Jet and Cookies

So the indoor training goals for this winter include the following….
1. Scent Articles for Jet and Chase: They are both doing really well when there is cheese or some sort of food on the bit, but when it’s gone, they aren’t doing so well. So I’m going to clicker train the scented articles with both the boys, so they understand what they are supposed to be doing. I’m getting this from Clicker Training for Obedience by Morgan Spector. I like the book, and I think it’ll work well for them.
2. Send to the Back of the Jump: Doing this just with Jet. He needs to learn the skill of being sent to the back of a jump, then coming around to jump it towards me. It does seem this is getting more common in trials. It’s a skill we need and he’s catching on fast.
3. K9 Nose Work Boxes etc: Working this with all the dogs! They love it. Moving from boxes to other obstacles like chairs and stuff too. I also hope to put the scents in this too soon. Birch, Anise, and Clove.
4. Back Up: Jet still doesn’t know how to go backwards. The rest of my dogs do, so this is on the list to teach him!

And hmm… now I forget what else is on my list that’s stuck on the fridge in the kitchen. But those articles are going to take some time, I think. And they are fun! Maybe I need go get some document scanning going so I can make copies of my training list and put one at work too.

Oh and this picture? This is jet ‘helping’ us make Christmas Sugar Cookies yesterday. He’s such a goof. It was really hard for him not to eat all that dough, even though I told him he’d get super sick!

It’s the same with my work. I can’t learn programming out of a book. Oh.. I can learn a fair amount, but to really know it, I really have to work in a class or with a teacher.

So today during our chat discussion for my Cyber Agility course, our instructor, Helix, explained what I have been missing for years. So don’t laugh just listen. LOL

My dogs are great at offering behaviors. The offer all over the place and I’ve never understood how to get them to stop offering and only do the thing on cue! So she said… are you ready for the revelation? Wait for it….

Stop clicking the offered behavior! LOL yup, simple as that. Only click when you give the cue for the behavior, not the offering of it. Okay so see, maybe I’m just a dork, and never got that before. But now I get it and I’m excited about trying it! Though I feel kinda mean about not clicking, but Helix also said it’s just giving the dog information by not clicking. There’s no need to feel mean!

Today we went to the dog park too, and I lost Tatum for about 20 minutes. Ugh.. she is a dork. The picture above is when we just got there. I wish I could take all six dogs but I can’t handle that many just on my own, especially when I have to keep a close eye on Tatum. Not that I did good at it anyway. Someone found her, called home from her tag, and my husband gave her my cell phone number and she called my cell and she told me where my brat girl was. LOL. She even got stuck in the stream and a nice gentleman pulled her out. That Tatum… she is a brat! I love her! Fortunately I didn’t get any Plantar Fasciitis on the walk.. lol, my feet are good an healthy! And my sprained ankle hardly hurts at all anymore.

Maybe they will sell cheap t-shirts for CU this weekend… lol I might buy one so I can wear it around! But I am really looking forward to the hands on experience. Even though I’m going to audit. Still I hope to learn a lot, especially about what to do with Muffit. Oh I took Muffit to my friend Christy’s last night and I will blog more about that later! I have to get Lucy fed, go see a new park for flyball practice we may practice in, see a little or Border Collie puppies (sooo excited!) get some work in, and then clean up the house a little.

Busy day, as usual.

So I’ve been thinking… I have been trialing a lot lately. And actually for the last few years. And I used to like trialing better than training. But now… I’m getting frustrated that we don’t Q (Q stands for Qualify) as much as I’d like to. And I don’t know how much other people Q, but really it doesn’t matter, it only matters what my own standards are.

So I think I’m going to seriously consider skipping some trials and do more training instead. Though it’s kinda a good time to say that anyway, because it’s not high trialing season anymore. There’s one AKC trial in July I’ve already entered, and there’s another USDAA agility trial in August. There’s more AKC in September but I’m going to have to reassess where we are and see if I can have some goals and then determine if I want to enter them.

Anyway… I’m not so sure I like teams in USDAA because it’s more stress and the other person(s) is depending on your Qs. Tomorrow and Monday will be better because it’s just for Chase and I.

On a good note, I brought Tatum and Muffit and they both did really well. Tatum, of course, loves going to trials. And Muffit just needs to get out and get used to the environment and learn to think and understand that he needs to pay attention to me in those sorts of situations. He is dead tired now… which is good! He is fairly high energy so to poop him out is a good thing.

Well Chase is not in the elite level so I think we are going to go late tomorrow and try to sleep in a little bit. I do love sleeping in. And hopefully we can work together a bit better tomorrow. Chase did tunnel suck on me a couple of times which wasn’t good, so I still have to watch that and train that more, too.

She is reliably pawing my hands now. And, of course, she’s using that behavior to try to get anything else, too. So that is going to have to go on cue very soon, so it ALWAYS happens on cue, and ONLY happens on cue. You know dogs and their feet. Just like us monkeys sometimes!

She is also reliably touching a white piece of cardboard with her front feet. She’s getting both on, though slightly, as it’s small. I need to find a phone book. We just usually throws ours away now and use the internet to find phone numbers.

I really want her to have exceptional rear-end awareness. And so I have a special toy (it was all I could find last night) that I put up to her back hips and click/treat. So she knows that the toy (I need a good unique stick with a shape on it to do this, really) touching her hip gets a reaction. Eventually, though it might take a while, I want her to move her hip toward the target so she knows she is moving that back end for her reward.

I’m also clicking and treating her for when I touch her feet, all four of them. This, of course, will not only be useful for flyball, but also for obedience and trimming those darn toenails, which she hates so much. Last night she was starting to hold still for me as I touched a foot. Sometimes I would lift it off the ground, sometimes not. Before I would C/T for only when I touched them, didn’t matter if she moved away. Now I’m only C/T when she doesn’t move away. And she’s catching on. And she’s not dying when her feet are touched.

What I’ll do after she has that rear-end awareness is get her to touch a foot target with her back foot on the ground. And then I can put it up on the box, and maybe pair it with the front foot touch. Probably I’ll do this on the flat first… front foot touch, rear foot touch, click treat. When she is dong that, up on the flyball box it will go. And I want her high on that box. And pushing off with her rear.

I have confidence this is going to work. It might be slow, but she’s not built like a border collie and she’s really going to need that rear end push off on the box. She’s my smooth collie girl, and I’m really having fun shaping this with her. And she is too. Last night, she didn’t want training to stop!

I’ve started him on the clicker and he doesn’t quite understand yet, but he will soon. We’ll start with what he knows, sits and downs, and add the mat work. Tatum really liked starting with the Mat.

So the days go by, we wonder what to feel and do about Lucy, and we just plug along.

So anyway I want to teach Tatum flyball the right way. And she’s not very high drive when it’s just me and her… so we are working on the small bits. I want her to have a nice swimmer’s turn.

There is a good article on training the box, which starts with very basic steps, over on Flyballdog Tag. And we need basics. Microshaping, even.

I got out the clicker and treats and I put down a white lid. Tatum knows to touch it with her nose, to run over to it and get treats, but not how to put her feet on it. So first step, get the feet on it. Well, she wasn’t moving her feet at all, so I put the white lid away and started to teach her to just move her feet.

She laid down, which was fine, and to get her to move her feet I put a treat in my hand and moved my hand far too her right. When she turned her body (lying down) to get closer to the treat, I clicked and gave her the treat. I kept moving my hand around to encourage her feet to move during the first training session.

We did this for a few minutes and then stopped.

A few hours later we tried again. I’ve been wondering how clicker savvy she is, as she’s very calm and subtle in her movements sometimes. We did the same thing.. I’d move my hand, she’d move her foot (either one, didn’t matter) and click treat.

Then I stopped moving my hand to see if she was getting it. First couple of times she just stared at my hand for a good minute, I swear. So I moved my hand again. But she was thinking about it. So I laid my hand still again, with treats in it, and she moved her foot! Click Treat! After a couple of those, she started putting her foot on my hand! Yay!

She is officially clicker savvy! I’m excited. She doesn’t offer much behavior to me.. not like Levi does, who throws himself all over the place to see what I want. But she’s a girl, she’s more posed than my goofy boys. And she’s still a bit shy when we work alone together. But to see her think and figure things out is great. I’m excited. I need to just learn to understand how she learns, and how she offers behavior, and how to shape her so we find out what we want.

And then put the behavior on cue, Only on cue, and Always on cue! Then I’ll be happy with my own training!

Oh.. so the next step is to get her to put both feet on the target, then put the target on the flyball box, and then get her up with all four feet. But that’s a while away so far. It’s gonna be great to have a flyball collie!

I just watched the AKC Invitationals… I would love to see Tatum there. Would love too! Sometimes I have too many toys hooked up to the HDTV and I need HDMI splitters too watch all I want. I want an HD DVD or a Blueray DVD… someday!

Drawbacks:
Now I have to also consider the consequences of doing this. At first, I was letting her nibble on my hand to get the treats. But she has such a soft mouth now I don’t want to reward her for being bitey when taking treats so I stopped that.

In addition I need to consider the white target. I use it for other things too, and usually it’s just a target to do a nose touch with and to get treats from. If I teach her to put two paws on it, she has the potential to do that all the time in all training environments.

So maybe I need to use something else.. when we reach that point. Maybe I need to make a special flyball target so I can still use the white lid for obedience targets and agility targets. Hrm… something to think about.

My definition of shaping is something like this: you watch a dog, and when she does something you want, you click. So if you want to shape a turn to the left (this is in the clicker books, I think) if the dog even slightly moves her head to the left, or even looks to the left, you click and treat. The dog will then be wondering what caused that click, and will move around trying different things. This dog will need to be clicker savvy first, though, and throw out behaviors to see what gets the reward.

Eventually the dog will figure out that turning her head to the left gets a click and treat. Then you up the ante, you stop clicking the head moving to the left, and the dog will try more, and move to the left, maybe even step, and you click treat that.

That is basically what shaping is. Micro-shaping would be clicking the slightest muscle movement, or twitch, on the dog’s left side.

This can take a long time in the beginning and takes a lot of patience. In example, Tatum is not a big offerer of behavior. Lucy, Levi and Chase dance all over the place wondering what it is I want from them and will mark. Tatum isn’t that savvy yet. But I had a perch box out today, and when she would sniff the box, I would click and throw a treat on it.

What I eventually want of her is to stand on the box with her front feet, and move her back end around it. But we start very, very slow. Eventually she put one foot on the box, yay! That is what I wanted, so click and treat. I pushed her off in play to get her drive up, and she came right back, put one foot up… click treat.. she put the other foot up… click treat! We were getting there!

Tatum is not very animated, so with micro-shaping what I need to do with her is just click any movement. To get her used to offering. So if she is just standing there, and I am just sitting there waiting for her to do something, if she moves her head or nose or muscle, I click and treat, to get that movement going.

This is the beginning. You can get a dog to do a perfect heel pattern as you move along with clicker training. Amazing stuff! And I did have to see it in action to really understand it! You increase with small steps. The more clicker savvy the dog becomes, the more behaviors the dog offers, the faster it goes.

And it is amazing to watch the process. Amazing!