Training Diary Day 162-174

Day 162 – 173

Things are starting to get a little less frantic around here and I have been managing to train Erik more even though I haven’t been able to write about it. I have been doing more retrieve work and had an interesting discovery that although Erik can do a long memory to his left he has complete brain fade when it is on his right.  So I clearly need to work a bit more on this to even him up.

Crate games sessions continue and he is starting to settle down quicker and is only having very few minor noise episodes. So I am going to continue on this phase of leaving the door shut until he has worked out that really nothing is going to happen 🙂

Erik is also less vocal when I hold him for a short period of time on a stop whistle, I am cautiously encouraged about this. 🙂

We also did some tug release and swap games. I am finally having better success with teaching him to swap tuggies and release quicker when he is aroused and having fun.

Day 174

As the sun was shining and the ground is starting to dry up I took some retrieve posts to the park and set up some retrieve piles and practiced send out, stop, redirect and long send outs. Good news is that Erik’s stop whistle is working well, but he loses confidence on long send outs.  Interestingly he will do twice as far as I was practicing today on memory send out if he is going back in the direction that we have walked but today I was effectively sending him forwards rather than back the way we came and so his confidence wasn’t as good.

I practice memories and blinds quite often sending him back the way I have walked but clearly don’t practice sending over new ground often enough.

His go right was again weaker than his go left so need to work some more on that.

I also mixed up what I was doing and we got very little anticipatory squeaking today.

I think that along with him learning more patience I am also learning how not to over load him. He is so keen and very capable that I have been guilty of not giving him enough time to process what he is doing, which I think has contributed to the squeaking.  In a way his squeaking is very helpful as it is a very easy way to tell if he is not coping with what is going on.  Easier than another dog who is silent about not coping. 🙂