Mouthing dummy, holding birds poorly... Help :(

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Re: Mouthing dummy, holding birds poorly... Help :(

Postby Kerry Webster » Mon 20 Oct 2014 2:38 pm

I agree with Sally, Michael.

Take it slowly.
My goal in life is to become as wonderful as my dog thinks I am.
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Re: Mouthing dummy, holding birds poorly... Help :(

Postby Michael Kontou » Mon 20 Oct 2014 4:37 pm

Kerry Webster wrote:I agree with Sally, Michael.

Take it slowly.


Thank you Kerry.

And thank you all, the responses have been very helpful.
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Re: Mouthing dummy, holding birds poorly... Help :(

Postby Michael Kontou » Mon 27 Oct 2014 1:18 pm

Well just to update a few who are interested, she is very much improved. I can now set the dumbbell up on an angle and she will move around and grab it from the middle every time.

I won't take this as to move ahead to the next steps too quickly, we will just get a little more polished and I will continue to challenge her with picking the dumbbell up from different positions before we move to short retrieves.

Thanks again all,

Michael
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Re: Mouthing dummy, holding birds poorly... Help :(

Postby Sally Haynes » Mon 27 Oct 2014 1:43 pm

Wonderful Michael! Well done and I bet you learnt as much as the dog did!!!

I popped back in to post a couple of videos I took when I was teaching Em to retrieve a tissue. I came home from work late one night and this was the first session we tried it using some of her dinner as treats. Although it's not a dummy or pigeon it will give you an idea of what I do when the dog gets it right (i.e. party!) and what I do when the dog gets it wrong (no big deal AND/OR make it easier). Clearly she had trouble differentiating between retrieving the tissue and the whole box as she started to throw a few known tricks at me. Once I went back to generalising picking up the tissue off a number of different surfaces (cat scratching tower, magazine rack etc) it started to click - just shows you what looks easy to us is confusing to the dog. After a few more sessions she now retrieves a single tissue out of a box (sometimes I hide the box for extra fun) whenever I pretend to sneeze. It's a fun trick but I get a lot out of teaching my dog like this in terms of reading her body language, understanding when she's confused and when she needs help in other parts of our training.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8yv_CTAsyo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v1M_7dKlqI
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Re: Mouthing dummy, holding birds poorly... Help :(

Postby Michael Kontou » Thu 30 Oct 2014 1:20 pm

Thanks Sally, it was your advice (and others too of course) that really helped, especially when you mentioned 'allowing her to make a mistake' so I can correct her. It is so simple and something I forgot at the time, now with what ever we do that quote is in the back of my head!

So we are good enough with the dumbbell that I want to go back on the table with some other objects. I have a range of bumpers I want to work through, then we can start on my freezer full of pigeons.

I will try and get a video up (or a link to one) so show progress.
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