different shapes and sizes of trees, signs and barriers.  Some of the signs she wasn't too sure about - like the black arched one and the plexiglas area on the Chehalis trail map (she was fine with the wood part).  On the gasline pipes she was content to put her feet on the bigger center post, but had to be lured for the smaller pipe to the side.   The sign with the angle-iron legs was a real challenge because it was so narrow.

To begin I lured her to put two feet on things and paid her while she stayed there.  Then I switched to just motioning and when she was consistently doing the behavior, started preceding it with the "hands" cue.  By the end of the walk I could simply stand near an obstacle and give the verbal and she'd do the behavior.  Of course the true test will be when we can use both "hands" and "table" interchangeably, but it will be awhile methinks.

I added lower things with the potential for 4-on after we'd done many "hands" already, hoping she'd understand it was a 2-on paying day.  She did.  I started with the bench approaching from the back where she'd see a more vertical surface.  When we went to the front she did get up once, but I just had her get off and then cued "hands" again.  She quickly figured out to only offer me "hands" since it was what was paying today.  She did only "hands" on the two big rocks, though I could see she was thinking about getting on one and then decided to give me "hands" instead.

I also found this cool forked tree and we did some "g'won" to it.  This is where Gimme must go between two obstacles for her Parkour through.  For the training level title the requirement is: the two obstacles must be less than dog’s body length apart.  For the novice title it is: the two obstacles must be less than twice the dog’s shoulder width apart.  There is no through in the higher levels.  One of the very cool things about Parkour is how the tasks are scaled to the dog's size and you can even ask for variences in special cases. 

The ground is lower on the back side of this tree, making it a bit more of a challenge.  Gimme would have no difficulty with either level, as this is more than is required.  We had fun playing with this.

I've always enjoyed our walks as watching Gimme sniff and snoop is fun all by itself.  Interacting with stuff along the way is even more fun.  Gimme is dead to the world right now.