Training Diary Day 181-199
22nd March 2018
Training Diary Day 213 – 227
19th April 2018
We have been continuing to work on all of the impulse control behaviours such as run/don’t run and have ben incorporating some cue discrimination work with this game. Once I have thrown the ball I ask for one or more known cued behaviours such as hand touch, spin left, spin right, come to heel on the left or right, or down before releasing Erik to go and get the toy.
Erik found this a bit frustrating to start with but now he is relaxing into listening to what I have asked for rather than guessing and getting frustrated when he doesn’t guess right. He had started to get into a pattern with the run/don’t run and so this is why I started to change things so that he was remaining cognitive rather than switching off and starting to anticipate the release.
We have also been working through an exercise that we started last year which is a cue discrimination exercise between ‘go back’, ‘stop’ and ‘hunt there’ which helps with getting him to listen in a retrieve context where I will need to stop and redirect him.
Crate games groups have been continuing with steady forward progress. Today I was very pleased as Erik managed two hours with the crate door open with dogs playing with toys, me throwing distractor toys for other dogs and other dogs retrieving. He was even visited inside his crate by another dog who came to say hello and he didn’t come out. I was so impressed with him today, AND THERE WAS NO NOISE AT ALL TODAY – WOO HOO!!!! Tonight he is a very tired boy; he worked very hard at being calm and relaxed.
The next stage will be to start all over again in a different venue where he expects to do interesting training. I’ll start this once the weather gets better and there is less mud around, I’ll be very glad when this rain stops 🙂
