Trick Training: Spin
This week our trick training challenge is “spin.” Auggie and I worked on this one a few years ago but I never really put a cue on it or had it perfect, so cleaning it up will be Auggie’s challenge this week. I haven’t done this at all with Payton or Pepper.
Once again I just started shaping with Payton, clicking for back end swiveling. Payton already knows “pivot” of course, and starts offering that (it’s one of his favourite tricks to offer.) I decided to go ahead and reward that and see if we can’t turn that into spinning.
I tried to lure Pepper but she isn’t handling my arm going behind her back well, so I decided to just try and shape a head turn instead.
After this video I decided Pepper was just having a hard time and maybe she isn’t ready for something of this level yet. Having only just started clicker training with her a few weeks ago and so far only really doing some targeting work, this might just be too much. So I think Pepper will sit this week out in favour of me trying to shape her to do something else, like maybe climb into a box?
Final video! Just Auggie and Payton:
Both of them can only spin one direction reliably – teaching them to spin both directions is my next task!
Trick Training: “Sit Pretty”
The dog forum I belong to is having a trick training challenge. Each week we get a new trick to work on. This week we had “sit pretty” which is a trick I’ve been wanting to train anyway, so I worked on it with all three dogs. At first I just decided to lure with all three, but that wasn’t working very well for Payton who is quite good at shaping anyway, so I scrapped luring with Payton and switched to shaping. It worked out just fine with him. For both Auggie and Pepper, I lured, and then switched to targeting (which is also more or less luring, I know) my thumb. This will turn into my hand signal for the behaviour at a later point.
On with the videos!
This one has all three dogs in it:
Just Payton in this one:
All three dogs for the “final” version here! Of course we still have some cleaning up to do, but this was the end of the week so this is our final video rather than final version of the trick. Auggie is the one struggling the most with this, but I think physically it’s difficult for him. We’ll keep working on it though.
Payton “cop-cop” training – again!
It’s been a while since we worked on this trick, but I haven’t forgotten about it. I still think it’s a really cute trick so we came back to work on it some more.
Here’s two videos of us working on it:
Apologies for this one where you can’t even see my feet, I realize how completely unhelpful that is!
