WEDNESDAY, OCT 13, 2010 Today we went to the Gym to teach our morning class. No students signed up for this session so Rosanne did a little greeting training with one of the other volunteers. I gave Brooke three things to do:
1. Click/treat proactively for feet on the floor.
2. Ignore Rosanne if she jumped up on her, then click/treat when her feet were back on the floor.
3. Cue "sit" proactively before Rosanne had a chance to jump up. Brooke did pretty well with her training task. Here is the video:
After that two of the conformation people came in with their dogs. The dogs were out at the end of tight leashes and Rosanne reacted to them. I gracefully moved her off to a sufficient distance and did some desensitization work. She doesn't yet know Look At That which would have been a good thing to do (must get that trained!). We were able to gradually move closer to the other dogs successfully. Suddenly another person came bursting through the door yelling "NO ... NO ... NO!!" at her dog in a loud voice. This really caused Rosanne to go off reactively. *sigh* These are people for a conformation class, *not* our clicker training clients. I picked her up and took her to the car. I need to set her up with handlers with good leash handling skills with dogs on leash and desensitize her to that before ever again having her on leash near anyone with poor leash handling skills. NOTE TO SELF: No more Rosanne on leash when conformation practice is about to occur.
Later in the evening, we were in my office at home. While I worked she was sequestered with me via X-pen. There is a small soft crate under the knee space in the other desk which she discovered. She now takes any chewies into her "lair" to chew and even chewed on a short piece of bully stick for quite a while for the first time.
On a break I worked on targeting her through a left spin. I faded my target hand quite a bit, down to just a small motion of my hand as the cue. The reinforcement system was click/tug and this was her first opportunity to work with a game of tug following the click. She took to it fantastically! It's important to me that my dogs can switch from toys to food and from food to toys in the same training session and she has no problems in that area.
I like to teach training *concepts* to my new dogs as a priority over specific behaviors and this concept, as I said, is an important one. We had a blast working on left spins, adding the cue left while she was moving through the spin, and reinforcing with click/tug. She's great at being clicked to release the toy too. I click, she opens her mouth, I give her the treat while picking up the dropped toy. Wooooo hoooo!
I also did a little bit of shaping her to go into the soft crate under the desk. I got her voluntarily going in and turning around. I think Rosanne likes shaping games!
After all of that training and playing, Rosanne circled about, laid down and fell asleep for her first nap not in a crate or play pen but just where she happened to be when she became tired. Very cool!
She's such an easy keeper - so relaxed, able to be left in a crate or play pen without fussing, able to fall asleep when there is no activity, yet able to play and train any time. Auntie Lynn says the same things about her - so easy to manage as a puppy. I'm thinking that Granma Mary had a lot to do with this - the Early Neurological Stimulation, the puppy enrichment and socialization of the litter, the early crate training. Hats off to you, Mary, for such an *excellent* job!
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