We have been having a devil of a time with the "phone book" exercise in Agility Foundations, namely, get two back feet on the phone book. We had little trouble with two front feet but 1. changing the game 2. expecting back feet when dogs have much less control/awareness of them and 3. trying to increase criteria have left me with a very frustrated puppy! He's started vocalizing when I get the phone book out. I feel this exercise is kind of dumb but my instructor insists this is the way I should do it (no luring, no teaching to back up first without the phone book). Today after finally (sort of ) nailing two back feet on, she wanted us to do a sit on the phone book. This just about broke my puppy (although , or maybe because, he was frequently offering a sit on the phone book when two front feet stopped working).
He's also having some difficulties with focus/motivation right now. I hope it's just an adolescence thing, but I suspect it might have something to do with his handler :(. I am afraid somehow I'm dampening his motivation, by not making it fun enough, decreasing frequency of rewards, or being too predictable.
I'd really like to find a rally class we can take, but my schedule is so busy none of them are fitting in, sad.
Wedding planning is taking over many spare moments as well.
2 comments:
I'm not a big fan of free shaping entirely. I think it makes sense for a really active, what-do-you-want-me-to-do type of dog, but with my ex-racers they tend to start out a little frozen. Just stand there and wait. So I find that I do have to lure and help them a bit initially. Later they can shape, but they need for the clicker and training in general to build a lot of value first. Maybe you could start with just a large thin book and by changing your position, maybe your dog will accidentally touch it with a rear foot. My main goal is that I don't want my greyhounds to go a long time without feedback... so if 20 - 30 seconds pass, I do start to help. Sorry for the long comment!
Jen
I love long comments!
I find that once my dogs know a few things that have been highly reinforced, they have "default settings", if you will. For example, Ziggy has been heavily reinforced for laying down calmly when no instruction has been given, so we get a lot of laying down on things, near things, etc. maybe I used too much luring early on?
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