Blaze
- A heeling session: Due to the amount of tracking that we have been doing, he thinks outside = tracking. Heeling is difficult. We attempted a high rate of reinforcement for head up and working.
Luna
- Heeling: She wasn’t taking the food I had, we used play when she moved into position. I didn’t wait for her to complete move, but as soon as she started, I started the play. We were able to keep it up for a few minutes and then I stopped while I was ahead.
- Contacts: After classes tonight I took her over the dogwalk a few times. She was a bit worried at first and never ended up running but did go over. She only stopped 1/3 times, but 100% at one end of the obstacle….
- Exploring: She got to meet a few people who were sitting quietly. As she entered the building, she seemed really happy, even about the people, but then someone else came in and she got sad and crouching down and didn’t want to work, so we shoveled some treats into her mouth as we left.
Griffin
- Heeling: I intended to work on duration but ended up on more for attention and good choices. We were working in the front yard and he was staring longingly across at the pond Those times where he came to me? REINFORCE!
- Group time: We met with a trainer friend in the afternoon for some work
- — Group stays: He did a sit stay (1ish min) and down stay (1ish) next to another dog. I fed him a few times throughout but he didn’t think about breaking or visiting the other dog. Or the person.
- — Stand for exam: Two sessions on this, we worked on the person going past, pausing, fake petting and real petting. We even did well with a bit of real petting but soon he got silly and wiggly.
- — Heeling: in a bit of a group. It was not good. He was a bit floor sniffy, so we worked on offered attention then. And then when he did heel, he didn’t seem as intense as he usually does.
- Scent/Tugging: We got Griffin to tug readily on his favorite disc. Then on his scented tug. Then hid that tug under a cone (two setting out….with holes in them) and we sent him to find it. he did, brought it back and disc tug. We did a few reps and it was okay but not great. There were some floor smells he loved and it was hard to get him back. But then we did another set with food, he found the tug, brought it back and we tugged for food reinforcer. It was really cool to see him work hard at tugging to get the food reinforcer. We had a talk this morning with someone who thought food was poor for retrieves because it makes dogs let go….I argued that a dog that understood food use would just work arder if he wanted the food.
Tomorrow we’re supposed to go to training group, but if it ends up super stormy, we’ll stay home and do indoor games. There is too much to work on and not enough time. Luna needs more in public and more enthusiasm. Blaze needs enough work to discriminate between heeling and tracking. Griffin….a lot. Esp duration. And practicing with our scent games. I didn’t do well with record keeping today but I did well with having specific goals for each piece of the training sessions.