Training Diary Day 99 to 102
12th December 2017
Training Diary Day 134 – 161
8th February 2018
Day 103
As ever continuing work on the run/don’t run. Also today I did a little bit of shaping with Erik. Interesting as it has come on the heels of thoughts I have been having about patterning and how to avoid Erik getting into anticipating what is happening and then getting over aroused because he knows what is coming. So, he was silent all through the acquisition phase of the learning, then started to become noisy once he had worked out what the behaviour was. I took a break and came back to it and then started to add a cue, which relies upon a dog offering behaviour repetitively in order that you can predict the behaviour and add a cue. This is where things usually get very noisy. So I tried mixing up the reps with other cued behaviours and he got them all right including the new cue of ‘round’ for go round a chair. He also went quiet. Hmm food for thought! I haven’t got any real conclusions yet; I need to do more work but an interesting line of training to pursue.
Day 104
Continued with the run/don’t run work. We also continued with the cue discrimination work with adding the round cue. Not much noise today added in ‘touch’ as well to the mix. All good.
Day 105 to Day 133
I apologise for my long absence, Christmas and New Year got a bit mad. I came down with a horrible bug over Christmas and so other than getting out for some days beating I haven’t really been able to do much with the ginger ninja. I have been working on maintaining things whilst out on walks and have made some small progress with ‘run don’t run’. We also did some cold game retrieving which went slightly better than last time. Erik did well on the days that we have been out beating, less mad then before and less chasing and less noise in general. We also did a bit of work on releasing a tug toy when he is aroused. I tried getting him to swap toys and I think that is worth pursuing to help him switch focus.
Hopefully I will be able to get back to daily updates again and get back to pushing on with Erik’s training. I need to write a training plan for this year and get cracking!
