Lori & Skadattle, Sheltie, 1.5 yr, Canada – Spring 2023

Scent hurdle racing! What a great sport 🙂 We don’t have it here, at least not to my knowledge. So she has lots of skills already! But true, holding an object is a project on its own. A very challenging one for most dogs if you want to build it up perfectly.
To help her calm/compress herself more you can try to teach her to “hold her breath” before even introducing the dumbbell. You can just slowly travel towards her with the hand holding the treat and when you see her focus and tense up in anticipation, mark that moment and deliver the treat quickly after that. Repeat. At one point you should be able to have the hand with treat in front of her face (not entirely in her nose, you experiment a little to find a distance that suits her best) and she is fully “compressed” looking at it. Her mouth closed, ears pricked forward and even holding her breath in anticipation. Once you condition that mental state enough it will be easier for her to take the dumbbell and hold it more calmly. You were generally waiting well for her to not bark and be all over the place but you can drill this phase even more.

Separately you can play this game while playing with toys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSq8Hde-LxA . It is basically pausing the game in random moments and rewarding the “freeze” with more action again. Usually it is easier to introduce the concept when the dog is still in chasing phase and you are holding the toy and then gradually you try to do the same after the dog wins the toy and it is in his possession. If the video is not clear enough, feel free to ask questions. 🙂

And on loving your hands more… haha not a very uncommon problem. 🙂 You did the right thing to help her out with that. You can complicate things further by starting to move hands while still asking her to keep eye focus later on, but I am sure it won’t take too long before she figures it out. 🙂

Yes, that is very good! Much better! I don’t want her practising chewing for too long though, so try to see if you can mix what you are doing now with the exercise I posted a video of in my previous reply. Get her focused and compressed, give her the toy and really soon after she picks it up (not always immediately, make little variations in how long the “hold” is) get up and have her follow you around with the toy, then stop and freeze, mark the moment she stops with the toy still in her mouth, ideally not chewing, and start the party again…. See where that takes you. After some repetitions of party-freeze-party-freeze – take the toy away and restart the whole exercise with a static position, compressed focus and all that…

Looking good! She is a quick little dog, so she has very little problem with quick executions. So yes, you can focus mostly on verbal discrimination and fading out the body cues even. I sometimes add spins into the action before asking for sit/down/stay. It especially helps with sit – if they are too “front minded” in the moment you give the cue (I don’t really know how to explain what “front minded” means, but sometimes you can see how they are easy to switch the weight back and sit while other times they need more time to process).
When doing it in reverse heel, I would try to fade out the hand gesture as soon as possible for sit. Try keeping the hand up the whole time to keep her high in front. Move slowly and then give her a sit cue without moving the hand. Be really quick to go down and reward if she sits immediately. See how that works. If it doesn’t and she gets totally confused, go back to helping but in that case try fading it out as quickly as possible.
And she did very well not moving her feet too much!

I am sorry, I missed your post somehow. If you don’t hear from me for suspiciously long (and it is not weekend), feel free to poke me!

Hehe, no worries, it is good that you are able to catch yourself helping too much. Those were some very nice sits! Keep up the good job and try to be mindful of the signals.

Backing up in heel – when you back her up freely, can she hold a nice, straight line? First thing I would do is actually almost what you already did at the end of the video. Just get her to go from sit to stand without loosing position when you first start to move your leg. When that is ok, you can place a HF target behind her and just have her go one step back onto the target with you moving along with her. You can also try reverse backing up where you have her on your side but facing you (you can help her keep that position by luring) – so you walk forward, she walks backwards. You can help her navigate the head and therefore keep direction. If that is too hard, you can try using a barrier to get a few steps in a row without allowing her to loose position.

Oh, I am so sorry to hear that. My condolences. I know how hard it is. <3 Take time... no worries about the official ending of the class, if you want to post something when you get back to training, feel free to do so.