Blog20weeks

STITCH

the weBlog of a Service Dog In Training

20 WEEKS OLD


I'm still semi-conscious from the week at the llama show - I'm allergic to hay, straw, dust, etc, so being in a sand-floored dusty barn with hay and straw, and running back and forth and showing and being show secretary - it leaves me pooped for a couple of weeks. I need something fun to get me back into training, so we go outside. I've got the dogwalk taken apart for the llamas to walk the boards, so I get Stitch walking the boards. Excellent, and she stops automatically in the yellow at the end. Woo hoo. We working up to it, so I won't count it today, but she's very secure. We walk past the teeter at full height on the way in to the house, and she tells me she wants to work on it. Last time, I got her going up to the fulcrum. Then I took her off and put her back on at the fulcrum and led her down, easing it to the ground. She's a bit leery of getting it on it. She wants to walk her front feet up and leave her back feet on the ground. I reward that X20, then stand in her way so she can't get her front on up as high as she wants to. The only way to reach high is to get right on the board. So she does. I let her eat handfuls at a time, and X5 brings her to thefulcrum, where she reaches the end of the handful and jumps off to start again. Another 5 gets her past it, and waiting there while I get more food out of my pocket. The first time the board tips, she thinks about bailing off but decides she'd rather kibble all the way down. X3, and I feed her while it's tipping, then let her walk down on her own and stop on the contact. EE-HAH.
She easily accomplishes the board walk and stop on the contact. In fact, she runs over and does it before I get there, stopping and turning to stare at me when she gets to the end. "Well? Click, dammit! I'm waiting!" She's decided, however, that she's not as brave about the teeter as she thought she was. It isn't a setback, we were working WAY ahead of ourselves this morning. X30 gets her back to the fulcrum. I pick her up off the ground and put her there X5, and she's still fine with walking down after the tip and stopping on the contact. She just can't put them together yet.
I'm not over last weekend yet. I have a splitting headache and visitors. Stitch has a puppy class. Stitch is awful. It's like she hasn't been trained for the last week at all. (hmmm). In the first place she doesn't want to get in the car. Then she whimpers in her crate most of the way there. She wants to go play with the other puppies. I have to stand on my head to get her to come (she was good at this last week) (She Knows This) (I want to strangle her). She won't Sit and at one point I find myself actually reaching for her butt to push it down. Argh. The instructor comes over and looks at me and I realize/explain that she's got an eye infection and the drops I'm putting in her eyes sting a bit, which is why she's leery of sitting near me. The *%^#$ instructor says "So it's not Stitch's fault?" I want to strangle her. Of COURSE it's not Stitch's fault. HowEVer, one reason I'm attending this class is that the instructor, unlike many, has the guts to say things like this to me. I put Stitch on a tie-out on the other side of the room, sit back down and pull myself together. When I go back to get Stitch, she's happy to see me. I start clicking a LOT for a loose leash, and I start (surprise) getting eye contact, so I click for that. We do some loose leash walking, and I click for that. By then Stitch is into the game enough to do some Zen - she's brilliant at this and actually does Zen instead of wanting to visit other puppies. When we're done, I ask the instructor to test her on 20 seconds of hand Zen, which she passes (ahem) handily. She also passes all of Level One, but my headache is too bad to bother with the Come Game. We'll leave that for next time. When we leave, she thinks about not getting in the car for a minute, then climbs right in.
After supper, my headache is worse and I take Stitch and go to bed. I just want her to lie down on the bed with me, but she thinks this is outrageous. She yaps and fusses. Finally I turn her upside down in one arm beside me and we both go to sleep. As I'm falling asleep I'm thinking "Leave her for a week and she doesn't even know how to fall asleep on the bed!"
This week she's going to get a regrown rear dewclaw removed. We're planning on doing this without a general anaesthetic, so I need her shaved and well-behaved. We spend breakfast shaving her and working on lying on the table. Considered both our behaviiours yesterday, she's wonderful. She doesn't try to get up at all when I put her on her side on the grooming table. I reward her every minute or so, and she stays very well. When I get to shaving her back feet, she whimpers a bit, but still stays. Since I've got her back end shaved, I do her muzzle as well, then brush out her pack and do a little stack-on-the-table work. She's brilliant. I think there's a photo of her dad at this age on a website, I should take one of her and send it to him. And I'm going to hunt her down and hold her to do her eye drops from now on, rather than calling her and asking her to sit. Duh.
We have an afternoon nap. She's just as noisy this time, but doesn't struggle as much. I finally turn her upside down again, and again she falls asleep right away. Interesting mental glitch on my part - I KNOW she's a dominant puppy, that's what I wanted, and that's what I picked from the litter, but I haven't before thought to deal with that on any but a strictly training/behaviour level. Now I'm hearing a lot of people over the years complaining that their dominant dogs "aren't cuddly except on their own terms" and I'm thinking I need to spend a little more effort teaching her to accept things she doesn't want to accept.
For supper we work on Eye Contact. Very good. Then I start doing about turns with her watching all the way around. She's pretty darn good at it. We practise it X20 and she's working about 14 right on a 360-degree turn. Tomorrow we'll test it. Then we do some front-rays and bullseyes. She's not quite as good as when we stopped a couple of weeks ago, but pretty darn good nevertheless. I start walking slowly around the kitchen, clicking and dropping a kibble every time she finds my eyes. Pretty soon she's really into this new game. She spends a bit too much time searching for one final kibble each time I drop one, but soon remembers what made it drop and comes to find my eyes again. Between the counters and the island, she can't quite find me, but as soon as we approach a wider space, she spurts out ahead of me so she can find my eyes from the front. A very good start. We're getting back in the training groove.
And just before bedtime, Miss Independence comes to the couch and asks to come up for a cuddle.
Half of breakfast is spent on a bath and blow-dry. She's getting better every time. Minor whimpering but no yapping, and no offering to get out of the tub. Scuba's not as good at blow-drying YET as Stitch is (Scuba's 8 years old). I still don't dry her bangs or around her ears, but she sits like a champ for the rest. The other half is spent on Level Three. We test the Heeling - she gives me a 360 degree turn with eye contact with no warmup at all. Clever child. Then we practise her Shaped Trick - that'll be backing up. She's got lots of tricks at this point, but some of them qualify as "behaviours" so I'm not using them for tricks, and of the rest, this is the only one that's purely shaped. She's got five good backward steps, and if she can't go any further because she's run into the coffee table, she stamps her front feet and pretends.
Three more things - Sit for Examination, Loose Leash Walking, and Come - that we need to test in a class situation where I've got milling people, and Scenting, and then we're on to Level Four. Unbelievable! Call it a month per Level so far, working 2 meals a day most days. She's not perfect, by any means, but she has a good understanding of all the behaviours I've shown her, and the ability to walk into a situation ready to learn. What a great puppy.
	Stitch wads up one of her dogbeds and sucks on it while making kneading motions with her paws. Her mother does this too. Part of me thinks this is a deranged and infantile behaviour that probably should be stopped. Part of me finds it too endearing to even think about. And part of me is just grateful she found something to do with her new teeth that didn't involve humans or coffee tables.
For supper we work on scenting. Wow, this is tough. It would be easier to teach her scent discrimination with dumbells and peanut butter than it is to teach her to find a treat under a kleenex. No matter what I put the treat on or under, she thinks of something else to do with it. I put down paper plates, she thinks "paper plate Zen!" and won't come near them. I put down plastic lids, she thinks "Whap the lids!" and she's knocking them all over the room and not even looking at the food. I put the kibble in a low glass and she starts kicking the glass. Finally I put kibble in one fist and present it fingers-up (fingers-down fists are automatically Zen fists) with my fingers spread so it's easy to find the food. That finally gets through to her, she's eager to find it now. Then I put it in the glass again and show it to her with my finger. Then I put another glass out, with food only in the original glass, and show it to her with my finger. Then I start mixing the glasses up, and add a third. Finally I don't have to show her each one, she's actually sniffing in them to find the kibble. Man. It takes the entire meal just to get the idea across. And she could SEE the kibble if she was looking - but she's not, she's sniffing madly, but it just doesn't occur to her to use the information from her nose to help her find the food. Fascinating. She'll sniff for a piece of kibble on the floor for five minutes but, though she's sniffing madly, she's not processing the information to help her find the kibble in the glass. We've got some work to do before we put THIS behaviour to bed!
Had to take the computer in for repairs for a couple of days. Very good learning experience. Without access to the blog or having to write it, I floundered around. I know we worked on stuff, I just don't know what it was, and we weren't really going anywhere, just playing around. Not that playing around with clicker training is a bad idea. I distinctly remember having ideas like "Mmm, I have to write THAT down", but now that the computer's home, I haven't got a clue what THAT was. One thing I did while it was gone was write out all the Levels behaviours in short form and make a small carryable copy of them that I laminated. This is an idea I got from PWD people, who have all the behaviours for each level of water trial on laminated luggage-tag-sized things so they can wear them around their necks while training in the water. I adapted the idea years ago to putting all the llama performance levels on tags, now I've got the Levels there too. I put coloured tape over each behaviour as I check it off, so I can easily see what else we have to work on. I know we worked on retrieving. This has matured a lot while we weren't paying attention. In one meal she progressed from trying to hold the dumbell in her incisors (not easy when you've only got incisors on the top!) to gripping it firmly behind her canines (again, not easy when you only have canines on the top!), and from there in the same meal to taking it readily and holding it correctly while I took my hand away, waved it around a bit, put my hand back on it, and held it with her, not releasing it until I said YES! Very good. And we went to class, and had a much better time with my headache nearly gone. She was still too excited to pee before we went in, but after ten minutes we went back out and she buckled down. Also I had no trouble getting her to focus on me when we got into the room and started working, and she came cheerfully and promptly when I called her out of a melee of people and dogs. She's gotten brave enough to romp around after the Great Dane and Golden playing nasty-sounding growly wrestle games (and smart enough not to launch into the middle of them), and to grab one of the balls and gallop around offering it to people. I'm counting that recall as coming from a mess of dogs AND from a mess of people. In class we tried 101 Things To Do With A Box. She sucks at this. If I left her alone in the room with the box, she'd be wearing it like a hat or riding it down the stairs, but getting clicked for it... hmmm, what on earth does she want? It was a pretty tall box for a short puppy. Once she reached into it and the box grabbed her elbow. As she pulled her leg out the box flipped over and tried to grab the whole puppy. We have some more work to do on 101. I got the instructor to approach and touch her head while she was sitting - several times. I fed her a bit while she was sitting, but was really amazed at how well she did. Throughout, she remembered she was sitting and staying. During class she's been greeting this person with a flying knee-tackle, so I was very happy with her. Going home, I may have taught her to stay where I put her in the car. Since my car wasn't working, I drove Ron's truck. Stitch had to sit on the back seat. I put her on the back seat, closed the door, opened the driver's door, took her out, put her on the back seat, closed the door, opened the driver's door, took her out, put her on the back seat, closed the door really fast and opened the driver's door and jumped into the driver's seat - right on top of her. Well, she wasn't there when I STARTED the jump. If you've seen me you might suspect that she'll be a tad more careful about landing in my seat just before I do in future.
This morning Scuba's breakfast involves repolishing her Watch while Stitch does Go To Mat. i spend X10 getting Stitch comfortable - I've rearranged the living room furniture (computer didn't work, hard drive didn't work, car didn't work, dog clippers didn't work, I was forced to play housewife!) and moved the mat. Then three kibbles for Scuba, and if Stitch is lying down on her mat, one for her. Four for Scuba, one for Stitch. Five for Scuba, one for Stitch. Takes her half the meal to figure out that putting her TAIL on the mat doesn't count, but once she gets that sorted out she's pretty good. Has one brief flurry of yapping to tell me how unfair it is that Scuba gets to work and she has to lie on the stupid mat, but 15-16-17 for Scuba and she gets back on the mat and shuts up. I reset the count and toss her a kibble when I get to 8. When Scuba's breakfast is gone, Stitch and I work on retrieving again. X10 I hand her the dumbell, take my hand off it, hold it again, and finally YES. Then I put it on the floor and click her for looking at it, walking toward it, leaning toward it, putting her mouth on it, picking it up. This is as far as we got before we stopped weeks ago. I really want her to know that we are talking about the dumbell, so I click for picking it up X30. Then I don't click it. Of course she drops it. We both look at it. She puts her paw on it. I pry it out from under her paw, start again, and work X30 for picking it up. Then I don't click. She drops it. We both look at it, and she reaches down and picks it up again, and holds it while I move my hand over to it and take it. EE HAH. I put it down on the floor and click X5 for picking it up, then reach for it instead of clicking again. She drops it, picks it up, and holds it until I take it. Then I put it on the floor, X5 for picking it up, then don't click, reach for it, AND SHE HOLDS ON TO IT WHILE I HOLD IT. I count to 5, YES, and give her a handful of kibble. From then on it's X3 for picking it up, then one for picking it up, handing it to me, and holding it with me. That chain X 10, and we're done. She plays fetch with her toys, but this is the first time she's actually held onto a training object long enough for me to take it from her without dropping it. She really appears to have made the connection - the hand-mouth-holding and the go-and-pick-up have joined in the middle. Now we just need to get her MOVING while this is happening... I'm very happy about this. Once a dog can reliably retrieve, entire universes of behaviours open up. We also do a bit of work on Sit For Examination. Once she realizes my hand is going to pet her and not deliver goodies, she does fine. We'll test this back in class in a couple of days. While I'm thinking about it, I ask her to Stand a few times and give her a Stay verbal and hand cue - something I've never done in this context before. And she stays! We play with this X10, with me stepping back up to about 4' away, and she holds the stand very nicely. If I click before I get back to her, she comes forward to meet me and get the kibble, but if I hold the click until I'm with her, she stays standing until she hears it. Good puppy!
We're on a roll now. We're so close to finishing Level Three that I look at Level Four and check off a few of the things she can do already - Come 40' through milling dogs, Swing with handler pivoting left, allowing handling of her muzzle and teeth, floor Zen for 30 seconds with her less than a foot away. And with no food, Down from standing on one cue and Sit from down on on one cue. Starting a new level is like New Year's day - an exciting new start. I can tell I'm excited about her retrieving because I go to buy groceries and - what's this in my cart? Cheez Whiz! Why on earth am I buying Cheez Whiz? Oh, yeah, SCENT DISCRIMINATION! So I dig out four metal scent articles and we get started. I scent one and put some CW on it, lure her over to it. and amazing! She finds the CW and licks it off! Wow! Never mind a dead turtle could do this much, it's cool anyway. The fourth time, she's running to the article Oh great, she just realized she can climb from half-way up the stairs onto the back of the couch. Ahem. She's running to the article and starting to pick it up when she's finished licking it. I click picking it up X10, then send her away so I can re-Cheez it, CW for finding it and then 10 kibble for picking it up. We run that X5, then I add a second, unscented article. No trouble with that. X20 and I add a second unscented one. At this point, she tries picking up the new one. I ignore it. Who would have thought she could sit for so long holding a metal dumbell? Eventually she spits it out. Then she turns and goes back to the spot I've been asking her to lie down in while I re-Cheez them! I call her back, she comes and picks up the right one. We start again, Cheez X 10, one no Cheez. Pretty soon we're up to 4 articles. She finds the CW, then sniffs all of them and picks up the right one. This is so cool.

LIFE BEHAVIOURS :

Lie on grooming table to get shaved.

Hand Zen

Lying quietly on a bed and going to sleep instead of fussing.

Go To Mat.

SKILL BEHAVIOURS :

Walking board .

Teeter.

Heeling about turn.

Back up.

Retrieving.

Sit For Examination.

A mish-mosh week without the computer, pointing up my desperate need for a training log. If I wasn't convinced before, I sure am now.

21 Weeks Old

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19 Weeks Old

SKILLS THAT WERE USED:

Almost walked on a loose leash into class. Peed on cue when I took her out.

I needed her to stay away from the scent articles, so I tossed a kibble in the corner of the room. When she got there, I asked her to Down and Stay. To my utter amazement, she Downed and Stayed.