Last week I spent several days playing Crate Games with Able. We’ve improved a lot at our sit stays, although we still need to proof against very high-value distractions (see blurry photographic proof below). Now I’m focusing on the more active games that teach the puppy to drive ahead of the handler into the crate.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, I am very unathletic and I need to put a lot of work into building forward drive into my puppy. He’s too young to work on agility equipment at his age, but not too young to learn to drive ahead to an object. A couple of weeks ago it was a peanut butter lid, and this week it’s his crate.
Able’s crate is set up opposite the door in my bedroom. I’ve worked up over the last few days until we can start from the other end of the hallway and he will spring down the hall and through the bedroom to get into his crate.
As Able nears six months of age, I’ve begun doing a longer formal training session with him for his dinner. He eats a colossal amount (more than twice what my adult dog does) and this means I have a big bowl of reinforcements I can use. I tend to use handfuls of kibble rather than individual pieces because his puppy kibble comes in really small pieces. Even so, he usually eats the last third or so of his dinner out of his bowl, because we run out of things to do before we run out of food.
I don’t time our sessions (although I probably should) but I think they are about 10 or 15 minutes long. If I have a new skill or something that’s difficult for us to work on, I do that first. Then we take a couple of the things that Able’s already pretty good at, increase the difficulty level, and do a few repetitions. I like to structure my sessions like this so that we always finish on something that the pup finds fun and has a good success rate at.
When Things Go Horribly Wrong
If things are going wrong with our first exercise, I will sometimes abandon it without making much progress and go on to the fun stuff. It’s very tempting to stick at something until you see the light bulb go off, but sometimes this leads to a spiral of doom. Many dogs get a bit stressed if they aren’t having a lot of success, and in my older dog Rik this leads to a flurry of limbs as she attempts to do All The Tricks at the same time.
The inspiration for this post. I took him to the vet’s for a weigh-in and tried to get him to sit still on the scales when there were two other dogs nearby that he wanted to play him. Then I made him pose with the elephant on the way out the door – but I aborted mission before I got a good photo because I could see that he was feeling stressed. He was panting a lot and there was a wrinkle in the corner of his lip, which I think I can juuuust make out in this photo.Continue reading “Training Snakes and Ladders”
Able and I are working through all the exercises in our Fenzi course on calm greeting behaviour. One of the assignments was to teach the puppy a nose-to-hand target, and then get him to do that with people he greets. It’s an interesting idea to give a busy puppy something to do, besides sproinging up into the person’s face.
Able’s hand targets are already really strong, but I’m dubious that he’ll be calm enough to recognise an outstretched hand from a strange person as a cue to hand target on them. I thought I’d train him to nose target on a prop – this should provide a more distinct visual cue that can be transferred to another person.
So this week I taught him to target on a peanut butter lid. He already knew how to do it when it was in my hand, and then I stuck it up on various vertical surfaces with BluTak so that he could learn to look away from me for his nose target. After playing around a bit with this, I managed to turn it into a fun, active game that teaches some foundation agility skills – just the thing for a nasty winter night!
Winter has arrived, and Rik’s bed was not close enough to the heat pump. She had to take matters into her own paws and drag it across the floor.
The Setup
You’ll need two small cardboard boxes, a small target, and something to stick it up with. I found that the BluTak was not really sticky enough to withstand my puppy’s enthusiastic nose touches, but I couldn’t think of a better alternative that could be easily transferred between surfaces.
Place a box on your armchair of misfits to elevate it to puppy head height (let’s be honest, I already had two boxes I hadn’t unpacked yet on my armchair of misfits). Stick the target to the box, stand in front of it with your puppy between your legs, and send him to target. Deliver his cookie right next to the target. This is very important in agility training – deliver rewards where you want the dog to be, not where you happen to be.
Able is now 5 months old. Over the last couple of months, I have put a lot of work into encouraging him to walk on a loose lead. A lot of agility people don’t put much effort into this, but I have set myself a goal – I want Able and I to walk up to the start line together on a loose lead before his first agility run.
I have a few reasons for this:
I have two off-lead walking areas near my house, and I walk to them several times a week (although mostly with just Rik at the moment). I want to be able to walk both dogs to the park, and to enjoy that experience, because I’ll walk my dogs more often if it’s not a frustrating battle of wills.
If we find ourselves in another covid lockdown, those local walking spots will be our only options, and I’ll have to walk Able on lead every day. And he’ll probably be more excited than usual since he won’t have other fun outings in his life. Again, I want to be able to enjoy walking him on lead, so that it doesn’t get put in the Too Hard Basket if I’m in a grumpy mood.
Constantly pulling on the lead is bad for a dog’s neck and trachea, even on a flat collar. Constantly pulling on a front-clip harness pulls the dog’s spine out of alignment. Pulling in a headcollar is not great for the dog’s neck either. I want our walks to be enjoyable for my dog too, without increasing his risk of injury.
I want to enjoy stress-free warm-ups and cool-downs. Agility dogs should be walked around for several minutes before and after they run. I haven’t consistently done this with either of my last two dogs, because they were/are inclined to pull on lead when they can see agility happening. Again, if walking my dog on lead is unpleasant, I’m going to do it less often.
This is moderately high up in my priority list (if I don’t have a lot of success at some point I’ll drop it so I can put more time into agility training), but I think it’s worth investing the effort while he’s young to try and get nice loose lead walking.
Today I’m going to share some of the things I’ve been doing with Able to help develop this skill. If this isn’t something you care about with your dog, you may not find the rest of this post very interesting – so here’s a picture of a cute puppy before you leave.
Able the Beaver visited the beach for the first time last week. He wasn’t too interested in the water, but he was delighted to find some bits of WOOD sticking out of the sand…Continue reading “Adventures in Loose Lead Walking”
