Homework Update - June 18

Last week's highlight was that we actually did some homework, despite family matters that came up and continue to need attention. What training time I did spend each day was on the agility field, which Bungee & Guinness were delighted about.

Obedience
We had a pretty dismal performance in class Monday night, which quite honestly we deserved, after doing nearly no obedience practice last week. Our poor teacher though! It's pretty bad when you feel sorry for them because you're doing so poorly. Even the things I thought we had down pretty good were poor, if they existed at all. Worse, as far as Bungee was concerned I was no competition for the intense attention she preferred to lavish on the raucous goings-on outside the barn door, with the Gamble workshop taking place on the adjacent agility field.


"Irritation is Motivation" ~ Susan Garrett
So irritated by the results of my own slacking, (despite very legitimate reasons), I headed into this week much more motivated to add time each day for Bungee's obedience practice. But, just because we were doing it doesn't mean it was going smoothly. It still started off kind of tough to get her doing things my way. At least once a day, something would come up in our training where she was absolutely set on doing a thing a certain way and only a certain way, and that way was not what I wanted. I don't really know why things were going awry. But part of it did seem that her herding brain cells had re-energized into a thinking pattern directly opposed to what I wanted her to do.

For instance, one day, she absolutely could not, would not stand in my basement training area, in the place I asked her to stand, with this one toy 10' away on the floor that she was adamant to stare at (herd?). We had worked through her contacts with the toy on the floor no problem, but she had gotten lots of rewards with it and releases to it. When I put her in her crate, put away the contact equipment, and brought her back out for a stand - no way Jose! "Only if I can stand to face THAT toy!" She also did this same sort of thing in class Monday night on several occasions, once being when I asked her to stand in one direction and she only wanted to face the open door and watch the agility class.

Like I said, I would only be guessing as to try to understand why, and the answer still wouldn't provide a solution, so quite the waste of my own brain cells. But I do know from previous experience and consults with Susan Garrett on the subject of distractions, that an interest in distractions is a lack of a motivation (for what you are doing). So that became my big question, how can I motivate Bungee to be as interested in what I want her to do?

"Think, Plan, Do" ~ Bob Bailey
Clearly I had to do something different. To find what that was I went back to the "Bailey Basics" as I call them, (Think, Plan, Do) where you get out pad & pencil, look at what we had done, what rewards we had used, what we got, what we wanted, what we didn't want, what we would reward, what rewards we would use instead, and think through a new plan, then break it down, putting it on paper step-by-step.

With that new plan, a fresh day, and this time clicker in hand, something I have put away from regular agility and obedience training for awhile, I went back out and had an absolutely brilliant obedience session with Bungee. Was it perfect? No. Was she in the same game as me and working in complete synchronization? You bet! Best of all, I did not encounter one moment of anything I would remotely label as "stuck", doing something the wrong way. But I did enjoy seeing one brilliant moment after another. When we hit challenges, we were able to break it down even further and then start building back up on successes.

I don't know about you, but nothing re-energizes my own spirit like having my dog totally on board and loving what we're doing.

I'm going to be using the clicker quite a bit more in our obedience training for awhile. I have more experience with it than many I know, and 6 years of the best clicker-training experience available in Ontario from our many past enrollments at Say Yes. I know I'm not as good with it as Susan (short of Bob himself who is?), but I do know how to use a clicker correctly and have achieved brilliant results with it again and again, so why shouldn't Bungee benefit from this tool too?

Agility
Bungee is taking to agility like a duck to water and the work is going great! I had a little learning curve myself earlier in the month as we made the transition from just flat work and circle work to working the same skills on equipment (jumps).

I have never done the quality of circle work with another dog that I have done with Bungee. With that I also had no experience to go on as to what impact the circle work would have on the early jump work. Specifically, in circle work, Bungee looks to me, looks to her RZ (reinforcement zone) and that is all part of the dog "driving the RZ". But, when I tried to put her in a small speed circle, it was so much like the circle work, that she did what she always does when we run in circle work, she looked to me as soon as I started to run with her, not to mention I was holding a toy too. Guess what happened to the bars? They don't stay up very well when dogs are not looking where they're going!

Easily worried by massive failure I must admit I was quite concerned as we had some rough spots to iron out the 1st few days of transitioning to jumps. But now I know. In the future I will know that there is a little transition the dog has to make from jumps to circle work, and better balancing of the FF (focus forward) work would alleviate most of that struggle we encountered.

So we left the speed circle and went back to full attention on our FF work this past week. It didn't take long at all, (2 days - 3 days) for Bungee to start understanding her new job. With only about a week's work, she is moving correctly through all her little sequences of pinwheels, 180's, 270's, two pinwheels with FC's in between, straight lines, and so forth. I had already witnessed her understanding of the box work, and I still marvel, but I have not gone back to the box since we put our attention on FF work. We finished off the weekend with her able to get through a speed circle just wonderfully. Of course, we have contacts and all manner of other things to work on too. But, the short of it is, I'm really encouraged. The other news is, like any true "worrywart", I was worried for nothing!

Crate Game
Back on a front burner. Like anything - use it or lose it - as Jean Donaldson writes: "behavior falls apart all the time". You just have to get back to it and work on it and it quickly comes back together. All the better for next time.


Signing off, Happy Training!
Hug your dogs & yourselves and remember...
"It's About Love!" :-))