Our favourite off-lead dog walking park is grazed by sheep for part of the year. Yes, that’s right – a council-owned off-lead dog walking park filled with sheep. No warning signs either; it gave me quite a surprise the first time I took Rik for a walk there!
The sheep returned a couple of weeks ago, with fairly young lambs at foot. I saw them long before Able did and got him on lead. He had a bit of a freak out and let fly with some incredibly loud alarm barking. The next two walks we were able to get a bit closer to them before the barking started, but he was still in rather a flap about them.
And then … today this happened.
We were walking along happily, well away from where the sheep usually hang out. Able was wandering in and out of a stand of trees. I called him – and at that moment half a dozen sheep came charging out from behind the trees, with an intrepid Border Collie puppy hot on their heels.
Able came the first time I called him! I am so proud that our recall training held up to such an exciting distraction. Sadly I had forgotten to bring a toy so we couldn’t celebrate with an epic tug party. I tried to play some other games with him for food, but well … his mind was elsewhere. He could come and he could sit, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from where he last saw his ovine friends.
Keep Your Mind Out of the Bucket
Able’s sheepy adventure has a lot in common with the bucket-proofing drills we’ve been doing at home over the last couple of weeks.
At the end of every agility course (in the South Island, anyway) is a bucket. The bucket contains whatever the handler chooses to put in there – the dog’s lead, maybe their hat or sunnies, and usually the dog’s favourite treats or toys so that they can reward their dog for their efforts. You put this stuff in the bucket when you enter the ring, and someone takes it to the other end for you.
Dogs quickly learn that while agility is fun, the bucket at the end of the course is even funner. This is very helpful when you’re running out of puff at the end of a run and want your dog to take the last couple of jumps ahead of you.
It’s also very unhelpful sometimes, when there is a jump near the end of the course, and your dog assumes that after that jump he can carry on to his party time bucket. This is a surprisingly difficult thing for many of our top-level agility dogs to resist, especially if they are supposed to take the “last” jump in the middle of the course before coming back to it at the end.
The Loose Lead Walking/Anti-Bucket Convergance
I have had some very keen dogs that loved their buckets (Spring especially), but so far none of them have ever made a premature visit to the bucket. Part of this is because of the way I train with toys scattered on the ground. I haven’t got that far with Able yet, but this week I’ve been doing some near proximity walking work that should also help guard against future bucket issues.
One of the issues I have with Able is that when he sees someone he wants to greet, he flies out to the end of his lead. He doesn’t usually stay right out at the end of his lead (except when the idiotic “someone” involved is crouched down and calling “puppy puppy puppy” and starts following me around while I try to back away!), but he’s getting pretty heavy and I find it very annoying. After a lot of work, we can get quite close to the person before he fires off now – but I want it not to happen at all.
This week I’ve been working on his proximity walking cue in the presence of a very high-value distraction – an empty food bowl. We’ve been doing all of this training on lead so that he can’t reach the bowl and find out that it’s empty. Once he’s better able to function around it, I will actually put some food in there and even release him to eat it sometimes.
Able is absolutely obsessed with the bowl, so we have had to start our training at the other end of the hall from it. I get him to sit next to me, facing the bowl, and then I cue him to stay “Close” and pivot around in a circle. I am looking for Able to stay level with me all the way round, rather than rushing ahead so that he can return to the start position and stare longingly at his beloved bowl. To achieve this I am reinforcing him with food just behind my leg as I walk, and stopping two or three times during each circle to feed him for staying with me.
The first time I asked Able to sit next to me with his back to the bowl, he found this excruciatingly difficult. I’ve now working on this piece separately. We start halfway down the hall, facing away from the bowl, and move forward away from it, stopping after every step for a sit and a jackpot of bikkies. This is still not easy for him, especially if I keep going into the bedroom, but I insist on straight sits at every stop and we are slowly making progress.
Once we get this piece right, I am going to grow the little pivot at the end of the hallway into a loop, taking a couple of steps towards the bowl and then turning around and returning to our start position. Once we can walk all the way up to the bowl and turn around as a team (without one of us being magnetically drawn to the bowl), I might have a go at putting it in the middle of the lounge and walking past it in a straight line.
Remember to let your dog choose. Don’t bribe him by holding bikkies in front of his nose. Don’t try to use your body to distract him from the bowl. Don’t jerk around on the lead. Start with as much distance from the bowl as you can get, hold the lead loose (although not so long that he can reach the bowl), and wait patiently through any puppy histrionics. Be generous in your rewards when he does choose you over the bowl, and creative about making things easier if you don’t see much improvement. This is not an easy exercise for many puppies (especially one as ravenously hungry as Able), but it should help your puppy learn a very important lesson – that working with you pays off way better than obsessing over visible rewards in the environment.