Here are some videos of me playing around with the jump in my yard with the food tosses. I started with the jump pole on the ground and just did food tosses back and forth. Then I raised the bar to the lowest setting and he still did great. Then in my next session I tried doing some sit and waits, and then a release over the jump, as that’s something we had trouble with at agility (the sit and wait was like an off switch and then I lost engagement). I think he did great for his first session at this! Let me know what I should do from here.

Thanks for your feedback about Monte’s distractions. I’m going to see what I can do to help him out – possibly trying to ensure he’s had more physical exercise before a class, possibly trying to satisfy his play drive with other dogs more often so he isn’t as starved for dog interaction.

I’m not sure if I can satiate his drive for play with his brother before a class – his brother’s owner is generally unable to get to class early for that, and my schedule often won’t allow it either. We could potentially get the dogs together on a different day, but I’m not sure that will help since I feel like it might reinforce to Monte that his brother is someone he had a lot of fun with recently, and he’d like to play with him instead of what we’re doing at the class.

As a side note, the owner of Monte’s dad just babysat him for 9 days while I was away, and she said he never tired of playing with her dogs – to the point she would have to crate him to make him stop and rest. After several days, her dogs were telling him off when they were tired and he would listen to them and wait for one of them to be willing to play with him. The reason I mention this is that his drive for play with another dog can be very high, and I’m not sure I can satisfy it in a short time before class. I’ve tried to walk with his brother a short distance to a dog off leash park when they were younger and could not get them to stop wrestling to walk – and then we pretty much had to drag them and try to run to the off leash area. Just so you have a sense of how crazy he is for dog play.

Monte does also go absolutely crazy for the owner of his brother – possibly also due to the association with his brother. So if he smells her or hears her, he is super distracted and looking for her. I have tried to allow her to say hi to him before a class (when there’s time), and sometimes that helps. The hard days are often ones where she has arrived late, we have already started doing things, and then he hears her or sees her (or smells his brother) and loses all focus.

I’ll work with the nosework trainers to potentially shorten his searches, make them easier (pair them) or even possibly remove him from the search if he’s showing that he is making the decision to not work and track other things instead.

Hi – I have a question about working through distractions and how to build that. Is it something that gets better with age? Is there a way to break through the distraction and get him engaged? I’ll give you a specific instance that happened last night, but this same situation has happened to us before at agility, nosework and tracking.

We were at our nosework class last night, and his littermate has recently joined the same class. He absolutely is obsessed with his littermate and the owner of his littermate, and when he smells either of them in the environment or sees them, he completely loses his mind and frantically tries to track them. For our second 2 searches last night, his brother had been in the search area just prior to Monte. He could not focus at all to search for odor once it was our turn – he ran from place to place in the space tracking him, and was completely distracted from what he normally enjoys doing.

This was the same behaviour that Manca saw when Monte and I did a lesson immediately after his brother – he kept disengaging and going off on his own mission to find where his brother had been.  He’s done this at tracking when he heard the voice of the owner of his brother and then could not focus at all to track because he wanted to see her. Even when given a chance to see her, he still didn’t get back to work and was so distracted.

These are examples with his brother, but there have been other situations where a new dog joins our agility class and it completely throws him off for a couple lessons.

What do you do with dogs like this? Will these play games help ultimately? Or is he just going to take a long time to mature and get less excited/distracted about things? I find it so frustrating when he does this as I feel like his mind is gone and he is not interested in me at all.

No he wasn’t with me for our trip. I’ll go back to lessons 1 and 2 and send you some videos

Hi – just wondering if you have any feedback about my training videos? I think they might have gotten buried by my other question. Let me know if there’s anything I need to adjust in my playing. Thanks!

Here are several play videos from today to show you a good sampling of our typical interaction right now. You can see he is slow to start but then once he realizes we are going to play, then he stays pretty engaged. He definitely gets more engaged with chase games. I’ve been using the hand touch/chase the hand more in different environments and it’s been going well – eg last night at Nosework I used this after he was excitedly visiting with a person he loves right before we were to go in and try a timed blind search. I got his focus back on me and got him excited to go play and search. That went really well (and he aced his search, finding all 3 hides in the fastest time!).

For the toys, the blue fleecy toy is one he knows from agility as it’s the one he loves to be rewarded with after a run. He does get distracted by it if he sees it while running agility so I have to hide it in my shirt. You can see that he doesn’t tug super hard with me – he latches on, but mostly wants to hang on and be towed around. He definitely doesn’t want to lose the toy, but I don’t get as strong tugging game compared to with my son, or even Manca, who he really wants to win from! With me, he is more polite. He definitely gets excited about chasing the toys. He was getting tired by the end of the toy videos as I did all of these sessions back to back, so that was a long play. I’m not sure if I ended the session correctly – when he lies down and decides he wants to just chew the toy.

https://youtu.be/GRUAfEmwyrw?feature=shared

Monte and I played the hide and seek game today and I think it went pretty well!

The above post shows Monte playing the Poke Me game and the Engagement/Jump up games tonight. He was a bit tired so was a bit lower energy/enthusiasm than normal, but not too different than his usual. You can see that he does get more excited when jumping up is part of the game – he LOVES to jump up on things including people! He’s definitely understood the poke me game but he’s still pretty polite about it – he doesn’t get particularly excited for food toss games although he will go get the treat, just not at a fast pace.