walking baseball again
August 5th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I think I’m going to stop posting about walking baseball unless something truly amazing happens, because obviously I jinx myself by reporting any sort of progress with Grey on it, and this just becomes an incredibly boring blog where I just say ‘nothing happened, we did more of the same’.
Today she got every cast right, except for one. (A Left cast, which she went Right on.) However, every cast had to be repeated about 5 times before she went.
Sometimes, after a cast (which she looks at me for, but continues sitting there), she then looks back at the secondary (wrong) dummy. Then she looks back at me. I cast her again towards the correct one. She looks back at the wrong one. I can see her little doggie mind computing it all: ‘I most want to go to that dummy. But I don’t think she is sending me there. So where is she sending me? I don’t want to get it wrong, so I will think about it and watch it a few more times, and when I’m sure, then I’ll go.’ Meanwhile, my shoulder is getting nearly dislocated from my enthusiastic casting.
Adam did walking baseball with Slate at the same time, only Slate didn’t like the wet grass and kept standing up every time he turned his back, so it in fact turned more into sit-stay revision, proofing against wet grass…
‘those dogs are a credit to you’
July 29th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I continued with the same exercise and the penny might have dropped… That, or Grey has learnt to run Back, whatever happens! We’ll know more next time I run the full drill.
Today I thought to myself that Slate needs to run this drill too: At the moment, when Adam is home, he takes Slate off into the woods and practises ‘Over’ with her on fallen trees and fences – whilst I stay in the open space with Grey and do walking baseball. But Slate is losing out, with this. So I think I’m going to copy the cheat sheets and give them to Adam to do with Slate.
Meanwhile, today I was training the dogs on the football pitch and this guy drove in and parked and watched. I think he must have been waiting for something or someone or having a break.
First I had Grey sitting in a sit-stay, whilst I did walking baseball with Slate. Then I switched them over and gave Grey a turn. I left them both in a sit stay whilst I went to the car to get a tuggy toy as a reward.
When I’d finished and put them both back in the car, the guy called out of his window to me: ’Those dogs are a credit to you!’
Well, that was very nice! Sometimes I get all caught up on a small detail I’m working on and I don’t see the overall picture, which is just how well trained they are.
walking baseball progress update
July 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Grey is, I think, making slow progress on walking baseball. I am still having a problem with stickiness on casts. On these instances, if she goes before she is ‘ready’, then she will go in the wrong direction. It’s as if the stickiness is her thinking about the cast I’m giving and the dummies and which one to go for. If this is right, then as she gains in confidence, the stickiness should disappear. This is the premiss I’ve been working on, anyway. Quite what is required to give her the confidence she needs, I don’t know. I’ve shortened the casts, I’ve moved right up close to her. It all seems to make no difference, her brain is computing away and will not be rushed!
On Friday, when we last ran the drill, I decided to stick to one cast and just practise it over and over until it was going well, with no stickiness. The cast was a Back cast, with a distraction/secondary dummy to the Left (9pm). This was tricky because she turns on that side, so it meant the distraction (suction) of the secondary dummy was all the greater.
I did feel that, by the end of the session, I was statistically getting more going-first-time than stickiness. But I didn’t ever get, say, 5 consecutive going-first-times, so I could be sure it was absolutely solid. So I will continue with this at our next session. Meantime I continue to look like I’m doing a strange form of aerobics in the park, watched by a bemused Grey…
walking baseball cheat sheets
June 24th, 2011 § 2 Comments
I’ve had a few people contact me to ask about using US retrieving drills, and one of my favourites is walking baseball.
I don’t want to come across as a US retriever afficionado. But I do think that the standards those guys achieve in terms of lining and casting are phenomenal. Yes, they use methods which I wouldn’t be prepared to use on my dogs. But perhaps all their achievements are not just down to ecollar use. Perhaps they are also about the drills they use and the comprehensive progression through predetermined exercises.
I can’t claim to be anywhere near the standard of those US retriever folk: I am still experimenting to see what is possible when you lift these drills out of the ecollar programme they were designed for, and also I’m running them with HPRs instead of retrievers.
Here are the cheat sheets, in case anyone else is crazy enough to try blindly stumbling around a field whilst consulting a diagram. Walking Baseball involves just 2 dummies. To explain…:
- The red blobs are the thrown dummies. They are thrown in alphabetical order (so the dummy at B is thrown first, before the dummy at C, for eg).
- The direction with a box around it is the cast you’re going to give. The straight arrow is also the dummy you’re going to want/cast you’re going to give.
- The curvy arrow with the squiggly line through it is the other thrown dummy, the one you don’t want.
- In essence, this is an exercise in the dog not getting the dummy you just threw – the dog is always getting the previous dummy.
- Dog is sat at A. You are standing by her.
- Throw dummy Right to B.
- Throw dummy Back to C.
- Leave dog sitting at A and walk yourself back to D.
- Cast dog Right, to B.
- Dog is sat at D. You are standing by her.
- Throw dummy Left to E.
- Cast dog Back to C. (Dummy thrown in previous ’round’, above.)
- You and dog are at F.
- Throw dummy Right to G.
- Cast dog Left to E. (Dummy thrown in previous ’round’.)
walking baseball
May 29th, 2011 § 2 Comments
My foray back into the drills of US retriever trainers, to find something which might help with Grey’s casting, was Walking Baseball.
Walking Baseball was first developed by the US retriever trainer D.L. Walters and is described in great detail in his book ‘Training Retrievers to Handle‘. However, that description does read like some sort of advanced maths formula, saying things like ‘Throw to I, back up to M, send dog back from P to Q’, accompanied by equally incomprehensible drawings. I tried this drill in the past with Slate, but got thoroughly confused with which direction P, Q or Z for that matter, was, and ditched it after only a couple of tries.
However, as it is such a centrally important drill for US retriever folk, I figured there really must be something in it and I should persevere now and get to grips with it.
This time I avidly studied Walter’s diagrams and drew up a sort of cheat-sheet I could take into the field with me. I also watched some YouTube videos on the drill which helped realise it, off paper. Firstly, US retriever training guru Evan Graham has an entire DVD solely on Walking Baseball, and here is a YouTube clip of that:
Then there are a couple of other videos with a trainer called Tera Lanczak, showing Walking Baseball Overs and Backs. (The sound gets a bit wind-obscured on these last 2 clips, but still worth watching.)
From the variations which Tara Lanczak used in her videos, I realised that actually I don’t need to follow Walter’s diagrams exactly, I just need to know the principles of the drill. In essence:
1. Use white dummies. (Grahams says use orange, but Lanczak uses white and I think white is easier to start with.)
2. Each time the dog brings a dummy back, and you throw it out again, be aware that you are going to send the dog for the dummy which is already out there and not the one you just threw.
3. Keep everything on tight lines: You want to give the dog straight casts L or R or B, so when throwing dummies imagine everything is functioning on a 4-spoked wheel. You cannot cast for diagonal backs. So keep it straight.
4. Extend the distance as the dog is able to cope. You can really establish some distance with this drill.
Today, I tried the drill for the first time with both Slate and Grey. I kept it very small (mainly because I’m still learning what I’m doing), and it went quite well. The grass was a bit too long in the field, which made it harder for both me and them to spot the dummies and ensure the lines were straight. I will try it again on the football pitch at Stanmer Park.
I think this will be a great drill for them, and also it only involves 2 dummies (instead of a bag of them). The downside is that, when working 2 dogs, one dog has to sit and stay quite some distance away from the action.
