Cones and Clickers

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It’s almost springtime in the Pacific Northwest. We had a mild winter so the transition has been a subtle change from cold and damp to cold and less damp. Cold is relative, of course. I mentioned the freezing pre-dawn temps that I work in at the barn (the last cow had her calf this morning; we are almost done), but once the sun comes up, things warm up nicely. In other words, our winter has not been nearly as intense as what the rest of the US has been experiencing these past few weeks.

Even with the drier weather, the ground is still far too muddy to do much outside. My schedule with the cow project has been rather hectic and I come and go a lot. Since I always give the dogs a treat before I go, I plan ahead and do a few minutes of training with them a couple of times a day.

Azza is about as mature and stable as she will probably ever be so I decided to try her again on simple agility equipment. I’m only using a cone and a jump bar. And I’m using a clicker. She never really took to the clicker before but she’s pretty into it now. I wonder how much of her enthusiasm comes from sitting on the couch just a foot or two from Mimi, whose level of excitement for clicker training is quite impressive.

One of my training goals is to have the non-working dog wait quietly in one spot while I train the other dog. No crate, no restraint. But no barking or whining or leaving that spot. I frequently click and treat the dog who is staying quietly in the spot. It’s good for the working dog to see this--both of them have to get on board with the idea of sharing training time and space.

Another training goal is to have the dogs reliably go out and around a cone. I'd like to set them up to work backsides of jumps when we can get outside and have more room. Mimi’s problem has always been too much handler focus so I work more distance with her. Azza, well, I just want her to go around the darned cone. At first all she wanted to do was touch it with her nose or paw--excellent, rewardable behavior in most circumstances but not what I wanted. Sometimes I lay a jump bar on the ground with the cone at one end. Azza has been particularly afraid of the jump bars. But she has been doing extremely well with this exercise, diving around the cone with quite a bit of momentum, and taking a little hop over the bar without stopping to worry about it or acting like it will bite her. My long term goal is to get her to reliably jump real agility jumps set with low bars, say, 12 inches. She is of course physically capable of clearing much higher jumps but I just don’t think that is a realistic goal. If she touches any part of a jump, she shuts down. And if she knocks a bar, well, it may take days before she’ll even approach the jump again. So for now, it is a bar on the ground and a cone.

I also decided to convert two of Mimi’s behaviors into verbal cues only. She has a “spin” (she turns to her right) and “turn” (she turns to her left). I use verbals for these commands but she responds mainly to the hand signals. She is handed and performs the spin much better, faster, and more consistently. So I worked on the turn for a few days to get it in better shape, then I started fading out the hand signals for both, making them smaller and smaller until I reduced them to a finger twitch. I’m now insisting on the behaviors with verbal only. It’s funny to watch Mimi process this. She KNOWS what I mean when I say “turn” but she tries half the behaviors in her repertoire before she will do the turn without any body motion from me. She often tries the rally obedience “around” in which she moves from a position facing me, around my back, into heel position on the left side. She’ll try this two or three times, spinning in tight loops around me. And she always falls back on her favorite trick “beep beep” in which she backs up while facing me. But she is definitely making progress. It's a silly game, really, but she certainly enjoys it.

And the last trick that I'm working on is the two-dog heel. Mimi has been trained to heel on the left side. That's conventional. But for dog management purposes, I trained Azza to heel on the right. I happen to use the exact same phrase for both of them: get ready. So I'm working on putting them in sit stays facing me from a few feet away, then releasing them at the same time and having them get into heel position at the same time, one on each side of me. Also a silly game but quite amusing for me.

Let’s be honest here. Mimi’s agility competition days are long behind her. Azza will never compete in agility. That environment is far too complex for her to deal with. But there’s no reason not to keep their minds challenged and their bodies active. They like the extra treats too, of course, but having all my attention focused on them is certainly motivating for both of them.