Last Thursday I had another session
with Amber over at
Dog Training by
P.J. I was really pleased with the session.
First of all, we scheduled this session at the center, rather than
out in a park. While small, the training space is very nice. Like
many modern training facilities, it's a small warehouse-type space
with smooth-finished concrete floors, well-spaced rings for leash
tie-offs set into the wall, and some decoration (mostly for the
customer's sensibilities) to liven the place up a bit.
We scheduled the session for mid-morning, so that Glindy and I
would have the place to ourselves. This allowed us to train in a
quiet environment that was as non-distracting as possible.
We worked on a number of different things, including watch, behind,
and gun-dog heel. The watch was quite difficult, as there were some
barking dogs next door to the training facility, and Glindy keep
going on alert every time she heard one of them. Of course, this
was the point: to work Glindy in a mildly-distracting environment
that wouldn't set her up for failure.
We eventually managed to get Glindy up to about 3-4 seconds on the
watch, but about halfway through the hour-long session she began to
get really frustrated. She began throwing behaviors, and kept
breaking behaviors she had down pat to redirect her arousal at me
in the form of jumping up, frustration whining, and an occasional
bark.
That's okay, though. Part of dog training is understanding that you
often take one step back for every two steps forward. Also, dogs
have their off-days, too; they aren't machines. Amber thinks I'm a
bit too lenient with Glindy--and I admit that it is sometimes
true--but in some cases you just can't push a dog farther than
she's ready to go at the time.
However, one behavior we worked on pretty successfully was the
wave. Glindy has some experience with nose-targeting, and is also
pretty paw-oriented. Since we'd already worked on introducing the
wave with Robin, it really only took Amber a few minutes to get
Glindy to reliably wave. Of course, Glindy's still not on verbal
cue, and won't respond at a distance yet, but we've definitely got
her to understand the target behavior. The rest is just consistent
practice. *sigh*
So, thanks to Amber, Glindy and I are continuing to improve some of
our basic behaviors, and are well on our way to adding an
OCD-mitigating doggy wave to our repertoire. We're meeting again
this week, and the work will continue.