Bob Bailey/Parvene Farhoody Seminar

I’ve been waiting – years- for the opportunity to see Bob Bailey speak (click her for an article about him!).  I’ve been endlessly fascinated by him ever since Blaze was a puppy and I first heard about Bob Bailey and his ‘chicken camps’ where people could learn great animal training skills. I was almost thinking I would never get a chance when I found out about this seminar just about 6 weeks ago.  I quickly rearranged my schedule and we made a trip just outside of Chicago.

Bob Bailey has been speaking with Parvene Farhoody for quite a few years now. Parvene is in many ways a student of Bob Bailey’s but she’s also done many great things herself and is very experienced working with pet owners and training in a variety of settings. They did a great job of dividing up the seminar as well as coaching/problem solving with a few demo/working teams over the weekend.

5 red dogs.

The seminar was various lectures, some by Bob Bailey and some by Parvene – though most of the power point slides were in the same format – my least favorite part of the seminar – yellow on black, with interesting stylistic choices on capitalization, font size, and italics. I was familiar with this format from seeing some DVD’s. There were presentations on critical thinking, behavioral economics, efficiency, history of animal training, and a few more.  There were two working dog teams that had some coaching throughout the day as the teams both worked on training the same behavior and improving fluency.  I always take a lot of notes at seminars – this time I had 48 pages of typed notes from a 2 day seminar. There was a lot happening and from past seminars I know I think I will remember things – but if it’s not written down for reference I never remember!

Saturday evening, a well known scent trainer, Randy Hare did a demonstration and lecture. I feel like I must have missed some of it because some of it didn’t make very much sense – later I heard others also expressing confusion so it may be possible he was used to teaching in another format. I’ve seen some of his videos before and seen the great stimulus control his dogs have – searching for the correct odor and then receiving their reward, even though toys are bouncing all over and other distractions occur.  It was also interesting that some of his training is entirely the opposite to some of the scent training I’ve been exposed to – and both approaches have dogs successfully working and competing.

Many of the lectures were pieces of things I had seen before on Bob Bailey’s DVDs – but some of it was so great to be able to hear him talk about his experiences and approach. I would be able to listen to his stories for days. It’s almost impossible to believe the things he’s done with animal training, the experiences he has had, and how much he has accomplished.

Sometimes when I’m teaching, I’ll get excited when a dog accomplishes something fairly simple even though I’ve seen it hundreds? thousands? of times by now. It shouldn’t be quite as exciting – but it really is. And I saw that same thing from Bob Bailey a few times -even when coaching a team training a simple ‘go around a cone’ exercise there was so much enthusiasm, attention and excitement for the successes and errors. I sometimes was watching him instead of the working dog – Bob’s attention primarily was on the dog but would occasionally flicker to the handler and then right back to what the dog was doing. He seemed to almost be unable to stop himself from adjusting props and distractions a few times to push the dog further along in the training.

It’s going to take days to go through all my notes and start working through the changes I would like to make to training for my dogs, my student dogs in various classes and the teams I work with for private lessons. I kept a running list of ideas and alterations I want to work on.

The few things I walked away with:

• Fast: Training should be fairly quick. Look for areas where this isn’t happening, find ways to make adjustments. Not to say we need to get to the final goal right away – but we need to continue to make measurable progress.  “Don’t waste your most precious resource – time.”
• Keep more records: I’m pretty diligent about having very basic records – I have rough outlines for all my training for the past few years and even more rough notes on classes. I need to go back to finding simple ways to track a few more things that will be useful for measuring long term progress and the impact changes make on our training programs. “..permanent, objective records…”
• Evaluate everything: One of the underlying themes was the critical thinking – and especially of established programs/practices in training. There are a lot of things that are dog trainer myths/traditions/’ways’ that are not always necessarily most efficient or effective practices.  There were quite a few what-appeared-to-be-not-so-glowing references to various popular training systems/programs/marketing situations – but the honesty was there, there’s a lot going on in the dog training world that is not data driven and the love of some of these things can hold trainers back.  I’m pretty good about not falling into the popular-training-system thing, but I also don’t always evaluate my own training enough or why some programs developed by others seem to work well (or not so well).  “The [behavior] principles are free! They’re yours!” – Parvene Farhoody
• Don’t accept good enough.  It’s so hard. There’s so much to train, limited time, etc.  If I keep worrying on my agility details my dog will be 10 before he’s ready to compete. On the other hand, we don’t want to accept and reward poor performances or we’ll be creating a big whole long term. One of the points repeatedly mentioned was to not make things easier if we had trouble – it’s not a best training practice. With my own training I will rarely make that adjustment but when I teach I sometimes will. I’ll need to make a better plan for how to reduce the need to consider that option, as well as how to make it appropriate and worthwhile for clients to be able to follow through and completely re-set, give the dog a break, etc rather than accept “good enough.”  This goes along well with the 4-H motto of “to make the best better.”  “The exceptional trainer does not accept good enough.”

I’m so glad I went, I would go and see this seminar again.

The dogs didn’t think it was the best weekend, lots of time in the car crates, walking by drainage ponds full of geese, and some training on breaks and at lunch. I got to see a training friend who I had not seen since we did a dog training program together in 2008!  There were a handful of other people I thought I knew (some I actually did, some I didn’t) and I was surprised I didn’t know more people there.  Viktor had his first hotel stay – that deserves it’s own post sometime soon.