Today Perrin got to play with the new Toto Fit Infinity that we won! It arrived today and I promptly got it filled and figured out a way to stabilize it with the things I had. (Shhh, I will put the living room back to the way it was before my husband sees!)
He loves this stuff so much. Cute boy!
We also started working on nosework. This is completely new to Sei and the method is new for Perrin, however Perrin has been taught this before another way. I decided to try the exercise from the sample lecture of the FDSA NW101 course (which I am hoping to take in the October session if finances allow). The gist of this exercise is to have odour in one hand and food in the other, C/T when the dog shows interest in the odour, then feed at source. This sounds very simple, but I had several mechanical issues while trying to execute this.
- Moving the odour hand and the food hand to the middle to reward, rather than bringing my food hand all the way over
- Holding my odour hand too high for the dog to eat out of, then dropping it to the dog to feed
- Letting Sei sit too long when he went to his default behaviour of ‘sit still and stare at me’ rather than resetting promptly
- Dropping treats trying to feed at source while also holding a clicker. Different treats could help this too.
These mistakes and more can all be found in both dog’s videos, but are more obvious in Sei’s because Perrin understands the game, and is confident to keep pressing forwards so covers my mistakes. (Also he is bigger, so I had less issue holding the odour too high to feed him at).
Perrin clearly remembered what wintergreen is! I don’t think he made one mistake the whole time. He can step up to the next level next time we try.
This was Sei’s first try at anything like this. The first time I made all of the above mistakes, but the one that hindered us the most was me sitting still. I added some more motion the second time we tried, and he rocked it! We will keep going with this exercise for a few more days at least and see where we get with that.
There is a semi-local ORT test in early November, and I’m thinking I may enter Sei and see how he does. I am even more uncertain about Perrin, because I also want to submit his Novice Parkour videos and I really only have the budget to do one. We will see what I decide.
Beyond that we also continued working on spins with both dogs, toys with Sei, as well as him catching food out of the air. But that last one is mainly because it amuses me 😛
Adventures in Dog Training 