Today was a shaping kind of day given the weather. Sei slept for a large swath of the day, which surprised me, but made getting things done around the house super easy.
- Relationship Building Through Play
- It rained all of the morning and most of the afternoon, so I didn’t get any more personal play sessions filmed like I was hoping to. I did go to video a baseline for both dogs on food play, but realized that all I really know how to do is throw food. It was a pretty boring video, so suffice to say that I will be going through the lectures to learn more about this one, because this one is all lack of handler knowledge.
- Empowerment
- No empowerment homework today. I’ve got to get creative and come up with some new push games for Sei. The set-ups I used for Perrin’s won’t work because they are either too tall for the pup, or I no longer have the equipment after the move. Hopefully moving on to the next lecture tomorrow.
- Collar Shaping
- We did a fair bit of shaping and other puppy things today. I built off of yesterday’s mediocre collar work with some better thought today. I found shaping having Sei put his head through a puppy sized collar really hard for me to mechanically do. I have to hold the collar with one hand, the clicker with the other, my treats have to go…somewhere (I didn’t have my bait bag handy as I usually don’t use it in the house. With Perrin I would have just put them on the ground, but Sei is still figuring that whole thing out). The collar is pretty little, and puppy motions are small and fast, so are hard to catch. Then, I don’t want to be too rough getting the collar over his head, and that’s hard with such a little collar when I can’t use both hands. Anyway, today I decided to shape it with Perrin first to work on my mechanics. And that went great. Then I figured that if I used Perrin’s giant collar to work with Sei rather than the puppy collar, it would give me two advantages:
- Split the behaviour down even further. Instead of ‘put your head through this small thing’, the behaviour was ‘put your head through this thing’. This removed some of the spacial pressure and made the exercise less intimidating for Sei.
- The larger collar gave me more margin of error for holding the collar, for catching Sei’s head movements and removed the issue of roughness while the collar moving over his head. The last item especially reduced my stress about the whole thing, which made me do much better.
- We did a fair bit of shaping and other puppy things today. I built off of yesterday’s mediocre collar work with some better thought today. I found shaping having Sei put his head through a puppy sized collar really hard for me to mechanically do. I have to hold the collar with one hand, the clicker with the other, my treats have to go…somewhere (I didn’t have my bait bag handy as I usually don’t use it in the house. With Perrin I would have just put them on the ground, but Sei is still figuring that whole thing out). The collar is pretty little, and puppy motions are small and fast, so are hard to catch. Then, I don’t want to be too rough getting the collar over his head, and that’s hard with such a little collar when I can’t use both hands. Anyway, today I decided to shape it with Perrin first to work on my mechanics. And that went great. Then I figured that if I used Perrin’s giant collar to work with Sei rather than the puppy collar, it would give me two advantages:
- Hand Touches
- This is the fourth or fifth (?) time we have worked on these. I’m really happy with how he is coming along, he is totally getting the game!
- People Do Stupid Things
- This game was suggested by Sei’s wonderful breeder. It is basically getting the dog associating the rude things that clueless people may do to them (or a less clueless person may do by accident) with awesome food. Today we started on basics. Face touching, closed hand petting (gently grabbing fur/scratching kind of), picking up feet, gentle pushing etc.
- Front Foot Target
- He did really great with this!
This having a back yard thing is really great. Now that I have the space, I am really excited to get Perrin started on his first Cyber Rally-O courses. I have picked out 4 that we have all the skills for, now I just need to dig up my rally signs and figure out what to use as pylons and ring markers!
Adventures in Dog Training 