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I love foundation training!

…that is: I love the foundation after it’s trained

The other day I was helping my father in law with his puppy. He’s had dogs before, but the last one lasted almost fourteen years, so it’s a long time since he has dealt with a puppy. In addition he’s got a quite challenging puppy, so he’s very happy to get advice. One of the things I want to show him is that a lot has happened with training over the years. To demonstrate how efficient shaping can be, I picked up my own youngster, who is ten months now, and decided to teach retrieving for competition retrieving. Boy, was that a fun session!

I finally realized what a good foundation I have been working on with this dog. Everything worked perfectly on the first try! After ten minutes, he picked up a rolled up newspaper, came back, waited for my signal, and then dropped it in my hand. When I taught my other dog the same thing it took a week… All we need is a bit of proofing and perfection, and it’s an exercise ready for competition. Not that I probably will bother to do the last bits of it, since I’m not too interested in obedience competition, we did this only to demonstrate methods. My father in law was really impressed and, frankly, so was I!

The method I’m using is basicly chaining the behavior backwards. That means starting with rewarding interest, biting and then holding the item. I then proof the holding to the point where I can dangle a treat in front of the dog’s nose and he knows if he drops that thing the treat will disappear, so he waits for my signal (which is first a yes, then swapped for a “release”). I then add the criteria of the dog sitting before getting to drop the item. When that’s done, retrieving from a distance is usually not an issue. It’s so much fun already, that none of my dogs so far has had any trouble running to get it. Last thing is the dog sitting, me trhowing, dog waiting and then running to get it. That’s easy if you have a good sit command and the dog understands not to go before you release (Orkan knows that form throwing toys and running to get them, and agility starts). Then you switch the release word with “retrieve” or whatever you say in english, and the thing is done!

What I realized during my session with Orkan is that he has such great understanding of how training works! With Storm I had to work for a while on biting and holding, but Orkan already has an understanding of biting stuff that I hold in front of him, because of the shaping I’ve done with tug toys. It was a bit harder for him to keep holding it when I let go, but that was solved by another thing he knows from before. When I close my hand with the treat in it, he’s wrong and needs to change his behavior or improve his position. When I open it, he’s right, but needs to freeze until I tell him he can get it, or I give it to him. That way I could easily give him the message that the holding was right, and he needed to keep doing it in order to get the reward. Easy! When I dropped the newspaper on the floor, he had an easy time picking it up, but when I threw it further away, he first stayed where it had landed, patiently holding it. That was also an easy thing to solve, I simply showed him my open hand, which he knows from nose touch contact training, and he came running. I wouldn’t use that nose-touch more than a few times, since he has already learned to put toys in my hand that way, and then he doesn’t need to wait for a release command before dropping the toy, in contrast to the sitting down and waiting. But it came in handy that one time to put him on the right track of coming back to me! I also used the crate games to have him wait while I throw and give him the command, since his sit is not perfect yet

Training is so much fun when it works!

Agility shirts :-D

My stepmother just got home from three months in the states (she grew up in NY but lives i Norway with my dad) and she got me the coolest sweatshirt and t-shirt ever! One says “weave woes” and has a crazy weaving cartoon dog all over, and the other has a happy little pooch on the see-saw. Yey! Nobody in Norway has anything like that. Agility is not big enough here to create a market for stuff like it, and we probably don’t think far enough to go online to find it. Hee hee

Jumping technique

These are my notes from a jumping techique seminar for agility dogs, the instructor was Vappu Alatalo. Hope you find it interesting!

Shanti – miniature pinscher

Shanti, my vet’s dog is staying with us for three weeks, while her owners are in Chile. She is a very nice dog, quite well behaved, and as long as she has a coat on she happily joins us for our walks in the woods. I’m planning to work a little on some issues she has while she’s here.

The first one is nervousness. Like most pinschers she has a tendency to bark at anything that might be a little scary. We noticed that a lot the first day she was at our place, she ran to the door or window whenever she thought she might have heard a sound, trying to scare whatever to go away. After she settled in a bit it got better, but still I want to see if I can help make her a more confident dog. Mostly the method is about counterconditioning. Scary things = treats. This way I hope to give her some happy expectations whenever she gets nervous, and have her turn to me instead of barking her head off, trying to make it go away. I went to a park in a city with her, and it seemed to work very well. Whenever we met a distraction I got her attention and she kept seeking me to see if I could provide something better than the scary man, dog, etc. I used the same kind of strategy with one of my own dogs, but that was more in benefit of contact training. He learned that he wasn’t going to get to run after that dog anyway, so he might just as well behave and look in my direction – something nice might happen.

Another issue is her food aggression. It applies to any kind of situation with a resource that might just turn out to be valuable to her. Like when my boyfriend dropped an id-card on the floor the other day. My dogs certainly defend themselves if someone tries to steal a very tasty treat from them (that i do understand!) but they don’t try to kill anyone within three feet of anything of any kind of value. She is obviously not very used to living with other dogs, which is understandable enoug since she lives only with her human famliy.

One of the things she is getting used to is that in our house there is always boring cow-skin bones all over the place. If she tries to defend one, my dogs will just walk away and find another – it’s not a high value bone to them since there are others in the next room. This seems to work out fine, she can live with a bone in the room and still relax. Improvement! Today she even played with Orkan and an old sock, they had a great time without too much teeth and barking.

She is also working on sitting with my dogs in front of me, being fed when behaving nicely. A bit difficult for her when one of the other dogs move, like when they perform a trick, but so far we’ve had no accidents. When she acts out she just gets to leave the situation, no treats for her. I’m going to train some crate games with at least Shanti and Orkan, maybe even with Storm, to work on releasing only one dog at the time. My dogs are very good at “misunderstanding” release cues when I release the other, something Susan Garrett’s post on “table trading” gave me a bit of inspiration on. This will provide a training situation suitable for the treat acceptance. If she acts out, she’ll have to go back in her crate, simply like a time-out.

We also try to get rid of her barking to achieve just about anything. Like when we stop the car she is convinced that the only way to get out of the crate is to bark. Hard nut for her to crack, that we leave her alone ’till she’s calm and quiet

It might not sound like it, but Shanti is really a very nice dog! If she had a bit more furr and ability to move in snow, I might just have stolen her… Hee hee! Thanks to Laxmi and Sveinung for giving me the opportunity to learn a lot about this little girl and dog training for some weeks. Hope you’re enjoying your vacation!

Loud training

Orkan has always had a tendency to flip into loud, squeaky, unpleasant noise when he gets stressed enough during training. When he was a puppy, that sound was there almost constantly, he yelled at me to make me give him my food, to get me out of the shower, or just to make me less boring. Of course, he didn’t achieve anything by that yelling, and we gradually got more or less rid of it.

But it still sometimes occurs during shaping sessions, when the reward is really high quality (food in his case) and the criteria is a little difficult, making the reward frequency a bit low. Apparently, his stress level gets too high for him to handle, and he bursts out in loud, high pitched ear-splitting yells.

Simply waiting has helped, and it happens less frequently now, but it’s kind of hard not to say or do anything when that sound is distroying your hearing, if you see? This has made me (more or less by accident) avoid the situations when he starts yelling, by keeping the reward frequency high. And still, when he’s almost one year old, it still happens sometimes. So I figured he needs some awareness of his own stress levels. His little brain rooms a lot of stress, so he might need that awareness for later occasions

My solution is to give him time-outs (go to your crate, and lay there for a little while. Along with this I give him a verbal marker, in english it would be somthing like “oups”. I think the verbal marker is important in this kind of training, since time-outs don’t give him a specific message on what he did wrong. He also gets a second of time to do something different while my descision about giving him the time-out is being put into action. The first session I saw the potential of him associating stretching (a trick he has learned) with the time-out, since the yelling tendend to happen when he jumped out of a stretch.

Now, it seems to work. I am very happy about that! I still keep his reward frequency high, but now it’s not to avoid stress, it’s rather because he is an extremely fast thinker, doer and learner. When things don’t happen in time, he learns something else, or gets a bit confused. It’s time to start pushing it a bit, to provoke his frustration. Dog training is fun when it works!

Old videos

To get started, I’ll post some videos from the last months, to tell you a little about Orkan.

This one is of our “water bowl projeckt”, to teach him some body awareness and also build some muscle:

More body awareness, some time consumption on a ferry ride:

Orkans strategy on how to get the toy before Storm, who’s bigger and stronger:

Status update on his tugging, two months ago:

Our first really really great training, the day that the tugging was finally fun enough for Orkan to really work for it:

Indors tricks and sit&stay training on a rainy day:

Agility training:

Play bow/stretch and applying it’s your choice for static exercises:

That’s it so far. If you watched these, you know where we’re at… Sort of. If I had the time and energy, I’d translate some of my past norwegian blogging into english, but hey – it’s christmas. Now it’s time for some marzipan and chocolate fun

Merry christmas to all of you!

Finally – in english!

So this is my new blog, in english. I hate the white text in the middle of the header, and hope I’ll be able to fix it soon, but at least the blog is up and running.
This is where I’ll blog about my dog training in english. I’ve been bloging for some years already, but so far mostly in norwegian. That stuff can be found at http://klaveness.blogspot.com

Yep. Here we are. I’ll be back!