Oh, how I love working with Denise. Her attitude puts me right at ease because she is upbeat, casual, and flexible. Her pointers are always spot-on and I end the lesson feeling like I know exactly what we should do, and energized to do it.
Last time I met her we mostly worked on heeling. We started off by reviewing heeling again, and I showed her our progress. Dragon had great position when he was paying attention, nice and close and pivoting beautifully. There was a small issue with his attention drifting. Denise had me tell him to take a break (signalling that he had lost the opportunity for reinforcement) and back up whenever he looked away. If he heeled nicely and payed attention for 3-5 seconds, then he would be paid. It can be surprisingly hard with a small dog to tell whether he's paying attention. I don't expect Dragon to look at my face the entire time because that's hard on his body, but he should be looking upwards and towards my legs. I will have to work harder to be able to recognize right away whether he's focusing or looking past my legs at something else. I'm raising my criteria and working on getting beautiful, attentive heeling before I ask for more duration.
We briefly discussed sitting at heel. I've been using a clear hand gesture/target to get him to sit nicely in position, to build up a good history of reinforcement. Denise cautioned me not to name the sit at heel. If I have to cue it, he won't do it automatically. If I wait him out and he does it and gets rewarded, then he'll learn faster to do it automatically. (When we practicing heeling on the rally course after I finished teaching class this evening, I practiced planting my right foot and shifting my weight slightly sideways as a cue to sit. He responded very well to this.)
From heeling we moved on to making training plans for all the rest of the AKC Novice exercises.
Fronts: During our last lesson, Denise had suggested that I use a front foot target and click for his butt being straight on, but he's been reinforced too much for pivoting from side to side and this was a frustrating exercise. I had decided to switch to backing up and using my hands down low to guide him in close to my legs. By now this had progressed to having my hands up higher and making an upwards motion, and Dragon would sit almost right between my feet. Then I would bend my knees outwards and throw the treat between my legs for him to chase (encourages him to get in close to my legs). Denise liked what we were doing and added that I should stop backing up when he looks at me, so that he gets to do the front and get reinforced if he's offering attention. I can also already fade the hand movement more. Once he's got that down I'll slow down my backwards movement until he's coming to front without my feet moving at all.
Stand/Sit for Exam: The Beginner Novice class has a sit for exam instead of a stand, and Denise recommended teaching that first. It's an easier behavior for the dog to be successful in, since he's less likely to shuffle his feet or move away. We used a CAT-like method to teach him to focus on me as a way to make the inherently-uncomfortable exercise end. Denise would step foward, click when Dragon looked at me, and then back away as I treated him. Build up to the scary stranger stepping forward and reaching, looming over the dog, waving stuff around, etc. I really like this method -- the dog learns that he can make the exercise end by standing still and watching the handler. It always works in the ring! Obviously you have to build it up slowly, so that the dog doesn't start breaking because he's too nervous about the stranger walking right up to him and looming over him. (Also, Denise didn't mention this, but using a stand platform would be a good way to set the dog up for success when transitioning from a sit for exam to a stand for exam.)
Retrieve: Dragon showed off his strong "bring to hand" behavior with his little leash tab. We talked about how dogs have trouble keeping items in their mouths as they sit. Butt goes down = mouth opens up. She liked that I'd been working on having Dragon do other tricks while holding onto his tab, and brought up using a platform, which was also on my to-do list once he was more solid with standing squarely on his new, narrow platform. We did practice with a large platform she had on hand, and lo and behold, Dragon was able to pick up the tab, get on the platform in front of me, and promptly sit with the tab in his mouth. Platforms are magic.
I need to order a dumbbell.
Broad Jump: I need to get some white boards to practice this. We did some jumping with her practice set, and I cued "hup" like I do for agility jumps, and he had no trouble with it. She recommended teaching him to go out to a target after jumping, and also putting a block by the corner of the broad jump to prevent the dog from learning to take shortcuts in training.
Stays: We ran out of time to practice but I said that his stays are great, in many different environments. I need to start practicing them with other dogs around. This will be easy if I remember to do it at work, where there is no shortage of both trained dogs who will hold their stays and green dogs who will be squirmy and break stays, for proofing.
I was amazed to realize how everything is coming together so well. I feel like we have a good foundation going.
Jealous, jealous, jealous...
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