Freestyle Practice

Focus!

Lately I’ve been trying to utilize toy rewards in my training more. Especially since Risa’s favorite activity is running. The best way I can utilize that as a reward is to use her flirt pole.

Initially, I found using toys to be problematic. Risa started to anticipate me marking and releasing her. This lead to forging when heeling as well as stepping in front of me. I got amazing enthusiasm but lost a ton of precision. The more I’ve used a toy to reward various behaviors, the more precision I’ve gotten. With familiar behaviors and ones I’ve rewarded with toys before, I am finally getting the behavior I want with the enthusiasm I love to see. 🙂 Along with enthusiasm, I also get more speed on behaviors like weaves and circling around me.

Another thing I noticed while working with Risa today is her focus. Ris has a long-standing bad habit of checking out on me when we’re working. Part of it is her fearfulness; she is hypervigilant and always on the lookout. The other part is a bad habit of dropping treats when I delivered rewards. I have worked hard to eliminate this on my end but Risa’s bad habit of searching for potentially dropped goodies persists. This is a non-issue when I work with toys. 😉

Whenever Risa misses a cue, I’ve been stopping what I’m doing and just standing there for several seconds. I began doing this after attending Kathy Sdao’s Get S.M.A.R.T. about Dog Training seminar. She said that we often reward missed cues by cuing and rewarding another behavior. The best way to avoid this is to just stop and ignore the dog for a moment. Risa has been much more reliable on doing the behavior on the first cue after I started instituting this. It also makes things much clearer for her. I was very pleased to notice that, when she missed a cue, Risa stayed right by me in a sort of ‘stand by’ mode. There was nothing stopping her from wandering off and following her nose. She, instead, chose to stay by me and await further instructions. Good dog!

Here’s a video of our flirt pole freestyle training session. It lasted about 8 minutes in total; very short. Due partially to the heat and also to keep things fun!