3 leg pattern with casts
March 9th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Following on our recent success with walking baseball, I’m continuing on from this point with Grey.
I have quite a few US retriever-training books, which I would really recommend to anyone wanting to train their dog to handle – whether a retriever or a HPR (or even a spaniel). Although these books advocate all kinds of punishment and e-collar use, you can take exactly the same exercises and drills and patterns, and use them from a reward-based training perspective. (In the UK all gundogs are expected to handle, to some extent – although retrievers are supposed to be the handling dogs par excellence.)
The only thing to be careful of, if you are using reward-based methods only, is to pay extra attention to preventing mistakes in the first place. The US retriever trainers can always use a nick from an e-collar on the dog at a distance, to prevent the dog from carrying through and ignoring a sit whistle or picking the wrong dummy.
If you’re using only reward-based training methods, you can still use exactly the same drills to teach a dog to handle, but you don’t have any brakes on the dog at a distance. So it really helps at first to 1) use a long-line for a good while at first and 2) keep everything small and manageable – no massive distances where the dog is working outside your control.
Folk who use reward-based methods tend to ignore everything to do with e-collar retriever training and dismiss it as not being relevant to what they want to do. This is a shame, because if you just strip out the punishment and look at the progression of exercises and drills, you can easily adjust them to be used positively. US retriever trainers achieve results, and contrary to what it might look like at first, those results are largely derived from rewards – dummies, for retrieving-fanatic dogs.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and reinvent the wheel, if you’re a positive-only trainer.
Although I have SmartWork, and the Mike Lardy stuff too, the book I return to most for its simplicity and coherent progression (as well as excellent walking baseball diagrams) is a bit of an old one: Training Retrievers to Handle by D.L. & Ann Walters.
This does have lots of punishment-based advice – which doesn’t even make good learning-theory sense. Such as: ‘As soon as he goes off course, holler ‘NO’ at him, go get him, put a lead and choke collar on him, and drag him back to the correct line.’ (p52). There is even the suggestion that you shoot your dog with an air-rifle at one point!!!! But really, persevere through all this if you’re interested in reward-based methods and extract what you can from it all.
Today I worked on the ’3 Leg Pattern with Casts’, which is the step after walking baseball in the book.
Slate did it perfectly first-time, as usual. (It’s a refresher for her, really.)
Grey hesitated on a Back cast, and sat herself half-way there. I moved up really close and cast ‘Back’ again, and she went and got the dummy fine. On the Left cast, she remained sitting and no-goed. I again moved up close and re-cast and she went fine.
I didn’t stop her at all today. I want to get her running these 100 yard casts first, before I introduce any stopping and re-casting. That will be a major issue for her, since she experiences the stop whistle as punishing in itself and is then less likely to have the confidence to take the subsequent cast.
I’m determined to improve her handling for this coming working test season.
3HC & water & over
May 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Grey
Well, Grey, for the first time ever this week, did not drop the dummy once on exiting the water. Has the penny dropped instead? I hope so.
This came about after some work on the clicker retrieve, where we revisited ‘hold’, one of the final stages of the clicker retrieve. Here, the dog must hold the dummy even when shown a treat – proving that the concept of ‘hold the dummy until you hear a click’ is firmly established. I can now show Grey a treat, once she has left the water, and she will hold the dummy and look at the treat – whilst she is soaking wet – and only drop when I click. I believe this is a huge step forwards…
As for her directions, I have moved all the poles in much closer and this has resulted in much fewer no-gos. There are still, however, some no-gos happening, so I’ll keep the poles at this distance until we have a day without no-gos before moving them out again.
Slate
Slate did some good work on her ‘over’ this week, using a large, fallen tree. She jumped over almost every single time on one command and appears to be learning the word. We could really do with some more obstacles though as, besides this tree, I’m not sure where else we can practise this. Most fences have barbed wire over the top of them.
I’m feeling that Slate is a little under-stretched: When I am practising water and directions with Grey, Slate can do everything I’ve set up for Grey – easily. She is, after all, 2 yrs ahead of Grey in terms of amount of training time spent on her. Yet it is hard to set up 2 completely different large-scale exercises for their different needs (too time consuming). At the moment she doesn’t get much out of the direction and water sessions, which are designed almost totally for Grey.
So I’ve decided to revisit a couple of my favourite books to get some more training ideas to stretch her a little more. A book I like very much is a US book called ‘Drills for the Hunt Test Enthusiast’ by Carol F. Cassity. It is written for US retrievers, but don’t let that put you off: UK HPRs are expected to handle and US retrieverdom has cornered the market in terms of an orderly system for achieving this. I leave out all ecollar-related stuff; the drills themselves can be taught using positive methods.
losing direction(s)
May 20th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Are we getting anywhere with Grey’s directions?
I don’t know. I don’t understand the conceptual problem she is having in getting them.
Today, in Stanmer Park, with the T-drill poles out, I am still working on her getting the cast correct. For example: I send her Right, and she sits there and looks very confused and doesn’t move. I cast repeatedly Right, re-trying it, and still she sits there. I cannot describe how infuriating this is and how angry I get, although I can’t express it because she’s doing her best and is afraid to run in case it’s the wrong way.
I moved up much closer to her and cast her Right, and she went. I then repeated it back at the original distance, and she went right again fine that time.
I then try Left. Only for her to sit there and stare at me again. I decide to wait a few seconds before I cast again, to give us both a chance to think. Whilst I’m standing there, waiting, Grey decides to take it upon herself to run – in the wrong direction (Right again!). ARRRRGGG!!!!
I blow the sit whistle and she stops. (She is good at that part!). I then cast Left again. I think she then went Left.
I tried Back, and again this took several casts. On the 3rd cast, she looked Back over her shoulder and I said ‘yes!’, so she took herself off there, to lots of praise from me.
It was a particularly bad day, as I don’t think we had her going on a single cast, first time. It is just uncertainty and her being unwilling to make a choice about which way to run, in case it is the wrong choice.
I think I am going to reduce the distance and go back to a small-scale and build it up again. So, I will put the poles out level with where they were today, but not so far out in each direction. I will start close to her, and with the poles close, and we will build back out again.
Grey’s directions & water
May 12th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Bugger, we are still having problems with stickiness on casts. Not every cast, but I’ve never been able to cast all 3 directions on the T-drill and had no stickiness. She does always get it right, when she finally goes though. At the moment I’m working on the theory that hesitation means uncertainty and anxiety about getting it wrong, and that repetition will lead to confidence and no anxiety – and therefore no hesitation!
Some more water work yesterday, working on her holding the dummy and delivering to hand. The way I am working on this, is using the clicker as used in the original clicker retrieve: If she drops it on the floor, she doesn’t get a click or treat – even when she subsequently picks it up and delivers to hand. She only gets a click if it is directly delivered to my hand.
This proved quite interesting: I discovered that, if I put any pressure on her once she has emerged from the water (even just a stern ‘Give’), she is much more likely to drop it right where she is. My best chances of getting a delivery to hand come from extreme excitement and loads of encouragement, so she will hurry to get to me asap.
I would say I am getting two-thirds of water deliveries to hand now. Unfortunately, the first one is most likely to be dropped on the floor – something to do with her coat having just become wet, and an increased need to shake it out as a result. And, in a test, we only get one retrieve…
