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.
Payton the Amazing
This dog is awesome, and hilarious. I’ve posted a couple of times about our perch work. The last time he was on the perch was two or three days ago (I know, but I’m also working on other stuff, so we are actually rotating tricks…) He was going about a turn and a half for me, a turn regularly but often giving me more. I want him to be doing more than that before we start lowering the perch and then fade it out entirely, but he’s doing pretty good. The hand signal I’m using is Celeste Meade’s, which is a fist with my knuckles down towards the dog.
Well, I just had him in the bathroom with me while I was getting ready for bed. I wanted to put him in a sit so I said “Payton, sit,” and made the hand signal I use, which is scooping my hand up towards my face. Normally I have my hand open, palm up, but I was holding something so it was basically raising my fist up in the air. He looked at my hand but didn’t sit right away, so I just waited. Sit is his default behaviour so I knew he would sit in a second anyway once his brain caught up to his feet.
Except he didn’t sit.
He stared at my hand, which was a fist, knuckles down… and he thought about it, then proceeded to start pivoting his butt around.
I looked at him, totally shocked, then looked at my hand, and realized he was doing EXACTLY what I asked him to. Just not what I MEANT to ask him to do!
And he did it without the perch anywhere nearby and without having done any kind of fading of the perch. Just up and turned a pivot on the bathroom floor.
I then almost fell over laughing hysterically. Really, Payton? Wow. Okay.
Now I don’t know if I should just ditch the perch and make him start doing pivots without it since he already proved to me he can, haha.
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?)
Shaping is awesome
Do you ever get really excited when training something when you see that ah-ha moment take place? I know how shaping works. I’ve done it over and over and over again. I’ve taught people how to do it and watched them shape their dogs.
So tonight we got the perch out again and I did exactly that… and when he started stepping left clearly over and over and over and all the way around the perch I got so excited I almost started crying. I had to run and get my mom to show her, and of course when I tried it again he was getting stuck in his little dance again, LOL, BUT HE WAS DOING IT… I swear!!
And I felt like SUCH a dork being so excited.
Teaching Auggie to smile
I’ve decided it would be incredibly handy to teach Auggie to smile on command. Sometimes in the face of treats Auggie becomes SERIOUS DOG and doesn’t give me a smile… so if I’m trying to pose him and I have treats on me while I do this, I get SERIOUS AUGGIE IS SERIOUS photos instead of a normal goofy looking Auggie. Therefore, if I can be holding a treat and tell Auggie “smile!” and he will smile, I will get PERFECT pictures!! It’s genius, you see.
Except I forgot that my dog is an idiot and while trying to teach him a new trick he immediately begins offering up every single trick he already knows, or other things we’ve been working on. Like I’ve been working on cop-cop with him on and off for ages, so when doing heeling work, he attempts to get between my legs and stand on my feet. Or when trying to work on a down-stay, he likes to roll over.
The last trick I worked on with Auggie was teaching him to speak. I figured teaching smile would start rather the same, where I would click/treat any movement of the mouth, then start to narrow it down to the kind of open mouth expression I wanted. This was not a bad plan.
Except, again, I forgot that my dog is an idiot.
Therefore, this time, Auggie decided that I must want him to ROLL OVER WHILE BARKING.
Why, Auggie? Why? This is why I do things like buy a yellow submarine costume and put you in it.
Auggie attempts to communicate
I decided a while back that I might teach Auggie to speak. Part of me thought this was a terrible idea, for once I taught the dog to bark on cue, he might NEVER STOP. Another part of me thought, because he barks when he’s being bratty and playing, if I could get him to bark on command, I could also basically get him to be bratty on command. (I can hear you out there asking, but WHY would you want your dog to be bratty on command?? Well, the answer is because I’m crazy of course.)
Either way, I decided to just go ahead and do it. Tonight I sat down with the clicker, the dog, the big bucket of treats, and a plan… click any vocalization, no matter how quiet, that might be considered a bark. Whining, whimpering, grunting, wookie-noises, or various other attempts at talking were not to count… only what you might call a bark.
What happened next was so hilarious I had to actually stop and get out the video camera to record it and show people how absolutely ridiculous my dog is. So watch the video… and enjoy.
Little Comedian
So I’ve been working on Auggie’s one-minute sit stay and three-minute down stays. During the sit stay he started to lay down, so I’m standing across the room from him and go “No, Auggie – sit.” He continues to lay down. “Auggie… AUGGIE…”
He looks at me, and instead of sitting, he proceeds to ROLL OVER.
Which of course makes me crack up, because not only does he look ridiculous when he rolls over, but again, I can just IMAGINE this happening during the obedience trial. All the dogs are in a line doing a down stay and mine is like “Durp durp *roll over* *roll over* *roll over* What am I supposed to be doing?? *roll over*”
So later that night I was telling my mom about this, and I said something like “And I was like, no, Auggie! Sit! Sit!” and laughing about how he then rolled over… and then I look over, and there’s Auggie across the room from me, SITTING, and looking at me with this sad look on his face, like “I AM sitting!! What more do you WANT from me?!”
It’s a really good thing he’s so cute, or the brattyness would not be funny AT ALL.
Susan Salo Jumping 1
I haven’t totally abandoned all thought of the Natural Jumping program, but I got both the beginning and advanced jumping DVD’s by Susan Salo for Christmas. So right now I’m learning another method and exploring it. So far I can say that the Natural Jumping program is a very clear regiment of “do this on this day; do this on that day,” and so on and so forth. Susan Salo gives you the tools for your toolbox and you are sort of left to decide which tool you should use when. The disadvantage of this is that somebody who doesn’t know (like me) could easily end up using the screwdriver when they should still be drilling holes.
Obviously there are probably people who would prefer just being given the tools and left to their own devices; personally I liked being able to look at the book and know exactly what to work on with my dog and which point. My plan is to actually try and write up a schedule for myself to try to keep us on track.
Today is the first day I have begun to put into practice training with Susan Salo’s methods (not counting the set-point exercises I’ve been doing since last week and do not have video of.) Today I set up a straight line equal distance grid and worked Auggie through it a few times. It consists of five jumps, set 5′ apart, with the bars at 8″. It went… well… it went I guess.
Here’s video:
Watching these, I think I’m setting him up way too close to the jump. He’s supposed to take one step and then jump… I’m setting him up so close that he’s basically popping out of his sit and over the jump. Ouch. So that is my fault. I’m pretty sure his one-stride on the second and third runs there is a result of that. Not really sure what happened towards the end there where he strides on jump three.
I took a LOT of notes while watching the Beginning Jumping DVD and I need to go back to them to remind myself about troubleshooting and see what I might do here. I think the first thing to do is to drop the bars down to 4″ and work him for a few days at that height… see how he reacts.
Obviously Auggie has major jumping problems and it’s going to take a ton of work to help him one way or another.
I will say that Auggie was REALLY EXCITED to see a jump chute set up again. He kept blowing his sit-stays because he was so super excited to get through these. I don’t know. It’s weird. His confidence isn’t 100% even in the jump chutes but he seems to LOVE jumping. My mom would tell me about times last year when he would go to the back of the yard where I set up the jump chutes and he’d pace around crying and whining at her, because he wanted her to set up the chute so he could go work it.
Natural Jumping Method – Week 10
Week 10 is the beginning of the Problem Solving stage of the jumping program. This stage introduces one stride lengths, bounce distances, long and short strides, and higher verticals and bigger oxers throughout the different weeks. This is where a dog really starts to learn to look ahead and THINK about what is ahead of him rather than just rely on muscle memory to jump the same way every time. During the problem solving weeks, the setup changes each lesson whereas previously all three lessons in a week were the same. However, Clothier doesn’t want you to move on until a dog has basically mastered each lesson. Some dogs might need additional practice rather than just one day/series of six jumps to master a lesson. Auggie needed more practice on lesson 3 in this series… unfortunately, I forgot and moved on to week 11 without really allowing him to master that lesson.
This video shows lesson one, lesson two, and lesson three of week 10. The patterns are different every day and can be found in the book. Week 10 is about teaching one stride lengths, which for Auggie is 45 inches. You’ll see there are still oxers and verticals mixed in, and that jump distances change between two stride lengths and one stride lengths.
As you can see, day three (I should have changed my terminology to lesson three – sorry) is a hot mess more than once. The good news is that Auggie seems to be getting a real kick out of the jumping program anyway, even though the distances between jumps keep changing! And having fun is what it’s all about.
Natural Jumping Method – Week 9
So week 9 is five oxers. No more single bar jumps… every jump in the chute is an oxer.
He does really well navigating smoothly over all five oxers, getting a nice arc over them. Unfortunately he also keeps up with that pattern of stutter-stepping the last jump a majority of the time. Still not sure why he does that. I experimented some with putting a target after the last jump, hoping it might drive him over the jump and remove that stutter-step… didn’t work. So I’m still not sure on the “why” of how he reacts with that final jump.
Return to Natural Jumping
Well, I’m cheating it. I know, I know – I have the book, I have read it, I KNOW it says not to cheat and move any faster than she recommends. And I’m cheating it anyway.
As part of our effort to start over in Preferred, I have made a return to the Clothier Natural Jumping Method. Now that I know Auggie’s height (in preferred, for now, anyway) is 12, and I know that we really need to stick with that, I made a plan of how to continue.
And that is to just move the bars up to 12 for the rest of the method.
I DID back up some. I went to the final week of the rhythm lessons, where you have five regular jumps, evenly spaced, and did that for two days.
So here are your videos!
Jumps 4 and 5 are call throughs rather than run bys. On Jump 6, I cut out the less than spectacular shot of my butt running away from the camera, but I ran him through the chute going away from the camera, then turned him around at the end and ran him back up. He was nice and smooth, both ways!
So far, so good!
The Aug
This weekend was not a very good agility weekend. I am concerned at this point that Auggie is no longer having fun at trials. He was incredibly slow on Saturday, and Sunday he tried to leave the ring during standard. He has never left the ring on me – I think he just wanted to let me know that he was done.
The 16 inch jump heights are too much for him. This trial was also indoor and the unusual mats were giving a lot of dogs problems – I think the combined effect was just too much for Auggie.
We have decided to give him a break. Our agility practices will stop; instead I will start playing around with herding, something I’ve wanted to do anyway. When we go back to agility, we will start running in preferred. The jump heights will go back down to 12 inches at that point. It does mean that I am basically giving up my single NA and single OAJ leg in order to pursue an NJP and NAP. We will still HAVE our NAJ but we need to start over with preferred agility rather than having that grandfather us into Open Preferred.
But it also means that this may bring the joy back to the game for Auggie, which is what is really important.
The good thing about preferred is that you can switch back and forth between preferred and regular agility. If we are ever able to challenge his measurement and get a new height card that puts him at the correct height, we would be able to switch back to regular agility.
So, well… there you have it.
I hopefully will soon post with some herding photos/videos.
Taking a break
Today was a really not-great agility day. It is far better than my worst agility day ever, when I spent half the day in tears, but it wasn’t that great.
Auggie did fantastic, he really did. The problems we had weren’t his fault – they weren’t even really mine.
But his course times were horrible. Ridiculously slow. We finished JWW and my mom said “What time did he have to beat?? He got 60.”
“SIXTY? He had to beat Forty-FOUR.”
Honestly, he was practically walking the courses. I do think it was mostly the matting inside the club (we are indoors – this is only our second indoor trial ever) because he went into a tunnel, and when I saw him coming out the other end he was running like a rocket. He was up on the side of the tunnel he was coming through it so fast. But once he hit the mats again, he was like “oh.” and the switch turned back off.
I sent a very very long e-mail to J because she asked me to e-mail her and tell me how today went. I told her everything that happened and all the possibilities, what I thought went wrong, and what I was wondering and afraid of… that is, that Auggie is no longer enjoying agility. And after some feedback from other agility folks, I asked her if she thought we should maybe take a break or something… just for a while.
Her response is that we have plenty of other things to play in, maybe we will switch to herding for a while… and she thinks we should start running him in preferred. That will drop his jump height down back to where it should be and also give him more time in the SCTs.
And now I agree. In May, when the judge measured us high, I cried all the way home. I didn’t want to drop my dog to preferred. I felt like it was giving up on him. I wanted him to run regular agility. I wanted to MACH him! I knew he could do it, because he has – he got his NAJ, he got that running 16, so he CAN do it! I decided that as long as I still felt that way, dropping him to preferred wasn’t a good idea. I knew that, if it ever became the right thing to do, I would know it, and I wouldn’t feel that hesitation anymore.
Today I no longer have that hesitation… today I know that dropping him into preferred is the right thing to do. I am still very sad at the idea of giving up on MACH Auggie… but, as J reminded me, he is my FIRST agility dog. And he has so many things against him right now.
Sometimes I’m gonna have to lose.
We could still get a PAX. We could still go to nationals (they allow Preferred dogs to run at nationals since last year.) Same goals… just different. This will drop his jump height back down and give us more time if he doesn’t rev up. If he DOES rev up… or if we CAN fix the jump card issue… we can always make the decision later to move him back out of preferred and pick up right where we left off.
In the meantime… looks like for our next trial, we are going to be starting totally fresh in novice. Chasing a NAP and NJP now. Well, I guess when I sat at today’s trial thinking “Golly, I wish I were in Novice Jumpers again! That course looks so EASY!” little did I know.
Natural Jumping Method – Week 8
For week 8, we move up to four oxers. The pattern is vertical, oxer, oxer, oxer, oxer. Jump heights are still set at 10 inches and distances are still 90 inches for Auggie’s two-stride length per the calculations in the book.
He learns a lot faster in this video than he has in previous weeks. By the last jump in day 1 he’s running smooth and fast – save the last jump, which he still stuttersteps up to. On day 2 he drops a few bars, but notably, during jump 5 he actually doesn’t stutterstep up to the last jump! I have no idea what the difference is, because he goes back to doing it in the next jump and during all of day 3. WEIRD DOG.
Hopefully time will even out the issue here. I’m the kind of person who likes to know the “why” behind stuff though so I’d really like to know WHY he is still stutterstepping the final jump and only the final jump. I may never know, but I would LIKE to know, haha.
Agility Update
The weather has gotten a little better, and last week we managed to get out to J’s house twice and work outside – practice we desperately needed since our first trial is coming up in a few weeks here.
First, the jumping is going pretty well. His confidence is pretty good and he was taking the 12 inch jumps outside nicely, better judging his take off points. This week in our jumping program we are entering the Problem Solving phase, which may prove pretty challenging. I’m nervous about it, because I don’t want to really shake Auggie’s confidence right before a trial, but I feel like we need to just keep pushing forward and hope for the best. What else can we do?
There will be a VMO present at our trial at the end of this month, and I’m desperately hoping Auggie is thinking short that day… nothing to do but hope for the best.
Second, we got to put the target on the full height a-frame for the first time and it went SPLENDID. He really gets the idea of driving to the bottom now rather than hopping off halfway down. I’m hoping we continue to have success with that in the weeks that come and his bad habits don’t return.
J informed me that this spring we’ll be focusing on obstacle discrimination when it comes to things like a tunnel under an a-frame or dogwalk. “You’ll see that in open,” she tells me, as though she thinks we’ll soon be competing in open standard…
Let’s just get a SINGLE NA leg first, and then I can start worrying about open standard!
Anyway, I have many many many videos to edit and upload, and I will get on that soon, but finals are creeping up and I have been working on some large-ish projects that need to be completed… uh… well, Friday. So until I get a chance to really sit down and edit the videos, then post them all on YouTube, then write about it here… you’ll just have to believe me that Auggie did AMAZING on his last day of the series of five oxers!! Nice, even pacing, sailing over the jumps – just gorgeous!
Natural Jumping Method – Week 7
Week 7 is a series of five jumps with three oxers. The pattern is vertical, oxer, oxer, vertical, oxer.
LOTS of stutter-stepping as he tries to navigate this series. About halfway through day 2 he starts to even out as he figures out how to adjust, though during his fifth run he ends up stutterstepping WAY too close up to the bar and has to pop up over it… and if you pause it at just the right moment he’s making a hilarious face as a result. Day 3 goes pretty well, but I notice that he’s consistently stutterstepping up the last bar. I’m not really sure why that is – if it’s a matter of him not seeing another obstacle beyond the final jump, so he makes some kind of weird adjustment for some reason? I honestly can’t figure out why he would do this. It’s interesting, anyway.
Natural Jumping Method – Week 6
In week 6, you add another oxer. The pattern is jump, jump, oxer, jump, oxer. Since I had the pattern as jump, jump, oxer, jump, jump during week 5, I simple added my second oxer to the end of the chute. Hopefully that means my pattern during week 5 was correct!
Hey, check it out! My new fencing is up!
Let me explain exactly what is occurring during day one – the jumps are secondary to the other lesson that is going on here. Earlier that day, I learned some bad news and ended up having an anxiety attack (in the middle of work, to boot!) I came home that evening practically in pieces, stressed out, not sure how to deal with the situation I’d been handed.
I didn’t think about this when we went out to do our jumps.
Auggie completely and totally picked up on me being an emotional mess, and did not want to disconnect and go jump out away from me. I had to make a change in my emotional state to get him to go ahead (it helped that it was pretty funny that he pulled off the jumps like that to come back to me…) Clothier has you do two sets of three jumps with a fifteen minute break in the middle, so after the first three jumps and out break, I basically had to pull myself together and knock it off, or it was going to affect my dog and his performance.
This video really shows something about the relationship we have with our dogs, and how they can pick up on things and it changes their demeanor, their performance. Imagine if this were at an agility trial and we were working on a full course instead of just through a jump chute… he would NOT have been a happy Auggie if I were trying to put any kind of distance between us!
I ran out of SD card space on day 3 again so another clip is missing. During day 2 and 3, we have what looks like a serious setback here, because Auggie’s back to stutterstepping – a LOT. But at this point in my working relationship with Auggie, I know what’s going on here: the rules have changed so he has to figure it out again, and when the rules change, Auggie decides it’s better to resort to stutterstepping. That’s how we got to this problem in the first place.
I’m running with him or constantly moving in just about all of these runs because I’m watching his footing really closely. If you watch the day 2 video, you can see how his jumping changes even within the one video, within six runs. It’s kind of impressive, but again, I’m really hoping this is just a part of the learning process rather than being something where he’s not going to actually have confidence when it actually comes to an agility course where all you have is one shot to get it right. This is only week 6, we still have lots to learn, so no sense worrying about it yet.
(Oh yeah, and check out all my newly striped jumps in the day 3 video! I spent all Saturday afternoon with several rolls of multi-coloured tape, striping my standards and jump bars.)
Week 7 is three oxers. Ai yi!
Naturally Jumping Method – Week 5
Week 5 is the first week with oxers. An oxer is as wide as it is tall – in Auggie’s case, since we are still using 10 inch jump heights, this means I have two 10 inch jumps that span 10 inches. The book doesn’t tell you where to put the first oxer, so I guessed and put it as the third jump. All of the jumps are still spaced 90 inches apart; in this instance, jump 2 is 90 inches to the first bar for jump 3, there’s the 10 inch spacing between jump 3’s bars, and then from the second bar of jump 3 to jump 4 it’s another 90 inches. For the oxer stage of the program, that 90 inch spacing will stay constant.
It’s a bit hard for him to nagivate that oxer at first. I started putting our broad jump/spread jump word to it (“big jump”) after the first crash into it and he did better after that. This might be cheating because it requires me to be there cueing him to adjust for a larger jump, so he’s not really learning to look at the jump and just adjust on his own. But it makes sense for agility to me – competitors I know all use a word like “big jump” or “go big” for spread jumps, doubles, and triples to cue the dog “There’s a longer than usual jump coming up – adjust!”
During the second day, he crashes into the oxer the first time, but on jumps 2-6 he doesn’t make the same mistake again.
I don’t have day 3 videos because I screwed up with the camera. As the video says, the day went pretty much the same as the other two videos here, though.
Target Training Update
I’ve been pretty busy with the Naturally Jumping program, but we have been playing with target training still! Auggie got the concept very quickly, and I started playing around with throwing the frisbee (his target) across the room or down the stairs and making him “go touch” away from me. Last week, we were able to put the target on a piece of contact equipment for the first time… the teeter, which (luckily) is Auggie’s best piece of contact equipment anyway! As long as he can slow down (which usually requires me to be paying attention and tell him “EASY” if he gets to excited) he does just fine. It went really well, except for a lot of hilarity involving him looking across the room at the target and trying to go touch it before he was told. *facepalm* At one point he was in a sit, looked over at the teeter, licked his lips, and took off through the sequence – leaving me standing at the start, because if he breaks his stay and goes ahead of me I just stand there until he comes back to me – until he got to the teeter. Which resulted in me standing at the start, and him standing on the teeter doing his touch, looking rather expectantly at me.
It will probably be a little while until I’m able to put the target on the a-frame, which is fine by me. I want to have plenty of time to get the touch behaviour reinforced before I have to put it on the one piece of equipment that gives us trouble. If the weather does a solid warm-up and stays that way, I can get the mini a-frame out in the backyard and start with that before we go out to his breeder’s house for practice on the real a-frame out there. I’m anxious, and yet not… I don’t want to rush it, but I want to get on with solving this problem at the same time.
We’ll see. So far, so good – that’s all I can say!
Naturally Jumping Method – Week 4
Week 4 went pretty good! Moving the jump heights up to 10 inches didn’t seem to throw Auggie off much at all, so I’m glad. All of the jumps are still set at 90 inches apart.
During day 1, I ran with him on all of the jumps. Every now and then he does knock a bar… but Clothier says not to worry about dropped bars. She says it is a natural part of the process of re-learning how to jump and that every time they knock a bar it helps them think stuff over. I’m not sure why I don’t have all 6 jumps recorded – I must have had another issue with my memory card.
Day 2 was REALLY windy – apologies for my camera wrist strap blowing into the shot during one jump! I was worried the wind might throw Auggie off a little, but he did fine.
For day three… there is a reason I only have five jumps shown here and it’s not a memory card problem. But I’ll talk about the video itself first! My mom was operating the camera and she made a few observations. Auggie still stutter-steps up to the very first jump before he gets into the rhythm of the last four jumps. The first jump is the bar he usually knocks, as well – probably because of the inefficient jumping.
I tried a few other things with these jumps, including sending him ahead (wasn’t sure if he’d do that, but he did!) and standing right at the end to call him through. Usually when I call him through I’m standing back several feet and sometimes even run backwards as he approaches to build up his drive, so that was a little different for him – but he’s pretty much unphased by it, which is great!
Another thing I’ve been noticing is that he hugs the standard pretty tight. Clothier wants the dogs to run and jump in the middle of the jump, but because Auggie has done agility training for so long he has learned how to hug the standards and try to make things a little more efficient when it comes to turning, crossing, and so on. When I run with him or am behind him, he always takes the last jump right over the middle because he’s in the process of turning to me – if I’m right ahead of him, he doesn’t make that change and stays to the side, hugging the standard. I’m not exactly sure if I should be concerned with this or not. My instinct is to not be worried about it…
NOW… why there are only five jumps shown in the third day. My mom was working the camera for me that day because it was raining – just a light drizzle, but still raining, so I asked her if she would come out and stand over the camera with an umbrella so my camera wouldn’t get wet.
Right before we did our sixth jump, it started POURING down rain. I’m standing there going “Oh holy crap – hurry Auggie, hurry, go through the jumps!” I’m flailing around with training treats in my hand, trying to get him back into the channel to run through the chute, and for a split second Auggie stands there, tries to blink the rain out of his eyes… gives me a Look, and proceeds to run back to the house – leaving me standing out in the pouring (did I mention it was COLD RAIN?!) rain, yelling “YOU GET BACK HERE YOU LITTLE BRAT AND DO THOSE JUMPS!!!”
Thus, there are only five jumps in the video… because Auggie was standing up on the deck wanting to go inside and refused to come out and jump one last time.
Here, have a picture of my dog, after I came in and toweled off my hair and had to change my clothes because I was soaked through.
Look how proud he is of himself. Brat brat brat BRAT! He later asked to go outside, and when I opened the door and informed him it was still raining, he proceeded to go out in the still pouring rain and prance around going “La la la, I’m playing in the rain, la la la~” BRAAAAAAT!
Oh yeah – I bought a ton of PVC and spent a good portion of Saturday afternoon in the garage, listening to it thunderstorm outside and cutting pipes down. The two jumps at the beginning are my “Junior AKC” jumps from Toys R Us, and are now four feet wide, so they match the rest of my jumps (finally!) and I am now all set to add additional bar jumps to create an oxer for the coming weeks of the jumping series. I need to break out my coloured tape and start striping stuff again!
Sadly, it is quite cold again today. The beautiful spring weather has been replaced by… well, icky spring weather.
Naturally Jumping Method – Week 3
We’re into week 3 now, which leaves the jump heights the same, so we’re still at 8 inch jump heights.
He does VERY well the first day! Jump 5 is gorgeous! I’m starting to see real improvement. During day 2, I realized I forgot to put my memory card in, so I didn’t catch every jump we did. I also decided to try running with him to see what that did… I’m running funny because I’m in my snow boots and they aren’t exactly the best thing to run in, so it seemed to throw him off just slightly at the beginning. Then he kind of decided to ignore me and focus on the jump, and he did a lot better! During day 3, I started just running with him to watch his strides more than really running to run with him, so I’m getting a really good look at just how his strides are. Runs 5 and 6 are really great!
During Week 4, we will move the jump heights up. My jump cups for the two jumps I built (the final two you see in the chute) only go every two inches, so I’m going to have to move up to 10 inches instead of gradually moving to 9, then 10… I hope it’s not going to throw things off too much.
Next week is also the final week in our 8-week long agility classes, and I think I will stop for just a bit… give Auggie a few weeks to work on his jumping and nothing else. Once he starts to improve and the weather warms up, we’ll pick up again, probably going to private lessons back out at his breeder’s place! Gotta work on those contacts, too.
Natural Jumping Method – Round 1
I meant to start last week but things kept coming up. So as of yesterday we are in week 2. Week 1 is getting dogs used to jumps/jumping multiple jumps; Clothier gives people who have dogs used to that sort of thing, IE flyball, permission to go straight to week 2. We don’t do flyball but Auggie IS used to jumping a ton of jumps in a row, so I went ahead and skipped to week 2.
Please forgive my very ghetto jump chute… I am in the process of trying to decide on some kind of fencing to build the other side, and until then I’m using my two ex-pens and the plastic playpen I’ve had since Auggie was a wee puppy. Also please forgive some of the camera angles… I know it’s hard to see a lot of the jumps. I was still trying to figure out the best way to shoot the videos.
Some details: per the measurements and formula in the book, our distance between jumps is 90 inches. I had a lot of trouble deciding on what height to start working at, and ultimately I decided to start at 10 inches (Auggie normally jumps 12), and if it seemed that was too high to move down to 8. The jump heights were all set at 10 inches during day 1. During day 2, I went ahead and moved the jump heights down to 8 inches after the third jump. They will remain at 8 inches for a while.
During day one, he basically stutter-steps the ENTIRE length of the chute. I apologize for not having all six jumps filmed, but my mom was helping me and by “helping” I mean she was putting her terrible camerawork to use. Only four of the videos she shot were any good, so those are the four jumps I show.
By the sixth jump on day 2, he actually appears to run the length between the jumps (it’s supposed to be two stride lengths) instead of stutter-stepping the entire length between jumps. He’s still not taking normal stride-lengths; he still stutter-stepped just about the whole length of the chute. But he is smoothing out a little.
Day 3 gives us some better results and he really begins to smooth out more. There were multiple times that I could count the two strides between jumps. Day three was encouraging to start seeing progress already!
