On Valentine's Day no less My Sweetheart Gimme was amazing.
Arms as distractions video - This session I focused on click/treats for ignoring my arm movements. I needed to experiment to know how much distraction I could throw at her. It wasn't perfect, but we made progress so I think I'm on the right track. I threw in some up-touch and only rewarded her if I gave the verbal cue "touch". These are all big changes for her to learn. Swinging my hand forward was really hard, because she was sure I was tossing a treat. I had to teach her it only worked if I said "get it". This is as much learning for me as it is for her. Naturally the next step with the "get it" game is to make the motion without the verbal cue part of the time, so there's no treat out there to get. And, of course, one can never offer too many "otto".
"West" & "East" video -
I thought her parallel alignment was better. She did a better job of sidestepping to move forward with me.
"Leah" & "Diss" video -
Gimme does pretty good at this, though I have to watch to make sure she doesn't move over to "Center" when I start moving backward.
Sequences video -
She actually did better with the first one even though it's not her best side - possibly because she's not as eager to throw an "Izzy" at me as she is to throw in an "Otto". Any possibility of an "Otto" is good enough reason to stop listening.
Backing "Heel-Side" video -
While my goal was to do the backing, I changed gears as needed to maintain better heel position. I think we are ready to use a smaller foot target. I need to take just 4 steps; so much of this is overkill.
