November Obedience Seminar

In early November we had our obedience seminar with Fanny Gott.  Going into the seminar I was disappointed and frustrated – we had barely done any of our homework since last seeing her in the spring. Griffin had been on very restricted activity over the summer and we only ended up with about 2 1/2 weeks of training right before the seminar.

Griffin and Fanny practicing stays….together. 

The seminar was great!  It was a pretty small group and for the first time we had a lot of our students participating. It was so great to spend more time with them and watch their training progress and to hear about it over the following weeks.

Griffin and I mostly worked on a few of our challenge areas: stand to down, splash down/fast down, fixing his moving stand (getting rid of extra steps), and sequencing. We had lots of good parts and then some of it is just frustrating, I know we’ll get where I want to be and I know it won’t be a quick fix.

One of the skills that I want to have is to be trying harder and be more creative about my attempts.  Take a look at the video on this page – I would never have thought to put two toys on the flirt pole or to use the hiding stations or make crazy noises.  Note too that this is one of the sessions where the dog played much sooner – some of the sessions required even more persistence to get play. It was painful to watch at times – so much energy was needed to get Tia to be interested and the non-response from Tia is very not-reinforcing.  But we did manage to get play/the start of play- and get it many times.

What my dogs were doing when it wasn’t their turns.

I know I do many of the same variations with distractions, rewards, and sequences,.  Even though I taught creative problem solving to kids for a few years and I am good at applying it for these other scenarios of creating distractions, new reward rituals, and different types or variations of sequences.  I know that results in some weak areas for my dog – he’s not necessarily expecting any one thing – but he know the typical variations that will happen and so we fall into these predictable ‘unpredictable’ patterns.

Other teams worked on playing, heeling, position changes, self control and so many other things. The dogs were exhausted and on one of the days we ended early because the dogs and people just couldn’t do any more. It was such good training and the dogs who attended several days were making significant and measurable progress. Most of the dogs who came for just one day were making improvements too (the handlers for sure!) and I could easily see how if the people kept working at the skills the dogs would quickly be progressing.

I took fewer notes than usual – “only” 27 pages which hopefully means I’m getting more comfortable with the material. And even after seeing some of the lectures multiple times – I still am making notes !  A few general pieces of advice to share:

• “Build on high quality of reward rather than high frequency.”  If we are only keeping a dog with us and engaged by feeding/rewarding a lot – we should evaluate the quality of the reward/work on finding and developing higher quality rewards. This will be important to help us progress and especially for competition we need the dog to work for us for a long time.
• It’s “..one of the biggest mistakes that people make” to add play cues before a dog loves playing. We want the play cues to mean happy and fun and engagement. If the dog really isn’t into the play those cues will quickly have some not-so-fun emotions and expectations.
• We want to not have a big difference between life and competitions and to “not settle for anything less than joy in both settings.”
• We need to be sure we “..Build value for the right things.” The activity and rewards, not extra cues or lures or props that we have to get rid of later. 

Joy about squirrels in Maryland.

Griffin and I have a new set of things to work on (to add to our list from the spring) and it’s overwhelming how much I want to do – but also I know we’re about ready to go into the obedience ring. We’ve been looking at trial schedules and trying to match that with the free weekend days we have available. Griffin’s at a point where we have both big problems to fix (drop on recall. scent articles. stand to down), but also he’s fairly steady in his work- especially the novice pattern – and sequencing is becoming easy for us.  Even Griffin waiting and watching another dog do agility was easy for him.

2014 was a disappointment in terms of trialing and training – Griffin’s injury and rehab gave us over 8 months of restricted activity and even now I’m still cautious about what we do.  I can’t believe we’re 2 weeks into December – the seminar has helped me think about what we’ll be doing next year.