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Obedience course Tuesday night. Fenris was amazing. I had a pang of worry when the instructor reassigned the groups (“Oh no, we have to desensitise from scratch!”), but it was just me … worrying. Fenris is (at least in this context) starting to generalise the process of getting close to people. We were on 3-5 minute mini sessions, rotating between the group members, and Fenris needed only a single session of sausage and sniffs to decide these were ok people. Even a man, which tends to be a bit harder. Dog people are good at doing the right thing to make it easier for the dog.

This carried over into our next sessions, where we started working on moving distractions, and people walking past us. Fenris didn’t really get Concerned before they passed us at about 5-6 meters. But again, since ‘dog people’, a simple “stop!” from me was enough to calm the situation down again. He was below threshold the whole lesson (well, except the time those two riders walked their horses on the road past the area – that was scary).  Considering that this is a dog who normally gets scared just by seeing anyone approach 40 meters down the road, the progress is very encouraging.

Over about 6-7 sessions we worked Hold the dummy-stick, position changes, focus, recalls, drop-downs and Rally stays, (lots of “mum, let’s go check if that man has more sausage”), and a little bit of jumping tricks to keep the fun up.

Steps to Success

Zen 2 – On our walk Wednesday, I accidentally dropped a palm sized slab of dried chicken treat. Fenris pulled it out from under my foot, and I realised his ‘Leave It’ cue is poisoned so badly, it’s not just dead, but possibly an archeological sensation. I need to rebuild this with a new cue from scratch, and this time NOT use it unless I’m 100% damned sure (and that goes for all other people and family members around, as well) he’s going to do it. Right now, ‘Leave It’ means ‘Run as fast as you can to beat the others to the prize’, which is not entirely what I planned.

Focus 2 – Getting some nice movements outside 5-10 steps, depending on the day and mood.

Handling 2 – brushed today.

Awesome Obedience

Position Changes – drop-downs at the course, no problem – even a full Stay while I walked around him, he kept his hind legs and hips straight. Beautiful. On the minus side, at heel, every position change has him drifting slightly more out from my side, so we’re going to have to work on that.

Other stuff

Monthly box arrived Monday, but with a fillable Christmas calendar rather than a toy this month. Not really interested in something I can only give him one of per day, so we grabbed that for us, and bought a cheap squeaky toy Tuesday to encourage him at the course. (Particularly to entice him into the car, and keep his attention.) It’s kept its squeak for two days, though, so maybe it wasn’t as cheap as it looked.

And then the ‘oh my god, what have I got myself into’ bit. The idea is to program push buttons with spoken words, so that the dog can push them to ‘say’ what they want. Have you read about Stella at hungerforwords.com? Go, read. She explains it better.

This is next generation dog training. Ways of helping the dogs ‘speak’ their minds, beyond pawing at drawers or ringing potty bells. I bought a set of four. The plan is to start with ‘train’, ‘out’, ‘chew’, ‘play’, I think. Of course I’m now a bit paralysed with ‘where do I start’, but I really need to just get that battery in there and just do a quick intro session.

Stella’s owner, a speech pathologist, works with people rather than dogs normally, and has taught it purely by modelling (the alternative for her was ‘hand over paw’ showing). I see other dog trainers are picking it up and using some mix of modelling (trainer clicks button for ‘out’, then they go out – until one day the dog does it themselves) and shaping (training sessions to ‘make’ the dog click the button, and rewarding appropriately (out for ‘out’, play for ‘play’, etc)).

The delivery cost was a bit high – otherwise I’d have picked up eight instead, adding finish, pee/poop, treat or water – he actually knows quite a selection of words; the hard part is picking the ones we use often enough that it’s easy to train.

The hunger blog also comments on what is (in her field of study) core words and fringe words. We only have enough buttons for cores – fringe words would be things like names of family members, specific toys, specific games like chase or fetch or find it, etc. Maybe years down the road. We will see.