Saturday, March 14, 2009

Obedience training videos

We were at the club practicing for a while today and I managed to get a short video clip of heeling and a video clip of finding one of the articles in the scent discrimination exercise. He's getting pretty good at going to the article pile, working the pile and finding the correct article quickly - however, the pace going out and coming back is really, really slow. Something we will work on later, after we are successful with finding the correct articles under stress and with distractions. Right now I'm working on building confidence by reducing the size of the pile - only five instead of the full set of eight articles - and making sure he goes right to work. He has a tendency to circle the pile and not wanting to put his head down and pick up the article when he is stressed and/or there are more distractions. Today there weren't many distractions at the club - just one other person working their dog - so working the pile was not a problem.



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh Jackson! I'm so impressed!! My human started to teach me to find articles but it was really hard - we use scent cloths and I just hated the feel of the cloth in my mouth...I kept spitting it out! We hadn't even got as far as many articles - she was just trying to teach me to pick up one scent cloth but I wouldn't even do that! Maybe it would be easier if we could use dumbbells like you...I do like retrieving my dumbbell. She says we need to spend some time working on this - but now we've got a dance performance coming up, we need to work on our new Canine Freestyle routine instead...and you know how us Danes can't hold too much training in our heads! :-) So she says the Obedience will have to wait!

My human says she is really impressed with your heeling - so good!

I'm really slow too, like you...I think that's a Dane thing, isn't it? We're just chillin' as we're doing stuff! Hee! Hee! My human finds that if she gets squeaky and excited, I move a bit faster! She also does this game with me where before she sends me out to get something, she says in a whisper "Ready, Set, Go!" - this gets me really excited! Normally, I hear this on the beach when we're about to start a race together!
Here's a video of me learning the Obedience retrieve for the first time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA_uxXTEqUU
- but that's as far as I got!

SLobbers,
Honey the Great Dane

Jennifer H. said...

Lovely heeling!! Falkor and I are both impressed!!

Shannon Rodgers and I were talking about how it seems that some male dogs have a hard time multitasking (hmmm I think some male humans do too LOL). So when they have to be thinking about more than one thing it really seems to slooow them down.

I commend you on all the hard work that you and Jackson are doing!!

Kathie R said...

Hey Jennifer and Honey, Thanks for the comments. And, Honey, I checked out your retrieve video - wow, what speed! We're going to try the "Ready, Set, Go!" Maybe it will work for us to :)