Tonight we had a new dog join class - large and dark. Someone in his past did a hatchet job on his ears, "because he's a fighting breed". I think it more likely he was intended to be a bait dog, but fortunately got rescued before that horrible end could play out. He seems really sweet and pretty bold, like Gimme, no fear. He just does everything and always fast. Gimme didn't notice him right away, but once she did he was quite a distraction.
"Thru" with obstacles video - Gimme went through this before I even cued it. At this point, she doesn't see the obstacles as obstacles at all.
Crawl trainer video - You'll see the new dog go by briefly. Now with one more dog in class, its a bit of a juggling game. In any case, Gimme thinks the crawl trainer is easy peasy.
"Table-thru-table" video - I wrongly assumed Gimme would listen to my verbal cue, so I didn't set her up on a path to make "thru" an obvious choice, so instead she gave me "hands". When I do set her up, she does it easily. Of course she can't resist hopping up on the boardwalk to the scaffold just because we walk by it.
Sequence 1 video - This was right after Gimme noticed the new dog and you can clearly see how unfocused she is. She is trying, but part of her brain is somewhere else. BTW the person and dog who are in the camera is the new team and if you look closely you can see his poor ears.
Scaffold work video - Gimme is very unfocused here, to the point of not being aware of where her feet are at times, making missteps. I turned this quick exercise into a longer exercise by adding a control point at almost every step.
Sequence 2 video - Gimme was doing pretty good and focusing well, until we got to where she needed to go "below" the boardwalk. I had her "wait" so I could get positioned, but when she got through, she didn't see me where she thought I should be, so she went back and then hopped up on the boardwalk (which I was straddling). Clearly I should have used the "wait" to get all the way on the other side of the boardwalk. When we get to the end, Jo has us repeat the segment where we had trouble before and this time it was even worse. I'm not sure why... in hindsight I think she was simply getting tired.
Scaffold work 2 video - She was really unfocused at the beginning of this and I had to slow her down quite a bit. I do see in the video a couple of quick looks to the new dog when they are moving around, which is certainly a strong distraction. She stops looking when the owner sits and the new dog isn't moving. Anyway, slowed her quite a bit and then she did better.
Free practice video - We were given time at the end of class to work on whatever we wanted to. I put out four props so I could have a variety of options and wanted to specifically put a lot of rewards into the waiting-for-cues account. Its a work in progress and sometimes it seems like those rewards aren't registering. Of course she has a very long history of getting rewarded for doing things to overcome. It occurs to me watching this, she may have been confused when I cued "stand", thinking I said "hands". They do sound a LOT alike. I thought she did well with the distraction of the tri-color dog moving nearby. She looked, but instantly turned her attention back to me. We did a few behaviors as part of her stretching: "hands" to the cone, "take-a", "spin" and "turn". We even tried "thru", but she'd started getting a bit wild, so I had her hold a "down" position to calm her.
Working through the presence of a new dog in class was very hard for the munchkin, so she slept soundly all the way home.
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