Able has been to two agility shows now. He was a bit overwhelmed by his first experience (I probably should have set his ex-pen up in a less high-traffic area so he could watch from a distance) but he gained more confidence as the day went on. He loved meeting lots of new people, especially Isaac and Kate.
He also has a new nickname – “Beaver”. I have never met any dog so obsessed with chewing wood. He spent his first morning at home trying to chew the hardwood floors. He’s given that up but he’s still keen on ripping all the rotten wood off the railings of the deck, or just digging up the deck itself, or chewing on the edge of a door… Hopefully my house will survive his puppyhood more or less unscathed!
My main focus this week has been our retrieve. I taught my previous dogs to retrieve by … well, I never taught my first three dogs to retrieve. I started it but didn’t make a lot of progress and then one parent or the other swiped the puppy off my hands and taught it how to retrieve. The basic method I was using was Chuck It and Pray – grab an exciting toy, get the puppy engaged with it, then throw it and spend the next ten minutes begging them to bring it back while they had a whale of a time without me.
Rik had no interest in picking things up when I first got her, and would disappear behind my legs if I threw anything. I shaped her to pick up a toy and then progressed to throwing it while she was nose targeting my other hand (so she wouldn’t see my arm swinging through the air) and expecting her to bring it back. I did a pretty good job with her but there’s one very annoying flaw. She loves to mouth her ball and would prefer to lean against my legs while she chomps on it, rather than giving it to my hand – a habit which wastes an awful lot of our training time.
I train with toys a lot, so I really want my puppy to have a great retrieve. That means:
- Bringing the toy all the way back – no spitting it out just out of reach and staring at me (a Border Collie favourite), only to pick it up and move a bit further away every time I step forward to get it.
- Giving the toy directly to my hand – this is where Rik fails, preferring to parade around a bit and then stand next to me and chew it.
- A clean pickup and gentle hold with no mouthing – I might want to return to the obedience ring one day, and a gentle hold is also important if you ever do any tricks that involve picking up and carrying fragile objects.
I read somewhere that shaping the full retrieve from start to finish, using food as a reinforcer, was the best way to get a good clean hold. I was a bit dubious (since I’d shaped Rik and she was a chewer) but I also took two crucial pieces of advice from Susan Garrett’s Homeschool the Dog course:
- Use the most boring toy you can. It should be easy to pick up and comfortable to hold, but not at all fun or interactive. Nothing that squeaks or feels good to chew or has tassles that swing around when you shake it.
- Train in a small confined space, ideally with the puppy on a lead, so that there is no chance that your puppy will ever abscond with the toy. A radical change from the Chuck It and Pray method!
I began our retrieve training last week. We progressed quickly through the first few steps – closing his mouth around the toy while I held it in front of him, and then picking it up from the ground. But then we got stuck for a few days. I couldn’t get him to put the toy into my hand.
The R+ advice for this is to use your hand as a nose target, and then bend your fingers underneath to catch the toy as it falls from the puppy’s mouth. I tried with this Rik once when I was trying to fix her retrieve, but it didn’t work – she had zero interest in doing a nose target when she had her awesome exciting super-fun ball in her mouth. Now it wasn’t working with Able either, for the opposite reason – he was so excited to do a nose touch that he forgot to hold onto the toy.
We struggled away at this for a few days. I managed to keep my pup fairly interested in the training by mixing it up with other, easier approximations, like clicking as soon as he took a step towards me with it in his mouth and letting him spit it out to get his reward. This seems a bit contradictory – if you want your puppy to hold it and bring it to you, why would you reward him for spitting it out? – but it never hurts your progress to click and reward before your pup has “a chance to be wrong”.
And then, yesterday, he figured it out. He could walk back to me with the toy and touch my hand with it still in his mouth, and then when I clicked he could drop it and I could slide my hand under his chin to catch it. Suddenly all the pieces are in place and I have a puppy with a super awesome retrieve!
I was a bit worried that shaping a retrieve meant he wouldn’t discover the fun of the game, the way my first three dogs did through the magic of Chuck It and Pray. That hasn’t been the case though. Today we played around with a few retrieves while I was relaxing on the deck, with no food in sight. Able was quite happy to play without food and was bringing it straight back at a reasonable speed. He won’t go further than about 3m to get his toy yet, but I’m sure that will come with confidence.
A proud puppy owner moment 🙂