Game On! Dog Training

It’s winter here in update NY and since it started way before the official date of Dec 21st, we are well into our 3rd month – snow covered and temps ranging from single digits to low 30’s if we are really lucky.  Not counting wind chill.  But I grew up in this area, so I’m used to it and make the best, generally “embracing” winter…getting outside for walks with the dogs nearly every day…taking note of the visual beauty, the quiet, the soft feel of freshly fallen snow, the crunch of cold, cold snow.  The dogs seem to love it – no complaints from them!

Yesterday, I joined a friend for training in my “winter” horse barn with Tai and Breeze.  While it wasn’t all that cold, my “thermal” layer was inadequate and I left after 2 hrs thoroughly chilled, yearning for a hot cup of anything to warm my bones.  And hey…didn’t the weather forecast say SUNNY!!  Not where I was.   But, I was out and about and decided to stop at a favorite park to go for a walk with the dogs before heading home.  I left the training session with mixed feelings.  Tai is now 13 months old and this was only his 4th trip to the barn, he’s full of hormones at this age and sometimes his choices are unexpected or at least unwelcome.  Fresh horse urine is really big distraction afterall .  Even though I KNOW it’s a journey, I left feeling a little frustrated.

We stopped at the park and started our walk, me still trying to shake the negative feelings.  All was well with both Tai and Breeze, checking in often giving great response to their recalls.  The meatball treats no doubt helped!  Tai and I also played tug a few times with my glove (forgot a toy).  But still, I just wanted to get the walk over with to get home and get warm.

Then it happened…I saw a flash of blue.  With a little orange.  What is that?  Oh my…an Eastern Bluebird!?!?  It landed on a bush just 20 feet or so away.  I stopped with mouth agape.   I don’t see Eastern Bluebirds that often in the summer, but had never seen one in the dead of winter.  Then another bluebird joined this one.  We stood still – and this is one of the reasons I call this a magic moment – the dogs stopped too and just waited.  They seemed to sense from my stillness that something was up.  We waited and yet another bluebird joined the group.  Then another.  So for a little while, I watched – with some interest from Tai and Breeze – this little group of 4 beautiful blue and orange birds flitting around in the brush.  After a bit, we left and continued our walk.

Suddenly, my perspective on winter and dog training had righted itself.  I began to see all the positives in winter and felt lucky that because of my dogs I had found myself on that trail at that time; and I could better see the positives in our training session too.  Afterall, wasn’t it Tai that executed the short jumping sequence so beautifully and with such enthusiasm?  Spring will come and Tai will grow up.  Best to enjoy the now while its here and the journey that gets us to those “better” days.  A reminder that they aren’t really better, just different.  And one day in the heat of a hot humid July day, I’ll look back longingly on this winter day.  And when Tai is fully mature, I’ll look back fondly on his puppy adolescence.  Enjoy today; more snow expected.

Note…according to Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, upstate NY is not part of the Eastern Bluebird winter range.  However, their migration patterns vary from winter resident (generally in milder climates) to long migrations from harsher climates to the south.  This winter, I’ve seen several flocks of Robins as well.  Seems to be an unusual winter on many counts.

Ever hear of “zig zag training?”.   No it’s not a new handling system.  It’s just a term I made up to describe how Tai’s training is going at just one year old.  In any given training session (or in daily life), I zig in one direction and then I observe a behavior that makes me zag in another direction.  Example: I rent a facility to train and expectations are we will work on jump grids.  I’m out on the floor and just ready to start, when a friend who is sharing this rather expensive facility chooses to work on the teeter at the other end of the arena.  This is when I discover that the sound of this teeter bang on the mats sends my previously attentive puppy into orbit.  Ok, we change direction….we are now training….can you keep your mind when the teeter bangs?

This can happen at home too.  Wintry conditions or not, we can sometimes work outside on flat work skills or even work on one or two  low jumps in the snow.  What might start out as a session to train lead-out pivots, may end up focusing almost entirely on his sit-stay or his focus forward on the 1st jump.  We zig and we zag.  Always moving forward,  but constantly revisiting those key foundation skills that will serve us well over the years.   Or discovering new things that need to be worked on for this particular dog or even occasionally discovering a hole that needs to be filled.

So different from a training session with 6 yr old Breeze where a goal is set for the training session and 99% of that time that is what we accomplish.  But of course I wouldn’t change a thing.  This process of discovery is one of the pleasures of raising a puppy.   He is smart, athletic, handsome and gets along with everyone.  He loves full body hugs and would really like to be a lap dog…unfortunately for him (but not for me!) my lap isn’t big enough to accommodate him.

He still surprises me in daily life. We put up our Christmas tree and he NEVER touched an ornament…a shocker of the pleasant kind.  He has recently discovered television.  I am not kidding, it was when I was watching Susan Salo’s Foundation Jumping DVD and Susan was just talking.  Tai became fascinated by her voice, then really for the first time began to pay attention to the images on the screen and especially notice any fast moving object.  Fortunately, I don’t watch sports much and he can be in another room when I watch dog training videos.

He knows to wait on his bed in the kitchen while his dinner is prepared.  Recently, I sent him to his bed, not noticing that my husband had set a laundry basket on the bed.  No problem, just climb in the basket.   This made me laugh.  But I wasn’t laughing so much the other day when for the first time, he climbed on the dining room table – I don’t mean front paws, I mean all four feet standing there.  What the heck?

He has a lot to learn, I have a lot to learn.  We’ll get through this already rather long winter, enjoying our walks in the snow and when spring arrives, opportunities to train his equipment skills will skyrocket.  Meanwhile, I’ll be patient, work on foundation skills that can be accomplished mostly in the small space of my house or the snow and be content with my zig zag training.  It will all pay off in the long run.  After all, that philosophy is exactly why his formal name is  “Longview Tai”.

Being a New Year’s baby, Tai is nearly 1 year old.    Hard to believe that fact and does that mean I can’t call him a puppy anymore?  He’s growing up to be quite handsome, although “goofy” is a more frequent moniker.   On a recent off leash walk  and before I could react, he took off to chase a lone leaf blowing across the snow 50 or 75 yards away and found himself submerged in the Erie Canal.  What he didn’t know was this lone leaf was blowing across a partially frozen, snow covered surface of water.  Fortunately, he broke through the ice right at the edge.  Let me also explain, that this also involved hurling himself down a 20 ft rocky bank.  It was about 22 degrees and snowing.  He was surprised when he hit the water, scrambled out, shook off and appeared completely unphased.  Brrrrrrr.   So, after my initial horror at what he had done, I laughed.  Lesson learned there – at least for me – no off leash walking near partially frozen bodies of water with a border collie – even if he would have to perform feats of acrobatics to reach the water.    This is a lesson I did not learn with my shelties.

His training is coming along nicely, although sometimes I admit  it feels like he knows nothing.  Of course, this isn’t true.  His developing fluency in response to verbal cues is where I’m sometimes left scratching my head and laughing.  It’s like there are lots of threads of partially learned behaviors in his head that he hasn’t completely sorted out and sometimes they get tangled up and his response ends up somewhere I never would have predicted. So, I laugh (and think about rule-outs to help him sort it out).

Or when his innate border collie-ness takes over and he becomes completely focused on a noise that I have to concentrate hard to hear.  It’s like….Earth to Tai!  I say to him…”you are such a border collie” and I have to laugh.  Or when he’s been invited up to give me a big hug and it’s like he can’t get close enough, so he keeps pushing and pushing into me, until I lose my balance; or if in my office chair, I’m rolling across the room.

I recently videoed one of our training sessions.  Admittedly, I was a bit challenged by the mechanics of this particular training…food, toy and clicker in hand….so I was getting unexpected responses.  I laughed a lot on this video.

I’m pleased to know that I’m laughing a lot…it keeps our sessions light and it means I’m enjoying Tai and the training process without feeling rushed.  I should also mention, by the way, that often, I’m not laughing, but simply smiling with pleasure at his brilliance.  I’ve been successful in not putting myself on a timetable…maybe a bit too successful, actually :-).  But now that we’ve been given the “gift” of an early winter – with lots of snow and bitter cold, I’m going to make sure that I keep laughing even when I’m rearranging my family room furniture to make more room to train,  training in a cold barn or bundling up to do flatwork in the snow.

I hope all of you are both laughing and smiling in your training sessions too!

Most of us think a lot about what’s going to happen or might happen or what we want to happen…whether it’s in our professional lives, personal lives or dog lives.  It seems we’re always racing to get somewhere else, to grow, to get stuff done, to achieve that next goal.  Nothing wrong with that.  But every now and then, its good to look back and take stock of how far we’ve come.  With a young dog, when I wonder if I’m making progress in my training, this can be comforting.   With an older dog, looking back at the journey we’ve taken together can be quite emotional.  My sheltie Lacey has a birthday tomorrow – she’ll be 11 on 11/11.

Lacey’s a healthy and happy 11 yr old for which I’m mightily grateful.  Lacey is the dog that taught me so many lessons, it’s hard to count.  It was just before Lacey came into our lives that I started working with Susan Garrett – who set me on the path to becoming knowledgeable dog trainer.  It feels like yesterday that I introduced Lacey at 12 weeks old to Susan and she had her first shaping lesson.  She was brilliant – I quess I mean both “she”s – Susan and Lacey.  Lacey was confident (to say the least), a bit independent (to say the least) and very quick.   She was a joy to train unless she had other things on her mind.  Building a working relationship with her taught me a lot (to say the least).   As I work puppy Tai through distractions, it’s not my more recent experience with 6 yr old Breeze that I think of…but what Lacey taught me.

“Denahur’s Racey Lacey” has all the titles an agility enthusiast could hope for barring a national championship.  Silver ADCH, Silver LAA, Top 10 USDAA, MACH,  Regional and National placements.  Her career was interrupted several times with injury – a recurring shoulder issue.  After the last go round in late 2008, I eased her into retirement but not before she was overall individual winner in the 2009 Northeast Regional USDAA Performance class and took home the Performance Grand Prix Regional Champion trophy.  She wasn’t the fastest out there that weekend, but she was the best.

So on Lacey’s 11th birthday, here is a list of  11 things that Lacey taught me.

1. Patience and the benefits of laughing while dog training.

2. That steak can have more value than squirrels.

3. How much fun it is to shape behaviors

4. How to invent a jolly ball on a rope – the first toy Lacey would tug on outside

5. That transfer of value really works.

6. That there must be really, really, really good smells in our backyard

7.  That a 3 foot fence will neither keep an athletic sheltie in the yard, nor keep the neighbor’s German Shepherd out of the yard (duh).

8. How to condition a dog to – hopefully – prevent injury, benefiting Lacey and all my dogs.

9. How to manage a dog who gets sprayed by a skunk – which happened incidentally 15 minutes before she and I were to leave for the airport – another story altogether.   I recommend Nature’s Miracle Skunk Odor Remover.

10. That one good way to  handle ring nerves – is to look  in her eyes, think of what a good little buddy she is and smile.

11.  The joy of really laying it down in competition, knowing that she knows too and celebrating together.

There is no doubt that Lacey still has more to teach me and here’s hoping that there will be many lessons over many years.  Happy Birthday Lacey!   So, give your older dogs a big hug and extra treat from Lacey and me tomorrow.  If you’d like, click on this You Tube link to see a pictorial of Lacey’s life so far.  I hope you do and that you enjoy it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egFY_RfyEao

I’ve been on a trick kick over the last couple of weeks.  Maybe it’s because Halloween is just around the corner.  But more likely, it’s because I’m back from the Worlds and USDAA Nationals with Breeze and I’m now concentrating more of my mental energy on Tai.    AND because its fun AND because I looked at some of Silvia Trkman’s videos.  Now there is a dog trainer!  See link below.

So, all week Tai has been rolling over; spinning left and right; wrapping a cone; weaving between my legs, hand targeting; backing up; sitting pretty; downing on a mousepad.     Some of these tricks are old friends we are revisiting after a lull.  Some are brand new and still in the early shaping phases – what fun.

Nearly all of these tricks have an agility benefit – building mind-body awareness or practicing maneuvers that will eventually be performed over 26″ jumps.  Although, I can’t quite figure out the connection  “rolling over” has for agility.  Anyone?  Oh and with his long body, he requires a fair bit of real estate to perform this one.

As Tai performs his “tricks”, he’s been getting lots of treats but when I seek a little break in the action, he’s been practicing his version of “Trick or Treat”…otherwise known as “HEY YOU…pay attention to me”.  We’re working on extinguishing this behavior (or at least I am).

While Tai rests calmly in his crate, he doesn’t usually choose to take a break unless it’s after a vigorous romp outdoors.  But since he sometimes tries to squeeze himself into the sheltie’s bed and since he’s nearly 10 months old, it seemed like the right time for that investment.  Here’s how that is working after an hour long hike yesterday.

More tricks on the agenda for tomorrow (Halloween)…maybe teaching Tai to “say his prayers” would be appropriate for All Saints Day (Nov 1).  I’d love to hear what tricks you have taught your dogs.

Here is the link to Silvia Trkman’s website  http://silvia.trkman.net/