STITCH

the weBlog of a Service Dog, competition dog, pet and friend In Training

Stand on the table

Cues - Sit, Down, SorePaw, Sit from Down

On her side on the table

Great breakfast session. I put her on the grooming table and she immediately plunks her paws into a Stand, and right away we get up to 13 seconds. Not to say I just wait 13 seconds, but we go up two seconds at a time and arrive at 13 with no errors. She's so relaxed about Stand that she's starting to looking out the window at the birds and catalogue the grooming equipment on the wall in front of her. Probably not what I'd want from a competition Stand, but considering how hysterical I was about the whole thing last week, I'll be happy to take this. Stand X 30, giving her about 5 kibbles for each of the longer ones.

I put her on the floor and we get up to 7 seconds with no whining. I don't push it and she doesn't whine. Good. Then we try Sit-Down-SorePaw cues. Sit is very good, Down is good but she's popping up the instant her elbows hit the floor, and she has a little trouble remembering SorePaw - makes me wonder why I was so hysterical about that too. I guess I was just having a hysterical week. She may be popping up from the Down because we're working on a tile floor in the dog room. At this point I have two choices, I can go for decent downs - but I choose the other one. I start cueing Sit from Down as she pops up. Fun. X20.

We finish off the session back on the grooming table. I lay her down on her side, pet her tummy and Yes and feed her while she relaxes. Three weeks ago I'm sure I couldn't have imagined her lying down quietly on her side on a grooming table. Pretty soon I'm petting her tummy to GET her to relax and only feeding her when her neck is loose and her head is on the table. Wow.

20 sec-onds of Stand

Sit-Stand-Down cues

Relaxing on table

20 seconds! And I was hysterical about Stand last week. Duh.

We work entirely on the table at supper. After she demonstrates a very strong 20 second Stand in a freestack facing my right, I turn her toward me and we do X30 on Sit-Stand-Down. She's not spontaneously Standing or Sitting from Down, but easily goes into them with a small hand motion. Down from Sit or Stand, and Sit from Stand is excellent.

Then I put her on her left side on the table again. She certainly remembers that this is a position to relax in. Her front legs are still limp, and her back legs are much looser than before.

Stand and Stay on signal

Paws Up and starting to pick her up from there

Cues

Relaxing on the table, learning to have her feet scissored

I give Stitch a hand signal to Stand, then my admonishing-finger stay signal. She Stands up and remains standing.

Then I fix her feet a bit, give her a voice cue to stay, and she stays in the Stand for 10 seconds. Wowzers. What a silly thing to be so excited about!

To celebrate, we start working on Paws Up. Bending over is very difficult for me. Scuba stands up with her paws on me on cue so I can put her collar on. All this bending over to pick up Stitch is killing me. And, like most puppies, when I reach to pick her up, she leans away. We have to do something about this, and soon. I sit on a chair next to the grooming table, and lure her to jump her front feet up on my knees (yes, I'm teaching my puppy to jump on me). Once she's up, I click and treat her for leaving her paws up while I hold her ribcage/elbows as if I'm going to pick her up. Paws Up and stay up X 50.

Finally I pick her up and put her on the grooming table. We do a few Sit-Down-Stand, and a couple of Sore Paws. She offers me Sore Paw several times while she's lying down and we play with that for a while because it leaves her lying with crossed paws - the Princess look.

I spend 30 trying to lure her over onto her side, but she can't get past her elbow. It's sitting there holding her upright. Finally I give up and roll her off it onto her side. Immediately she remembers to relax her neck and rest her head on the table. I play with her feet X20, then figure, as long as I'm here, I might as well do something useful, so I get my scissors and see if I can get them near her feet with her relaxed. X20, and I can, so I start scissoring one hairy front paw. It takes 30 to keep her relaxed while I do it, but by the time we run out of kibble, she's got one very large front paw, and one remaining humongous great whomping front paw. I'll do the other one at supper.

Scuba was very touch-sensitive as a puppy. It took months to get her to accept me scissoring her body coat, and she's still not happy having me work on her feet. She'll stay while I pet her with my foot, but only under command, never voluntarily. My Giant Schnauzers have all been much calmer about touch, and I'm thrilled to see the puppy is more relaxed as well. Not to mention that even a week ago I wouldn't have put money on her lying on a table so I could scissor her toes.

Paws Up and pickup

Eye Contact on the table

Princess Paw

Paws Up

Princess Paw

Bath and dry

Apparently I'm not the only one in the family who can have hissy fits. She's going to bed with no supper tonight. Our routine is that Scuba gets the dog dishes, I feed Scuba, then Stitch goes out to pee, and then we work. Tonight she jogs to the door, runs outside, turns around and sits down, staring at me. I tell her to go on about her business. She stares at me, then she gets up and comes in the dog door. I call her back and tell her to go outside. She wags her tail and runs off to the grooming table where we've been training for the last few days.

Nyuh uh, short and furry, that's not the way life works. I go sit down and do some work at the computer. This annoys her. This Is Not The Way Things Are Supposed To Happen. She does Paws Up on me, but I'm working at the computer. She Sits and Stares. She Downs. She Princess Paws. She Paws Up and whines. She barks at me. This is not her little puppy "what's happening" yap, this is as close as she can get to a full-fledged get-off-that-chair-and-feed-me! bark. I work at the computer. Sometime later, when she's lying down (no doubt feeling Put Upon), I ask her to go outside again. Once again she runs out the door, turns and sits, then runs back in the dog door. Hoky doky. So here I am working at the computer again, after which I'll ask her one more time to go outside. If she goes, she'll get her bedtime cookie. If she doesn't, she'll go to bed hungry. And probably yap until the cows come home, and probably have to get up to pee in the middle of the night. I thought this might be because of her scissored feet, but she's been outside playing on them all day, so that's no excuse.

Late midmorning she decides she can pee outside whether she really has to or not. Two reasons this is important to me - first because I have dog doors. This means I don't get to moniter their output all the time. It's only good management to be able to tell what that output is when you need to. Second because I hope she'll replace Scuba as a service dog as she approaches retirement age (can this be possible? Why, Scuba's only 8 weeks... months... dang, years!), and for that she'll need to know in her soul that she goes when I tell her to as she may not have an opportunity later. Anyway, away she goes, and we start training.

I'm always excited when I discover a new training law. Here's another one. Never go for duration with a really hungry puppy. I'm asking for 2 seconds of Eye Contact, and she can't do it. She flicks onto my eyes, then she whines, Stands, Downs, Sits, gives me both paw tricks, paws me, yelps. I stop asking for duration. We do simple Eye Contact X20, and we get up to 3 seconds, but I invent a new kibble-delivery system too - 1 kibble for 1 second, 2 kibbles for 2 seconds, 8 kibbles for 3 seconds.

Then we do some puppy pushups - Sit, Down, Stand. I notice that in her eagerness she's sitting from Down almost immediately, so I start cueing Sit from Down. This goes very well. We do pushups X30, including Sit from Down AND doubles - that is, Sit, Sit, Down, Sit, Down, Down, Sit, Stand, etc - and she's hitting about 90% accuracy. And I know I'm not just guessing right because once in a while she starts to give me the wrong behaviour, startles, and gives me the right one. We switch to puppy pushups X50 with Princess Paw, Sore Paw, and hand target added, and the accuracy stays up there.

The food's starting to kick in. We finish the session with Eye Contact X 50, and we manage to get up to 4 seconds.

When I ask her to go out at lunchtime, she runs out and pees. Then she comes in and puts Paws Up on my chair by the grooming table. We play 300-kibble Eye Contact. 300-peck Eye Contact would be 1 second, c/t, 2 seconds, c/t, 3 seconds, c/t etc. 300-kb Eye Contact is 1 second, c/t, 2 seconds, c/tt, 3 seconds, c/ttt, 4 seconds, c/tttt etc. I don't know how many reps we do, but we go through 200 kibbles, at the end of which she's giving me a 70% solid 8 seconds. There's obviously some terrible nutritional deficiency from that one missed meal, as she's totally focused but having trouble concentrating.

At one point I switch to side-down on the table to get her to stop bobbing - she looks like one of those car-window dogs.

We spend the last 50 on puppy pushups - Stand, Sit, Down, Princess Paw and Sore Paw. She's got the the standard cues down 95%, Sit from Down is at 80%. I'm starting to switch her from the hand signal Stand to a voice cue, so I give the voice cue, then the signal. She hasn't actually anticipated the signal yet but she's getting very light - obviously READY to Stand when she's heard the cue. And once standing, she's very solid. I can move her feet, hold her tail, lure her weight forward.

All the work we're doing on the table is with the kibble on the table beside her. Even this morning, she never thinks to reach for the food beside her.

Supper continues lunch. Her concentration and ability to be still is increasing. We start with Eye Contact. She gives me 70% correct on 12 seconds, 90% on 10 seconds. To her credit, when she blows it, she's not leaving or wandering off, she's just thinking she should be offering something else besides. So she lies down. Or sits. Or swings her paws. She watches while she's offering these other behaviours, but she glances down to make sure the table's still there when she lies down, so I'm not counting that. She's doing pushups so fast I finally tell her Down. That helps. There's another trick to it - if she's going to keep watching for a long time, she slowly moves her head back. She reminds me of an ancient librarian slowly tilting her head to see through her bifocals. 150X Watch. I'm starting to use the cue.

That leaves 100X for pushups. It's so exciting to see her responding to all these cues!

Exactly how far is one expected to go in puppyproofing a room? I let her into the computer room the other day (mostly I'm using a laptop in the living room). There was a little suspicious rustling and I went to look - I had four llama fleeces in bags that were ready to enter in a show next month. One of them didn't survive.

Yes, that one was my fault. No question. What puppy could resist an entire plastic bag full of hair? BUT this afternoon she looked like she had her cheek glued to the kitchen cabinet. Huh? Then I realized - she had a drawer pull firmly in her molars. Eating the drawer pulls? NOT my fault!

EE HAH! We finish off Level Two this morning! I put her on the floor, sit down in my grooming-table chair, and ask her to Watch. She gives me Paws Up and Sit, but her eyes never waver, and she does it on one cue.

Upward and onward! We start on Down from Sit at 10' - she can probably do this right now with a Stay, but that's pretty complicated, so I stand on the opposite side of a baby gate and we work very quickly up to 6', then add Sit from Stand. X20.

Vet's coming this afternoon to give her another shot, we'll try the stranger hand Zen then.

We try Scent. Argh. I take 4 kibbles, show them to her, then "hide" them under a tiny plastic cup. Duh. She wouldn't THINK of knocking over a plastic cup just because there was food in it. At least not in the middle of working for her breakfast. I show her again, rest the lip on the kibble - nothing works. Finally I put kibble in one hand, cage it loosely with my fingers up, and show her that hand and an empty one. OK, she knows where the kibble is, but she still doesn't want to dig for it. Zen at its finest! I'm always amused by people who say they can't teach obedience because it will interfere with conformation. EVERYTHING we teach or ask for is compromised by something else. Down interferes with Sit. Zen interferes with Touch. And, as I find out in a minute, Nose Target interferes with Paw Target...

So for today, Scent is a bust. We move on to target. She's got a pretty good handle on Nose Target, and I made an error with Song and Scuba that I want to avoid with Stitch - I didn't differentiate between face targets and paw targets. I just pointed the dog at something and let her figure out what to hit it with. That's a problem for door-opening buttons and agility contacts, among other things. I was working gobacks with Song once, sending her back to whack a ring standard with her paw. My mind was drifting. Suddenly I realized that we'd veered several feet to the right and she was heading straight for the ring ROPE between the standards. My vision of her whacking the rope, bringing the entire ring down on her head, and never doing gobacks again interfered with my mouth, so I could only watch in horror as as she pulled back that huge paw - hesitated a moment, then reached out and BIT the rope. At any rate, Stitch is going to have a separate cue for paw and nose.

If I can figure out how to teach her paw target. I have a little pink plastic lid. I put her on the table and show her the lid. She gets no click for nosing it, biting it, bunting it. She loses interest in it. Put the lid in front of her and cue Down. Sure enough, she touches it with her paw on the way down. I put it on her right and cue Princess. She touches it again. I cue Sit and hold it where her Sore Paw will hit it. Great. Unfortunately she has no clue that the clicks are for touching the lid. In fact she seems convinced that I'm deliberately making her behaviours more difficult and she starts actively avoiding the lid. Argh.

The art of training is being able to break things down into tiny segments and explain them to the dog. English doesn't work (I've tried).

As we're on our way to the parlor to try again, I think of Go To Mat - a behaviour which requires her to put her paws on something. Now, I'm the Rubbermaid Queen. I have a billion and a half plastic containers of 8000 different sizes, and they all have lids.

We start with a tub lid. Perfect. The plastic makes a nice contrast to the carpet, the lid is big enough that she doesn't try to pick it up (more than once), and the next thing she thinks of is Go To Mat. It takes her 10 to realize that I don't need her entire body on the lid. Now she's giving me a two-front-feet lid stomp. Good.

I pick up the first lid and put down a slightly smaller one. She has to sniff each one before she can stomp it, but after that we get good solid stomping immediately. There are 6 steps in between the tub lid and the tiny pink lid, and there she draws the line. She's going to retrieve the pink lid. Argh.

Another brainwave. I back up to the previous lid and she stomps it with no problem. Then I put the pink lid ON the previous lid, and we finish the meal brilliantly. Training is so much fun!

We're a bit big for our britches at lunch. She passes the stranger-Zen from Level 3, then I test her on a bunch of other things. She cheerfully fails the Down and Sit cues from 10' away, the Distance work, the Down Stay and Sit Stay, and the Stand from Sit. By the time we're done, she's offering me Down no matter what I ask for. Whee. She does eliminate on cue, but even I have to admit the test for this is more a test of the observational skills of the trainer than it is of the dog. Still, she knew why she was there and she DID the behaviour.

Then we go back to the foot target. She tries to retrieve the next-to-smallest lid, we work X20 to get the paw stomp again. Then X50 to solidify it, then I add the pink lid on top of the other one. She tries to retrieve the pink one. Fortunately she puts her paws on it before she tries to pick it up (it looks a bit like a 3 Stooges routine), so I've got lots of time to click her before her mouth hits. By the time we've used up lunch, she's working 70% paw targeting the little pink lid no matter where I put it in the room, though if I get it more than 10' away, she'd rather hit it on her way to lying down on it. Good session.

I divide lunch in half. We start on the targets. Second-from-smallest target lid she remembers right away, stomping it decisively from anywhere in the room. X10. I put the little pink lid on top of it, planning on working that setup X10, but she stomps it so hard she sends the pink lid spinning across the floor, then stomps it twice before it stops. So I take the other one away and we work pink X20. Then I get a pair of scissors and cut the pink lid into two plastic coins, one 2" across and one slightly smaller.

Bummer. I put the larger coin down and she picks it up. Tosses it around. Spits it out, catches it, chews it. I let her work on it. Eventually (fortunately before it's totally dead) she drops it and starts searching the room for something to do, whining. Finally she comes back and accidentally touches it with a paw, c/t. OH, YEAH! Stomp. Stomp, stomp, stomp. I have a problem now. Whether she's going to mouth it or stomp it, she approaches it with her head down. It's so small I can't tell whether her foot is touching it or not. I put it on the rug in the dining room and I sit 2 steps down in the parlour. That's better, I can see it now, but me sitting below her floor unsettles her. She stands on the coin and offers me bows and a down that has her chin plastered to the coin. 20 more clicks and she's back to clean stomping. Maybe next time I'll put it on a semi-vertical surface.

Then we try the Get Lost game we did so poorly at several weeks ago. She's much better at it now. She makes excellent eye contact with me standing up, and there's no hesitation. As I turn, she turns with me. We have a problem, though. She remembers that she thinks the point of the game is to turn circles faster than I turn circles. She doesn't think about watching me as she turns. On the good side, when she thinks she's gone far enough, she grabs contact again. Argh.

I move close to a wall, and turn very slightly. As she starts to go around, I step into the wall, blocking her, and click when she looks up to see why I won't let her play the game the way she knows she should be playing it. X50, and she's still not quite watching me as she comes around, but she's correcting herself when she goes too far. Stationary contact remains excellent.

When we reach the end of the meal, we've got 30% correct responses. Next time I teach this, I'll wait for 10 seconds of good contact before I try turning.

She loses her first tooth and passes Level 2. I'm starting to expect her to respond to requests like a trained partner. She IS starting to respond like a trained partner. My baby's growing up.

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