The finish is one of the two things I've decided to focus on for our winter training projects. The other one is fronts, but we haven't started our new games with that one yet. Today we started working on finishes with a new game. A game I'm hoping will speed up his around finish and result in him being closer and straighter at the sit end of it. Aside from speed never being his strength in finishes - especially in a trial - he often times ends up sitting too far out and forward, and crooked. The crooked is usually rear-in because he sits before he gets his rear in position.
A big thanks to Melinda (Exercise Finished) for posting the 'around... and run!' game on her blog. You can read the details on her blog, but basically the first phase is as follows: using a treat in your right hand lure the dog around behind you, then use the treat in your left hand to keep him in tight. When you see he is coming around, you take off running. Later on you will transition into adding the sit command and eventually losing the treats. I tried this for the first time today at the club and am really happy with the results. In my version of the game, I end up throwing the treat because he loves to chase treats and it keeps him going.
I think this game is really going to work for him. He loves it, and hopefully, it will speed him up and keep him in close to me when he comes around so he will be in better heel position. And, maybe if I do this all winter, it will carry over into the ring next spring!
Here's a short video of our first go at this.
And, not to leave Jolee out - I'm trying the game with her too, so here's my first go at it with her.
There was a fun match at the club where we train today so I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to train in a more trial-like setting. I wanted to see how the article exercise would go with distractions and what his overall attitude would be. I have entered a trial in the same building two weeks from today. I have 60 days from when we received our UD title to still enter Utility A, so my thought was to enter our club's trial to see if his performance of the article exercise is still holding and where we are with other exercises. He's never done well at a trial in the building we train in, so this may be a good test of his progress with the article exercise. It will probably be the last trial we will enter until next spring, so it will be our benchmark to measure our progress over the winter. Depending on how much we progress through the winter will determine our goals for next spring.
I'm excited that the articles went really well. No circling the pile today. He just went out and started working the pile and found the correct article fairly quickly. The moving stand, gloves and directed jumping were also good. His go outs were straight and the jumps were good. He fulfilled the basic requirements of each of these exercises.
What needs work - The signal exercise gave him a slight problem. He anticipated the down signal so we restarted the signals. He did them fine on the second attempt, and he even trotted in on the come. The anticipated down would have NQd him in a trial. I'm not too worried about that though because it's something we can work through.
I am somewhat frustrated with his attitude (specifically lack of attention and lack of briskness) in a trial-like setting. It's really not surprising though, because we have struggled with this from the very beginning. However, I am getting more frustrated that I haven't found a way to get the positive, happy attitude I see in practice to transfer over to a trial-like setting. He becomes distracted, worried about what's going on in the next ring, and he reallyslows down. I'm not sure if he needs an attitude adjustment - or maybe I'm the one that needs it : ) Maybe I should try to be more upbeat in the ring. Perhaps he can sense my frustration. Maybe I should change my expectations and accept his slowed down performance in a trial. Maybe he's never going to show the briskness that's required to avoid points off. Hmmmmm... some thoughts to ponder over the winter.
I'm thinking now I will continue focusing on attention and briskness in practice, but not get frustrated when I don't get it in the ring. Because, really, once you get in the ring there's nothing you can do about it then. How's that for compromise?????
We're back at the club training regularly - trying to pick out one or two things to really focus on. In her recent newsletter, Susan Garrett talked about her winter training projects. Susan does agility, but has lots of good information in her posts that applies to obedience training and developing a relationship with your dog that I have really found helpful. Her winter training plan involves picking a new behavior you'd like to teach or a behavior you wish to change and then work at least two, 15 minute sessions a day, five days a week during the winter on that behavior.
So, I'm trying to pick a winter training project for Jackson. My challenge is training twice a day in the winter. Since the weather here is not conducive to training outdoors in the winter, I'm trying to think of a behavior that I can work on in the house. That in itself has some challenges when you have three Great Danes in the house and you need to separate one of them to train : ) I'm narrowing it down to the following: 1) Attention with/without treats and with distractions; 2) Touch (training Jackson to touch my chest at a point that gives him perfect fronts); 3) Pivots; or 4) Finishes to perfect heel position.
He loses a lot of points in the trials because of slow, crooked fronts and sits, so if we can get these fixed, we'll do a lot better in trials. I'll let you know what I end up choosing and how it goes.
Last night in utility class and today at the club we worked on articles. No problem with these in practice. No circling - even with distractions of other dogs working in the ring. I obviously need to take this on the road - go to new places with distractions, like the local pet store where he gets really distracted just walking through the store. I want to start going there once a week just to do articles somewhere in the store. And, we have some fun matches coming up locally this next month, so these will be good opportunities to train in a more trial-like setting.
After taking a couple weeks off to regroup, we are back with a new plan and new goals. We love to train, so we needed to set some new goals to help us focus.
We had already entered a three-day-trial this weekend before we earned our UD two weeks ago, so we decided to go ahead and go to the trials and just relax and have fun. Since we didn't need any more qualifying legs, I thought it would be less stressful and I could just see how things would go. Besides relaxing and having fun, my goals for Jackson this weekend were to get some consistency in qualifying and improve his performance. Well, we didn't get the consistency, but I was very happy that we fixed his endlessly circling the article pile behavior - at least I think we've fixed it.
His circling the article pile became increasingly worse with each of the last few trials. The judges have been willing to let him continue his circling - and even sometimes walking away from the pile to survey the audience - as long as he kept moving and came back to the pile and picked up the correct article. However, I had decided that he just couldn't continue that behavior, if we hoped to keep competing at the UD level. I do allow him to circle the pile once in practice because he air scents. In practice, he will usually circle the pile once and then go directly to the scented article without sniffing any others. However in a trial setting, he will circle endlessly. So, the first two days of this weekend trial became training opportunities for us. Now, you cannot 'train' in the ring at an AKC trial, but some judges will let you give second commands, which will automatically NQ you, but it will give you an opportunity to interrupt a behavior you don't want to see. Another thing that was really helpful this weekend was the club rented ring time after the trials Friday and Saturday, so you could 'rent' the ring for 5 or 10 minutes to work on some things.
Day 1 trial - First article - He circled the pile a few times and walked away from the pile, so when the judge motioned for me to call him in, I gave him a second command to 'find it' and the judge allowed him to go back to the pile and pick up the correct article. Second article - When he started his second circle around the pile, I again gave a 'find it' command and the judge allowed him to go back to the pile and pick up the correct article. Sometimes judges will not let the dogs go back to the pile.They will have you call them in without the article. I was fortunate this weekend to have judges that allowed him to finish the exercise.
He doesn't appear to be stressed. He just seems to be really distracted and more interested in looking around than working. To impress upon him that he had a job to do out there, we worked on this in the ring rental time later that day. One of my friends from our training club helped me with this by setting up the ring like it was a regular trial so we could get the behavior. When he started his circling routine, I didn't say anything to him, I just walked out, picked up the correct article and tossed it out of the pile. Then I took hold of his collar, took him to the article and told him to 'take it' in no uncertain terms. Now, to him, that's a correction and seemed to get the message across to him that he was expected to go out and retrieve something. We did a couple more articles and he went right to work - no circling. Then our five minutes was up.
Day 2 trial - He NQd right off the bat when he missed the come signal, so I did not hesitate to give him a second command when he started to walk away from the article pile on the first article. He went back to the pile and picked up the correct article. Second article - he went directly to the pile and picked up the correct article. Hmmm, I think he might be getting it : )
I rented the ring again after the trial to work on articles some more. No corrections needed this time - he went to work immediately without circling. Maybe there's hope for qualifying the third day. I think fun matches are essential in training because you get those types of behaviors in the ring that you don't see in practice, and there's not a lot you can do to correct it when you're in the trial.
Day 3 trial - He qualified! More importantly, he did not circle the pile. I'm thinking - this is a breakthrough! I've not posted videos of his scent discrimination exercises before because they go on and on and on - sometimes for 3-4 minutes. Yikes! However, today's second article took only 39 seconds!
Our Goals - Okay, our short term goal is to improve his performance of some of the exercises that we are having problems with. They are sometimes good enough for him to qualify, but we still need to work on precision, consistency and of course speed. So, our plan is to continue training the utility exercises through the winter to try to get more precision and speed. If the training goes well, we will try working on our UDX next spring.
For those not familiar with the AKC UDX title, it entails qualifying in both Open B and Utility B at the same trial on the same day - 10 times. It is an awesome challenge for us. I believe there are only a few male Great Danes that have achieved a UDX title, so we have a lot of work ahead of us if we're going to try for that.
Our goal for 2009 is to earn the Utility Dog (UD) title. We are new at this, so we appreciate any comments or suggestions you may have about obedience training. Thanks for stopping by!
