Videos!!!

I promised videos and here they are :-) To begin with there is a video of SoBe hitting "and" sticking each of the 3 contacts just to show everyone that she really can! Sorry about the down time between contacts and the motion sickness potential as I move between them, I have not yet mastered the edit feature :-) 

She managed to do all of these contacts at speed, with me continuing to run and throwing her toy! What a good girl! Now we have to see these fantastic contacts in competition, or at least at the fun match on Sunday.

I am still working the 2on/2off on a low A-frame but she is working really hard to stick it as she comes flying over the top. She has actually missed stopping a couple of times allowing me to correct the behavior which is good in a training environment. 

SoBe does not back off even a little bit on the speed and because of this she is displaying her superior understanding of the behavior since she exhibits the apropriate behavior even though she is  moving into the position at a very high rate of speed! Yea SoBe!! 

This just hardens my resolve to keep and maintain the 2on/2off with princess SoBe, she has the best 2on/2off performance start to finish of any dog I have ever trained!~

Next video, I was proofing Mergers "Bang" behavior and asked him to start though a tunnel to build speed, straight to a jump beside the A-frame immediately offering the "Bang" at the completion of the jump.

The tunnel is set in a "U" shape approx. 9 feet from the jump/A-Frame exercise. Merger is expected to jump, hit the floor, bounce onto the A-frame hitting once before assuming the 2on/2off position. He is of course expected to maintain the position until released.

 

In the next video, I was playing around with running the A-frame with Merge. It was a lot of fun to try different things to get the striding I was looking for. Ultimately my goal was to get a 2 hit performance without a launch.

Initially Merger was using the stride regulator as a launch point which of course was not going to fly, pun intended!

I put a toy at the base of the A-frame to give him the idea that he needed to  go to the bottom, after I worked though this issue I added the Broad jump board to the bottom as a guide to hit the ground close to the end of the ramp. It took a bit if experimentation to determine a distance that would meet my expectations and remain comfortable for Merger. 

The first time or 2 I placed the toy between the A-frame ramp and the broad jump board to get him to put his feet down. 

Notice the orange gate, Merge also thought it was fun to come off sideways, I love gates! OK, that is a lot of props but by golly we got it to work. Notice Merger did on more than one occasion leap over the broad jump board without putting his feet down first, if he offered this option I simply withheld reward and he did it correctly each time after that. 

The stride regulator is just above the last colored slat and for Merge, the jump board is about 3 feet off of the bottom of the ramp. It is really fun to play with, definitely makes me think! There are 2 different videos of our trial and error session with the running A-Frame. I have not tried it with the dog walk...yet :-)

The last video is my baby boy, Vandal. As long as we were playing with running contacts it just made sense to give the Vandal a go :-) 

The only prop I am using with Vandal is the stride regulator, he seems to read it and honor it quite well.

As an aside, I am also working on a foot target with both Vandal and Merger. I am using the hit it board with my plan being, to ultimately remove the broad jump board in favor of a hit it board where I want the dogs to put their feet after the performance of the contact obstacle. The hit it board will be faded to a smaller and smaller item until it disappears altogether.

So, it appears I have modified the 4 on the floor method a bit more, so far I like it. It is clear criteria without slowing the dogs down, I also feel like it is something that the naked eye can pick up on to maintain consistency and proper criteria. Time will tell.

Vandal was having the very best time running his A-Frame! He has also been introduced to the dog walk and the teeter and so far seems quite unfazed by it all.

His tug drive has increased 150% since he has all of his adult teeth and of course we begin each training session with play, we play in between exercises and we always play at the end.

At the same time I am mixing up the behaviors that we are working on to keep it fresh. Vandal is learning to "go through" (figure 8 through my legs), heel and side, sit and down with short stays, running his contacts and playing. We do little bits of each every time we train with no rhyme or reason to how many of what or what order we do them in. It is always a small number of reps though, leave them wanting more is very true when dog training! Enjoy the videos.