RFE practice (89)

I spent the first session videoing skills for the RFE Novice Skills test. I'd do each behavior 2-3 times with treats and then once without. I got ten novice behaviors done and about half of those are acceptable. In order to pass the test and earn the title I have to get an average score of 8.35 on 15 behaviors (which must include bow). Clearly we have some more work to do.

Freeshape pivot-in-a-bucket video - I saw this bit in a Crufts routine, by Leslie and her Bearded Collie, Dewy. I'm impressed with everything she does - to start, just because she's starting with not-a-BC. Beardies are not known for their performance abilities, so I'm doubly impressed. Anyway, Dewy puts his front feet in a bucket, then pivots around with his back feet. I figured Gimme could do it easily. I didn't count on her being confused by a behavior I taught her with a similar size/shape container we used to go to General Patton's Bring Your Own Box facebook party. The box I used to freeshape this day was about the same size, but shorter, so it was easier to get all four feet inside. Her attempts to pivot were more of a hop than she usually does; I think from her conflict/confusion between "pivot" and "box". I turned it over to let her pivot on it and it helped a little. It didn't help that the daycare dogs were in full screech and very distracting. Interestingly, the best pivots we got were in the opposite direction than normal. I want to do this again, but will start with her "brick" (pivot target) in a shallow box and then work from there.

Freeshaping "beep" video - One of the ladies on the MDSA list had the idea I should freeshape Gimme to back-weave three cones. For the time being, I've decided to break it down further to only do two cones at a time, creating the "beep" and "boop" behaviors. Then I'll put them together, followed by inserting myself into the behavior to get our backward weaves. It's an intriguing idea, which takes the stress out of backing under me, so we are working on it. She's not normally stressed by "under", but this behavior has developed poorly and there is frustration, which is turning to stress. As is par for Gimme, everything has to be embellished with one or more of her backing favorites. In this case she keeps trying to turn it into "bacon". Note how quickly she develops a superstitious head turn - just one imperfectly timed click is all it takes. In watching this video, I see I also failed to adjust my criteria as I made the task harder - bad me.

We've since done a session in the living room using bleach bottles and she made a huge leap in understanding. She totally dropped any effort to put her feet on the bottle-cones. And more importantly, she was turning her body as she backed, making a slight s-curve. I wish I had video of it.

I ended the day with a short session doing some more video's for the skills test. It'll probably take awhile to get them all done to my satisfaction. I'm sure we'll get there...