Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Dog Walk work day 4


Here is day 4 training of my plank work. Today, clicker was used and I mainly ran with as this seems to be the most comfortable for him at this point. We tried about 10 reps and I tried to only click for the behavior I wanted. I would say out of 10 reps, 6 were the behavior I wanted (drive to end of board into 2 on 2 off position), 2 were complete misses (just kept going with the momma), and 2 were run to the end, stop, take a step into position (one of which I clicked for and shouldn't have). I am very pleased at how quickly he is getting the point of this exercise. He is so clicker savy that i should have known bringing out the clicker would help him. Tony is suppose to be building me a middle plank this weekend so that we can raise the boards up a bit more and have an up, middle and down plank for him to run on. Concerns right now are am i going to keep that speed with three planks? Am I going to still get "toes" as the height goes up? At this point, I would like to continue working the boards on the ground and very, very slowly move them up. I know this isn't the accepted way to train a dog walk (train drive first then get contact criteria second), but the clicker trainer in me wants to do it this way. Is it right? We shall see! I am not claiming I know where this is going to go and I know we will have good days and bad days but I am in this for the ride and am having a great time so far. I know that he won't generalize this behavior so after we get the dog walk full height here, we will need to take our show on the road and get on as many other people's dog walks as possible. Right now, I am keeping the reps short, maybe 10 or 12 per session, and I am working in his comfort zone, which oddly enough seems to be me running with. I did try once with me doing a restrained recall and he stopped about half way down the board, turned around and looked at me, like "why are you standing there doing nothing mom?" I also will need to work distance away from the plank as well but that is in the distant future (haha, pun intended).

No comments:

Post a Comment