Archie: Start-Line Stays and Contacts

I convinced one of the other folks in class to film me and Archie on Monday night. Here are some highlights!

It's been raining a lot up here in the Pacific NW so I've had to get creative with training in the house. I decided to tackle the start-line stay problem. Archie loses himself completely when I remove his collar and leash and toss them away. He uses this as an excuse to run off to check out other obstacles, people, bugs, etc. I tried to shape this behavior at home with the clicker. When I removed the collar and leash and tossed them somewhere else (in front, behind, next to), Archie was only clicked and rewarded if he remained sitting and looked at me (looking at the leash first is okay). Turns out, that didn't translate too well into the class setting. So I put his leash on for every run in class, made him sit, and if he broke the stay when I tossed the leash, I put his leash back on and repeated the start line routine. We discovered that the less I said, the better. Sit, stay, remove the leash, if he's still sitting, release him to the first obstacle. That's pretty tricky, really. The reward for holding the sit is me releasing him. But he is still getting plenty of rewards when he runs off. So he started choosing to let me release him over releasing himself.

In this video, he runs off when I remove his collar and leash, and sneaks in a bonus visit to the "ring crew" before coming back to me. It's a good demonstration of the basic problem.

In this video, I am resetting his start line by putting his collar back on. Not only is there manhandling (doghandling?), I'm using my dying rabbit voice to call him back to me. You can hear my videographer snickering. I'll certainly plan on toning down both in the future, although Archie is not a particularly soft dog and isn't put off by wrestling with me and his collar. Another clicker training project...

Archie gets to run the entire course in this one.