Even though it was a cold (for Florida) morning yesterday, I decided to head to the dog club to train. Our “building” is basically a covered concrete slab, but it is better than nothing, and we have a good group of people in the club. So, we bundled up and headed out.
Since Gunner had a couple of days off of “formal” training, I decided to just work on a few foundation skills...go-outs to a target, rear end awareness and dumbbell pickups. Here is a dog who has over 400 OTCH points, doing go-outs to a target, while someone in the next ring did complete exercises from start to finish. If you know me, the devil is in the details. I work small pieces of exercises, trying to improve each detail of our performance. That’s not to say I train those pieces perfectly, but we do train them. :)
I want to make sure Gunner's go-outs stay fast and straight, so we started with short go-outs and I rewarded heavily off of his target. We then worked back to full length go-outs, with me still running up and rewarding him for hitting his target. I asked him to turn and sit a couple of times before rewarding him and he happily obliged. At one point, I told him to jump....and instead, he went back to hit his target. Yay! This allowed me to correct a failure to jump, the same thing that happened at a trial a couple of weeks ago, when he decided he better go back and hit his stanchion....twice. Oops! I did not tell him to "jump" again, instead I gave him a NRM, went to him, put my hand in his collar and took him towards the jump. Then, while giving my hand signal, I told him to jump and praised him for going over the jump. To test him, I did a few more go-outs with target touches, then asked for a sit followed by a jump. He didn't hesitate before heading for the correct jump. Good thinking on his part, but this is probably a drill that needs to be repeated once and awhile.
If I had gone to the club and only done complete exercises, this error would probably not have surfaced. Gunner's go-outs and responses to cues would also continue to get slower and less sharp. Forget the formality and train your dog, don't test him. I don't care how much "fun" you try to cram into an exercise from start to finish, if you do the same exercise over and over, you become predictable and boring. Your dog gets enough of that in the obedience show ring, don't let it carry over into training too.
Train hard. play harder.
Shannon
