Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Practice

"Out": set up a tunnel/dogwalk discrimination. Blocked the offcourse dogwalk with a lattice wing so he would do the "out tunnel". After a few tries removed the lattice wing. Success! Well, not really. Later on, after a break, he was back to taking the dogwalk. Some day, some wonderful day hopefully in the not too distant future we will start to acquire this elusive "out" skill!

Weaves: This field doesn't have weave-a-matics so we warmed up on some 6-weaves. He did very well with them so we moved on to the 12-weaves. Not good. Not good at all. I think his new nickname should be pop-corn. And a trial coming up tomorrow... yikes!

3 comments:

Elf said...

Instead of using artificial equipment (something to block the DW), you want to start with the real equipment but really easy. Like: Move the tunnel entrance 10 feet away from the DW and 5 feet before it, and with you not 20 feet away but maybe 5 feet. Then gradually move yourself farther away. Then gradually move the tunnel entrance closer to the DW. That sort of thing.

-ellen

Elf said...

And make sure that you occasionally get him to come in and do the dogwalk, too, so he's actually learning the Out and not just learning to always take the tunnel.

-ellen

Muttsandaklutz said...

Oooo, I like that idea, e.g. moving the tunnel entrance before the dw. I read somewhere about using gates to block the wrong obstacle when teaching "out" but I'm not crazy about using props that have to be faded. So I'll try the approach you suggested instead.