RFE practice (72)

My plan for this day was to get back into the basics Kathy taught me. Gimme's heeling has gotten really sloppy, for a number of reasons. It used to be her favorite thing to do and it isn't now. My fault I'm sure. There was a time if we were working on something and she got confused or frustrated, she'd jump into heel position, because she knew it was always a good place to be. I want to get it back.

I worked these sessions barefoot. Part of Gimme's concern is because I've stepped on her toes and she's rightfully concerned I might do it again. Those are the only toes she has and she wants to keep them safe. I started out letting her sniff around, waiting for her to decide to come to me. It's not what Kathy suggested, but I felt it was the right idea for this day.

When Gimme realized I was busy with treats, she galloped over to see if there might be some for her. I had her usual cheese, plus chicken nuggets and raw steak. I set up four stations around the room, so we might dash in any direction for rewards. My idea was to use less rewards from my person (just cheese) and to dash to a station for jackpots. Gimme was intrigued and excited.

Setups & Heeling video - We started with a bunch of "side" "setups", like playing keep away. I don't want to encourage her to overrun the position and just make a circle around me to try again, so moved away when this happened. She offers another behavior so I repeat "setup" cue. I mixed in some short heeling, moving to the side and away when she went wide. I let her get away with the overrun-circle bit when we started with "heel" "setup". This session seems long, but we spend a lot of time going to/from rewards. I see my jackpots aren't impressive - delivery needs to take longer.

After this concentrated work, we play the finding positions game for a bit, where Gimme gets to run to thrown rewards, which I find loosens her up a bit.

"Around" video - My plan was to do short bits of heeling, interspersed with behaviors; however, her "around" was so wide, I had to work on tightening it. I didn't want the heeling rewards to also reinforce the wide circle. I tried several things and found clicking very early worked the best because she stayed tight to get to the reward point sooner.

Heeling & Distractions video - Heeling toward a reward station and also towards corners proves distracting, so we work on this a bit.

RFE practice, "Cane" & "Orbit" video - We haven't practiced this in awhile. She warms up to it pretty fast.

Sidepass video - I started by warming up her "near" (cw) and "close" (ccw). Then did a short stint of a sidepass in front.

In addition to the treats, I let her follow with "otto" and "izzy", just because she likes them. We also worked on her other favorite "scoot". I was focusing on her doing the down in a truly centered "center", as she's been canted off to one side lately.

Heeling w/Behaviors video - I was trying to get back to heel-behavior-heel-behavior-heel... with the goal to reward on the heeling sections. I didn't always do it, but it was the goal. I wanted to jackpot the final heeling segment, so she'd see the value in the position. I was also trying to be unpredictable. Sometimes (make it, a lot of the time) she doesn't actually listen to what I'm saying. We spend some more time working on "around", then just leave it out in favor of better (more precise/consistent) behaviors. This is longer than I intended, but her attitude remained good.

I was pleased with her efforts. The false pregnancy is almost entirely gone, though she's still a bit soft on persistence, otherwise her attitude is great. She's doing better all the time, eh...