I think my explanation above must have been really bad. I’m kind of serious behavior geek about cueing. And I just was trying to explain that I wasn’t using them in the video that I sent. I absolutely use both – or at least I intend to use both!! There are times though when I’m trying to improve things like looking at the dog’s line that I then put all my focus there and I lose the quality of my other efforts on course. It’s a multi-tasking issue with my brain. 🙂 I’m always trying to improve on that.

My big issue based on those videos that I posted is that I’ve been getting frustrated because on course, I use my “words” and he tends to completely ignore them. I do think much of it has to do with working on small sequences. I get into a cycle of:

Train in the yard, things seem like they are going well.
Go to a show where things fall apart, I don’t feel like he even has the basics mastered, so then
I go back home and continue to work on the basics.
Then we never really start working on harder stuff because we keep going over and over and over the basics.
Thus, my frustration.

One other issue we’ve had is that I had a torn meniscus in my knee that was affecting my running up until the end of June this year when I finally had surgery! So as I’m recovering from surgery – it’s feeling pretty good now – It’s been a while since I could run well which had an impact on Ben’s training – it was very difficult for me to always be where I needed to be much of the time. So he likely developed some frustration and that’s a thing that I need to fix.

He does have some skills. This is from a seminar earlier in the year with Tamas.

(these are the highlights. We still had problems but did put a few sequences together. This was pre-knee surgery.)

My issue really is to have a systematic path to teach, test, and hopefully improve so that we can keep things together on show courses. I’ve got a beautifully trained, highly skilled, 9-year-old small dog. But what works for him, doesn’t seem to be working for Ben – not just on course – I expect that to be different. But even in training. They are different learners with different strengths. Somehow what I’m doing with Ben just isn’t working. 🙁

So whatever we have to do to start a path to improvement, I’m ready for it. I feel like I’m not planning for improvement in the right way – that is in planning what to do, how to measure, and how to move to the next harder step in our work. It seems like all of my little dogs progress rather well. Somehow it’s not working with Ben. I’m not sure if this makes collective sense, but hopefully, I can just focus on moving forward together.

I’m going to have to take him out in the yard by himself to see if he doesn’t look around on the start line. I’m going to think about some fun games to play with him on the start. Like starting out with a smaller lead out – basically releasing him before he can look away, then build it up to longer. We will also work on focus forward games.

I took down the bars today so that he could easily chase his toy. It was fun.

I worked on some of the lesson one exercises. Watching the video, I can see he may need some work on tightening up some of his turns.

First video – turns on the flat and around a cone. Turns out of a straight tunnel.

One of the basic courses – green numbers.

My concern with running Ben normally is that he could kill one of the terriers. I had to semi-retire Gus at 9 yrs due to disc issues and though I don’t know what caused it, getting unintentionally knocked in the side by Ben is high on the list of probable causes. I’ll see what I can set up and see if I can find a setup that doesn’t put either one of them at risk. Ben is 22” and almost 50 pounds and he’s a bit dangerous at top speed. I could actually try running Gus as well. He’s still fit and I still run him on jumpers courses. I’ll figure something out.

We did two more border collie assisted sessions. A repeat of the tunnel game. This one was a bit less organized, but they were having fun. At the end of the game, Theo and I were playing a game he learned when he was really young and I was working the retrieve to hand. This pretty much only happens with the ball. He brings it back and punches the ball into my palm. I pretend I’m trying to take it, but I’m just matching his effort. This gets him really crazy and you can see when he kind of starts to lose it. He will cross the line where he starts to get truly mad and I try to just hold him at the arousal level below it. He gets humpy and growly. If I let him keep going up he will get to the point where he might bite.

The we played the Ben runs agility game. Ben was kind of confused by the low jumps and the not going too fast. But I think you can get a good sense of Theo’s response. 🙂

Hi Polona! Thanks again for the always great feedback. I’ll definitely make sure I play more of the games with him from your first class. I’ve done the few that were my favorites, but I probably missed some others that would be useful.

I went up to Canada to work with Tamas this past weekend with my older dog and I was able to work with Theo in the young dog class for half a day. Theo was VERY happy about getting to play and the turf was a little bit slippery, but I was pretty happy with him actually having some skills 🙂 and a little bit of speed. He runs so much faster while playing, so I look forward to combining that speed with his skills. Which brings up a question I have about scheduling my training. I don’t want him to practice too much at a slow speed, but I also don’t want to delay his learning. How do you suggest managing skill training while also working on speed training? Tamas told us how he taught most of his verbals on one or two jumps, so obviously those aren’t being done at top speed all the time. I think that it’s probably okay for us to continue with handling skill training, right?

I put together a bunch of turning exercises. It’s a bit random, but I think I captured the basics.

Our offside cue is very weak. I’m planning to teach the in-in without the offside arm, so I haven’t dedicated myself to seriously teaching the off arm. Another reason, as you can see in the video, he’s still not really driving in and out of his behaviors. I decided about a month ago that we were going to focus more on run, run, run rather than twisty-turny stuff. I do understand he needs to learn both.

He’s got tons of play drive and has been doing sprint training with my BC. The issue is bringing those things over to our agility and skill work. (I had knee surgery at the end of June – so I was not able to really run with him for the year before and I’m just finishing up my recovery. It does feel good to finally be able to run with him. At this point he’s a dog who runs as fast as I do and I would really not to get stuck with that.)

I’m open to all ideas!!

I’m also working on building a strong CER for that orange toy (it has a food pouch). I want it to cue him that the fun is about to start. So we’ve been dedicated to using it just for training for almost two weeks now. As you can see, it has some value. He’s a dog who conditions very fast when he recognizes a familiar pattern. I’m trying to harness that for play with me and for agility.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by Mary Basu.