Big week around here! Perrin got another title this week, as our novice parkour video submission results came in. Now Perrin is Perrin ETD PKD-N! Both Perrin and Sei’s trick dog certificates also arrived this week.
I finally got all of their title submission videos uploaded, so here they are:
Perrin -ETD
Perrin – PKD-N
Sei- NTD
We have been picking away at different skills this week, but nothing too coherent. I took a look back at Cyber Rally-O today, and am contemplating working at that again with Perrin. So that inspired today’s work with Perrin. Our yard isn’t big enough for all of the cyber rally courses, but all the ones designed for narrow spaces will work. The trick there is that a few of them require schutzhund turns, which Perrin and I had never worked on before. So I tried it today. Turns out Perrin got the idea in a flash! And they are kind of fun.
His heel position is pretty sloppy, too sloppy even for rally, but for day 1 of teaching a new skill I’m pretty happy! I will go back and do some more pivot work to refresh some muscle memory on heel position, and get pickier about which reps get rewarded. Part of the issue is me however. You can see when he swings his bum out, it is often because I am turning my shoulders into him when I turn my head to look. I need to work on not doing that. A lot of discussion went on over the last week on the TEAM facebook page about that handler error, and made me look more closely at my heeling. Sure enough, I am very guilty of it! I also learned that our fronts need a LOT of work, our circle to heel and ‘loop’ to heel behaviours are strong, but not very precise. Overall, I was happy to see that he was a happy worker (he has been on and off with Sei bugging him when we try to work, and with his hotspot bothering him as it heals), that he took to the new skill quickly, and that he still has his cues for the finishes. Lots of stuff to pick away at though!
One of the things Sei worked on was waiting in a crate while Perrin worked. He is definitely getting better (there was no chewing on the crate today, and he was quiet for the first half, rather than barking the whole time), but we have lots of work to go. We also worked on getting his 2-foot peanut roll shaped, sits, downs, play skills and stays. Over the weekend I shaped a scratchboard behaviour, so that he can work on filing down his own nails while we work on creating a positive CER to foot handling.
Yesterday I also got one of Sei’s advanced trick dog behaviours on video (3 behaviours at 10′ distance).
Adventures in Dog Training 