The Ruby Project, Week 4: Building a Balance

This week Ruby met her first ever pushy squeaky toy. She enjoyed pulling the stuffing out (holes pre-made for her by Able). She liked it when it squeaked, unlike poor Rik who ran off and hid behind the loo the first time she heard a squeaky toy. Most of all, she was very determined but ultimately unsuccessful in plucking all the fur off.

Out and About

Now that we have the vaccination situation sorted out, Ruby has a big wide world to explore. Some outings this week:

• Otago Equestrian Centre, as I had to go down there for an appointment with Able. We didn’t go into the building but we walked around it a couple of times and practised the Up & Down game. I was completely unable to get her attention when we were standing next to the hedge as she could hear birds singing in it…
• Dog club. I had to give up on the harness as she was a bit too excited to hold still to put it on (this will be a focus of our training next week). We volunteered to be a distraction dog for the CGC class and she was certainly very distracting with her terrible on-lead walking skills and desire to grovel in front of all the other dogs. Then Tracey helped me with some restrained recalls which were … shall we say, there’s a lot of room for improvement!
• Waimate dog park. I have never been a dog park person, but I don’t have enough space for Ruby to really run around at home and I certainly don’t trust her recall off lead. The park is usually deserted but coincidentally I arrived at the exact same time as Julie. She enjoyed playing with Blue (she is super fast) and then she started hunting for critters in the long grass in one corner.
• Walks around the streets of Waimate. Not bothered by teenage girls on bikes. Not bothered by boy racers. Very interested in things that might be hiding under bushes in people’s gardens, and in the rock garden at the supermarket.

One pleasant surprise for me this week has been that she pulls much less in her back clip harness than she does on a collar. She also seemed to automatically understand that she can’t cross my body when I’m walking her with Able, so they haven’t gotten tangled up once.

Troubleshooting a Bad Training Session

This week Ruby and I have been working through one of the monthly challenges as part of the Movement Puzzles course. I started the training for this inside last week, and this week we moved into the front yard as we were running out of room and I wanted to get some of our sessions on video.

I was very disappointed with our third session outside. She kept wandering over to the gate to see if there was anything interesting going on out on the street. When she was physically with me she was very unfocused and doing quite a bit of sniffing. I actually stopped the training a few times to do some Up & Down game to try and get the focus back … but it would disappear again as soon as I returned to trying to get her to do the movement puzzle.

What went wrong? I think it was a combination of:

• Too difficult an environment. I’d had a busy day and I was training quite late in the evening. While it’s still light here at 9:30pm in summer, the hedgehogs and other night creatures are beginning to emerge – and that’s a huge distraction for Ruby.
• Boring reinforcers. Ruby isn’t as into food as Able is. I was training with her dinner but she’d already eaten a lot of cheese on her visit to the supermarket carpark that afternoon, so she probably wasn’t very hungry. So far the only reinforcers I have found that light her up are balls – but these aren’t very practical to use for some training tasks, so I need to keep expanding her repertoire of what she’s happy to work for.
• Making the task too hard. When you move an exercise into a new environment with a green dog, you should make some of the other aspects of the task easier to compensate. I went outside because I’d run out of room to increase distance indoors, and I started with a distance similar to what she could do inside. This was way too hard when she didn’t have her brain fully kicked into gear.
• Too much failure. Ruby had had a few fails which dented her confidence. She wasn’t too sure what she was supposed to be doing to earn the food, hence the sniffing (probably a displacement behaviour) and the trips to the gate (because seeing a hedgehog would be way more fun than my boring little game).

I did two training sessions outside on the lawn the next day, experimenting with different variables.

• Middle of the day (no hedgehogs), fun active task with lots of handler participation (running over a jump), moderate difficulty level, balls for rewards. This was Ruby’s first “agility handling” training session and she loved it! We started with a sit stay on the bed (still some work to do there), did a little jump, and then I had her ball lying on the ground beyond it. We also did some in the other direction.
• Late evening (hedgehogs), more “brain based” task with handler sitting still (movement puzzle again), easy difficulty level (starting over at the very beginning), dinner for rewards. There was a little sniffing at first and she wandered off to check the gate, but after that she was much more focused than she had been the day before! A good reminder to me that she is very new to all of this and I need to be careful not to ask for too much at once.

Other Adventures

Last week’s theme was trying to get her moving and offering behaviour. This week’s theme has been achieving a balance between offering behaviour and staying in position. Some of the things we’ve done:

• Longer duration waiting in a sit stay before being released from her crate. Only at home – in the car she is so excited to get out into the world that it still takes a few attempts to get a stay at all!
• Staying on her raised bed while I walk around the living room. She still has ants in her pants at the start of each training session, but after I’ve reinforced her a few times she calms down and she can now stay put for 10-20 seconds.
• Learning “down” on verbal cue – and then after doing a few reps of that, learning to hold her sit position until I actually say “down”!
• Shaping games to encourage her to keep offering behaviour – this week I have shaped her to crawl under a chair, and to put her paws onto a baking tray.
• Recalls into heel position on either side. After our abysmal attempts at restrained recalls this week, it’s clear I will need to do some work to teach her that coming into heel position from behind is fun, and that she’s supposed to come to the side that I’m cueing. I need to work on my connection skills a bit too – I haven’t been running a dog much lately and I’m rusty. I’ve been throwing treats to send her away from me, so that I can then turn around, establish a connection over one arm, and reinforce her next to me for coming to the correct side.
• Meeting the measuring stick. Ruby was not initially a huge fan of this but she’s coming round. There are a few local shows in February and March and I’m hoping to get her measured then, because otherwise I’ll likely have to make a special trip to Christchurch or Dunedin just for that.