Training Journal
Since joining Recallers 3.0, I’ve tried to get into the habit of record keeping my training sessions.
I am terrible at it. I have failed pretty gloriously at record keeping. I was GREAT for about the first week of Recallers. Then that was the end of that… whoops.
I do have training notebooks, several of them, all over the place. Inside of these notebooks are notes I take when I’ve watched training DVDs or webinars or whatever. I jot down lists of tricks I would like to train, make notes on what we need to work on, figure out game plans for training large tasks like jumping skills. I think it’s pretty clear how bad my record keeping skills are just based on the fact that I have multiple training notebooks instead of actually having everything just collected in one notebook.
I mentioned my training notebook on a dog forum I belong to and another poster asked what my training notebook was like. “Not very well organized” was part of my answer. I thought the thread might spawn more people giving input on what they have for record keeping and what all they write down, but nobody else piped up about their training notebook. Maybe it’s a rare quality – maybe very few people record keep. I suppose I’m not alone in my disorganization, but realistically, it’s a GOOD thing to do. Why don’t more people record keep?
Regardless, a group of us who have access to Recallers through the end of March (or some who have access for even longer) have decided to work our way back through the course lessons from the beginning. The Re-Doers, we are so dubbed! So I have decided to re-do my attempt at record keeping.
It’s currently the beginning of week two (not counting the first week of re-working what is called Critical Core and are more just games that become part of your everyday life; most of these are in fact games I already played as part of our everyday life anyway.) I didn’t actually write down my training notes for Monday yesterday. I remembered to grab my journal and brought it to work with me to put notes in this morning. NOT ideal… I’m sure there are things that I thought about writing down last night while working with the dogs that I have forgotten by this point.
However, in the interest of accountability, and in the interest of showing a little bit more of what I have in my training notebook, I decided to post what I wrote down from yesterday’s training sessions.
2/6 –
Crate Games – Progress with Payton sitting faster. Still need to play the games more to help him out. Closed the door on Payton breaking sit and he didn’t lock down again.
RZ – Tried this with chicken. Auggie tried to bite my fingers off. IYC fail. Payton seems to get it at first, then I realize it’s just a fluke. Need to do more!!
Hand touches – Also tried with chicken. Chicken was too messy and shredded to work well. Getting solid repeated touches from Payton. Criteria is for two hard nose touches in a row. Shredded chicken remnants were apparently teaching Auggie I want him to lick my hand… not what I want. Put the chicken away.
Not exactly the most organized of note taking, but this is the format I’ve decided on. Essentially, I’m just journaling. The name of the game we played, what worked, what didn’t work, what I need to do to fix it. This is what works for me. Other people might use a different format, far more structured – I do sometimes take structured notes if our activity calls for it (I have a whole page where I charted behaviours out for latency) but being far more relaxed about it by jotting down these notes is how I will take most of my notes. The other major problem I see with my journals is how frequently I focus on “what went wrong” and how rarely I focus on “what went right.” I’m trying to write with a far more positive perspective these days. It’s a hard habit to break since I tend to look at things as a problem solver… this didn’t work, so how can I fix it? The problem solving IS an important part of training, but when I read my notes back, it just sounds really negative. And I believe that the language we use with our dogs and when thinking of our dogs and their training affects our thinking and affects our relationship with them.
Therefore, time to be more positive.
I made some shredded chicken last week because poor Payton was having serious poop problems and fasted him, then put him on antibiotics and a chicken and rice mixture. I haven’t done treats with him – he only got back on full dog food Sunday – and am hesitant to do anything that might aggravate his poor belly again. We didn’t do much training last week because I couldn’t use treats, and what I wanted to work on I didn’t feel could be done with a toy reward as well, but I have extra chicken leftover and wanted to use it to train with. But the chicken just wasn’t working well for the hand touches, so I think I will have to get back to the dog treats. He finishes his antibiotics Wednesday, so hopefully his stomach is back and in balance again anyway. If not… I guess I’m about to find out!
Also, Auggie really needs to learn better self-control, especially when he’s super excited during training (read: just about any time food is present during training.) He is good about being gentle for a few rewards, and then CHOMP! Bites my fingers again. Sigh. It’s a work in progress, as always. Chicken is FAR too high value to be giving him right now if I expect to keep my fingers. We need to work up to him not getting really excited and biting my fingers off for plain old treats before I try chicken…
…see? Negative. I just keep doing it!
The Dog Training Robot
I feel like I’ve become a bit of one.
As I posted earlier, I’ve spent the last 8 weeks or so enrolled in Susan Garrett’s Recallers e-course. I’ve been re-reading Shaping Success for a while since getting Payton; I got the 2×2 weaves DVD for Christmas (which I had been wanting for a while), and just got myself Crate Games a few weeks back too (which I had also been wanting and Recallers gave me the push to go ahead and order it.)
Basically, I have been so immersed in SG that I’ve found myself using her terminology in just about everything I do training-wise. My thinking has changed to be very “Say Yes” oriented. I was never the kind of person who would put a shock collar or anything on my dogs, but Auggie was trained with corrections – so being that I’ve trained with corrections in the past, I guess you can officially call me a cross over trainer into The Land of Do, as SG puts it. See? There’s yet another SG term. I feel like if I say (or think) “where’s the value?” one more time, I’m going to smack MYSELF.
But the odd thing is that it’s also become kind of therapeutic to start thinking this way.
Baby Georgie thinks (and has been reinforced for it, so “knows”) the fastest way to get out of her crate is to yip at the top of her lungs in her high-pitched baby bitch voice. So we are now trying to un-do the damage, train it out of her, and, basically, play Crate Games.
So this afternoon I came home from work, let the boys out, and put Georgie in Payton’s crate while I fed the boys. I was going to go get Georgie, but my mom came home right then, which caused Georgie to start yelping and screaming and biting the crate trying to get out and get to my mom. I already knew my mom had a migraine earlier and wasn’t in a mood to deal with the barking and yipping, but I’ll be damned if I was going to let a migraine tear down all the work we had done… so I shut my mom out of the room and decided to take care of it myself.
I walked out of the room and stood in the hall, waiting for her to stop barking. When she was quite for five seconds, I would go into the room. At first this was her cue to start screaming at me again, so I would immediately, silently, turn around and walk back out of the room.
I’m standing in the hall, having done this for several minutes, and feeling irritated because I’m freaking starving for my own dinner, not in a very good mood already having just left work, and this isn’t even my dog!! I sure didn’t encourage (even inadvertently) this bad habit, so why do I have to stand here and deal with this?! It’s bad enough to have to struggle with Payton’s brattiness but at least that is all a direct result of the work I have or have not put into him; this one has NOTHING TO DO WITH ME, and yet here I am with the dumb baby bitch barking at me every time I walk into the room, preventing me from just feeding her and getting on with the rest of my life. And suddenly my head starts going “It’s her choice. Control the resources, NOT the dog. It’s her choice.” Like a calming mantra. Control the resources… not the dog. It’s Georgie’s choice to keep barking and not be let out of the crate. It’s her choice to stop barking and have me walk in the room. It’s her choice to start barking when I approach the crate and make me turn around and LEAVE the room. It’s all her choice. I’m not really DOING anything. Just letting the dog make the choices.
And it’s actually VERY calming, really, when you think about it. It sure makes it easy for me. Well, “easy” may not be the right word, but it takes the pressure off me, at the very least. I’m not here to make the dog do anything. I don’t have to force it. We’re not having a battle for control. All I’m here to do is allow the dog to make her own choices, come to the correct choice (what I want), and then reward her for it! You get that? I’m just here to allow her to experiment, make her own choices, and then deliver a reward when the right choice rolls around. Nothing else. I don’t have to sit there having a shouting match with her, screaming, “Georgie QUIET! Georgie STOP BARKING! QUIET! SIT! SIT!”
I just stand there in the hallway with the lights off… and wait.
It really didn’t take much longer than five minutes for her to stop barking, stay quiet as I walked into the room and approached her crate, sit nicely when I unlatched the crate door, OPEN the crate door, and then release her from her sit so we could finally leave the room and go get her dinner.
And all I did was stand there and wait patiently.
I like this kind of dog training.
Training Chatter
So it’s week five of my Brilliant Recalls e-course with Susan Garrett. Over the course of the class, I wouldn’t say I’ve necessarily had any training epiphanies so the speak… at least not in the traditional “ah-ha!” moment kind of way. What I have had is a shifting of my thought process and my overall training habits.
The big one would be that I’ve ditched luring for behaviours. This is actually really hard, because lure based training is how I was taught to train and how I’ve trained for many many years. Old habits die hard and it’s VERY difficult to stop luring. It’s also hard because what we are learning in Recallers has to do mostly with a recall, though many of the games are useful in SO many different areas. So we aren’t learning, for example, how to teach a dog to sit without a lure. Not that I need to know how to teach a dog to sit without a lure – I know about capturing, and of course my dogs know how to sit – but I’m just using that as an example. So I’m shifting into a new way of thinking, but I don’t really know how to do everything yet. I definitely don’t feel confident enough to walk into a training class tomorrow and say “We’re not doing any luring in this class!” and help everybody in the classroom train their dogs as expected without using a lure… just because I haven’t done it all before, helped anybody do it before, and don’t even have a clear picture in my head of what to do. There is no game plan, no map. I am basically stumbling around with a blank piece of paper, trying to draw the map based on what I walk into, what other people tell me, and then can eventually show that map to somebody else and tell them “Well, if you want to get from here to here, this is where you go…”
One problem with drawing this map of shaping and capturing, as I’ve noticed with other people as a trainer and having used SOME shaping/capturing in my classes (even though I would say they have been primarily lure-based) is how HARD it is for many people to learn the concept of “don’t do anything, don’t say anything, let the dog come to the conclusion on his own.” I’ve told people “okay, don’t say anything, just wait” and they wait for maybe a few seconds… and then start saying things again or trying to “make” the dog do something. It’s difficult for people to grasp the concept of waiting for the dog to do things on his own and then reward it rather than luring or prompting… even with somebody standing right behind you, saying “JUST SHUT UP AND LET THE DOG THINK FOR A SECOND!” (Not that I’ve ever yelled that at my students or even been tempted to, but I sometimes think I probably should have yelled that at MYSELF in the past.)
It’s evolution of my thought processes. I’m enjoying it. I think that might actually be the biggest thing I’m getting out of the e-course, even though the games are also IMMENSELY helpful – but it’s how my entire thought process and teaching approach is evolving along the way.
Recall Bootcamp
After a lot of thought and a lot of staring at my bank account, I decided to enroll in Susan Garrett’s 5 Minutes to a Brilliant Recall e-course. It wasn’t exactly cheap, but I asked myself what a good recall is worth. If somehow Auggie or Payton were to get out the front door, or maybe broke the gate in the backyard, or escaped from their lead at an agility trial… and were running towards a busy road with cars coming… how much is it worth if I said “AUGGIE” and my dog would turn around and come racing back to me without hesitation? The answer, for me, is that it would be worth a lot more than I paid for the class.
So that will be our winter project… how much work we’ll get to do outside once the snow dumps on us, exactly, is anybody’s guess. But I will at least be arming myself with the games and the learning to work on it later.
Both dogs have also been learning perch work. Payton is doing better than Auggie, who ever since I got out the clicker and tried to teach him to speak has added barking furiously at me to his repertoire of “stuff to try during shaping.” Auggie was giving me two full turns around the perch but frequently would stop and bark at me, so I dropped WAY back and am currently rewarding for two steps in a row WITH NO. BARKING. and hoping that eliminates the annoying barkface.
Payton, on the other hand, is now doing a turn and a half. Sometimes he gets overly excited and ends up slipping off the perch and since he is no longer on the perch starts jumping around the room (my puppy is so weird) but once he gets himself collected and hits the perch again, he returns very quickly to pivoting. I’m very proud of him… when I first brought him home and tried to teach him to touch a target, he wouldn’t do anything. He would just sit down and stare at me. Having gone from that to a dog who learned to start zooming around a perch purely from offered behaviours, it just makes me smile. I almost cried when I saw the light bulb go off in his head and he started stepping in a hurry around the perch. Hurray for Payton!
So I will probably be posting some updates here, maybe with some videos, while we work through Auggie’s Recall Bootcamp! I’m looking forward to it for sure. (How can anybody NOT look forward to not having to go out and retrieve their dog who is in the back of the yard barking at ABSOLUTELY NOTHING through the fence when it’s 20 degrees out and they are only wearing a t-shirt and boxer shorts?)
