At the Ohio 4-H Volunteer/Teen Conference last weekend I helped with a few presentations and led one on “Foundation Skills.” I wrote about it a while back (and here).
I was fairly happy with the end result. We talked about body language of excited, relaxed, and stressed dogs. We talked about how we can get a dog more excited and how to get a dog more calm, using the Yerkes-Dodson Law as a framework. Essentially, there’s an optimum arousal level for different types of performance tasks and it’s our job as the dog’s trainer to help train him to be at the right excitement level for the task. This was a really fun variation of discussing body language, and I think it gave the more experienced 4-H’ers and advisors something to think about. Identifying or listing body language is one thing, but using it to help modify training is another skill level!
I wish it was spring.
In the little bit of time at the end, we did a rough overview of how I train heeling and training attention (use good reinforcers…then the attention just happens). We ran out of time before we could get to stays and some of my additional slides.
For the most part, I was pretty happy with how the presentation went and the various videos I had. It was really too much material to cover well in such a short period of time, in the future I’ll try to remember that and encourage us to be more careful when creating these topics!
I had a lot of great questions afterwards, and many 4-H’ers came up to talk to me. It was great to see how they were fitting the training pieces together and that they could see how to apply this to their own situations! A few advisors discussed training clinics and some have already been scheduled for later this spring.