JennBags
HHOSS Wonder Woman
As promised on another thread, a few notes on today's recall session. It's a short course, just 3 weeks, and aims to just get that recall a little more solid.
There were 2 other dogs on the session, a 17mo Finnish Laphund bitch and a 14mo labradoodle dog; Juno is just about to come into her second season, so I mentioned it so that we all kept our distance from each other. She does also have some resource-guarding issues, which the trainer mentioned to the other owners so when the FL sauntered over to inspect Juno's toy there was some growling.
Juno's recall is great up to about 10 yards away, at which point she stops. She will wait for me to come over to her, but she won't come to me, I haven't been making a big effort to change this yet as it's all too easy to train the wrong behaviour (which is probably what I've been doing anyway).
We were in a local park so everything was on long-lines. The first exercise was for the owner to go away and call the dog with a tuggy toy, while the trainer holds the dog to increase the drive, then lets go; the dog runs to the toy, has a quick game (after touching the collar), then back. We were doing it one at a time, so all the time that one dog was being used, the other owners were trying to hold their dogs attention as much as possible. Next we practised a "middle", Juno is brilliant at this at home (often offers the behaviour) but I found it very hard to get her to concentrate on the task at hand, although we did get a couple of good middles towards the end. We then practised a recall past an object, the other dogs had tennis balls but as Juno is a typical ball-obsessed collie, she just had a tuggy toy which she went straight past each time. Trainer said our aim is to get her coming to me past a ball/pile of balls but I'm not sure we'll achieve that in 3 weeks! Lastly we did another recall this time past the tuggy-toy that we'd been using to play but to a new squeaky toy which Juno absolutely loved. The labradoodle was more interested in the tuggy toy (and kept trying to take my one out of my hand!).
Homework is calling the dog to a toy while out on a walk, practising the middle, and introducing the "emergency stop" word so I have to think of one. It needs to be something that doesn't come up in everyday situations/conversations so the dog doesn't get used to hearing it.
Hope you've found my report a little bit interesting, it's a good record for me anyway!
This is a picture of her with the trainer's lilac collie at our last training course:
There were 2 other dogs on the session, a 17mo Finnish Laphund bitch and a 14mo labradoodle dog; Juno is just about to come into her second season, so I mentioned it so that we all kept our distance from each other. She does also have some resource-guarding issues, which the trainer mentioned to the other owners so when the FL sauntered over to inspect Juno's toy there was some growling.
Juno's recall is great up to about 10 yards away, at which point she stops. She will wait for me to come over to her, but she won't come to me, I haven't been making a big effort to change this yet as it's all too easy to train the wrong behaviour (which is probably what I've been doing anyway).
We were in a local park so everything was on long-lines. The first exercise was for the owner to go away and call the dog with a tuggy toy, while the trainer holds the dog to increase the drive, then lets go; the dog runs to the toy, has a quick game (after touching the collar), then back. We were doing it one at a time, so all the time that one dog was being used, the other owners were trying to hold their dogs attention as much as possible. Next we practised a "middle", Juno is brilliant at this at home (often offers the behaviour) but I found it very hard to get her to concentrate on the task at hand, although we did get a couple of good middles towards the end. We then practised a recall past an object, the other dogs had tennis balls but as Juno is a typical ball-obsessed collie, she just had a tuggy toy which she went straight past each time. Trainer said our aim is to get her coming to me past a ball/pile of balls but I'm not sure we'll achieve that in 3 weeks! Lastly we did another recall this time past the tuggy-toy that we'd been using to play but to a new squeaky toy which Juno absolutely loved. The labradoodle was more interested in the tuggy toy (and kept trying to take my one out of my hand!).
Homework is calling the dog to a toy while out on a walk, practising the middle, and introducing the "emergency stop" word so I have to think of one. It needs to be something that doesn't come up in everyday situations/conversations so the dog doesn't get used to hearing it.
Hope you've found my report a little bit interesting, it's a good record for me anyway!
This is a picture of her with the trainer's lilac collie at our last training course: