New Dog!

So, after my SMASHING success on Wednesday, I got assigned a new dog to work with. But this is not just any new dog. He belongs to one of the powers that be here at Triple Crown, who is, by the way, a DOG TRAINER. Yes, I've been charged with training a dog trainer's dog. Weird, no?

This was what was said about him: "you're getting [dog]. He's a little sharp [a personality term here, not referring to how smart he is] and he's bitten a couple people, so watch out for that. He'll be a different kind of dog for you. He already has basic obedience to about the level you're at now."

I spent way too much time trying to analyze how I ended up getting this dog: is he a holy terror and they're setting me up to fail since I did so well so far? Do they really think I'm THAT GOOD that I can fix the dog trainer's dog after only 5 weeks? Are they trying to break me? Am I on Candid Camera?

It turns out, from what I've gathered, that the dog was going to be boarding anyway, and so my best guess is that I'm a glorified babysitter for him. And as flattering as it was to think that they thought so highly of me that I could cure this biting dog when his owner couldn't, this newest assessment is a big relief. I'm not meant to fix anything. I'm just going to learn some things from this dog (who is quite different from my other two), maybe teach him some agility obstacles and a couple clicker tricks if he doesn't already know them, and mostly just keep his busy little brain occupied while his dad is away. This I can handle. Next week I'll take over the world.

Dog for sale!

So, if it isn't apparent from my posts, I am in love with Miss Sugar. She is a sweet mush of a dog, and everyone tells me how much she adores me. Having said that, this is a far less than ideal time for us to add a dog to our lives, so the best outcome would be for me to find her a home before I leave here. That's now three weeks away!

I really can't stand the idea of giving her back to the shelter. First of all, she doesn't make a great first impression. She barks like a lunatic when anyone other than me walks into her kennel building, and truly sounds like she is out for blood. It's all a crazy act, but try telling that to the nice family coming to pick out their new dog. Second, she's a pit bull, and that alone is a huge strike against her. And third, I've heard that the place where she came from is a big warehouse full of dog crates. They are a "no kill shelter," but honestly, do I want her to spend the last 6-10 years of her life in a crate? So, like I said, if I found a home for her on my own and brokered the adoption, I'd be really thrilled.

So let me tell you about Sugar. She is a total lazy goof. We can be in the middle of heeling and I'll bend down to praise her and she'll fall over on her back for belly rubs. She isn't terribly high energy, but every once in a while I'll take her to a fenced area to run around and she'll galavant around like a nut for 10 minutes, then be all "whew, that was hard work." She has the sweetest temperamant, and can be a little nervous about new situations, but with the obedience work we're doing I'm finding it very easy to go back to familiar tasks (sit, down, place) to get her to chill out and accept what's going on.

She is going to be a dog who just wants to lie on her bed and chew a bone, get petted now and then, and go for a nice walk every night. I would take her in a heartbeat if I could, but I can't, so this is my plea to the world: does anybody know anybody who wants this dog? I will deliver her to anywhere between Texas and Maine...well, OK...Massachusetts. Seriously, if you can think of anyone who wants a dog, please let me know, or have them contact me.

Dave's visit

Dave came up to see me at the end of week three. It was wonderful. The wonderful-est part was how totally normal it felt. We walked around Walmart looking for something for school, we swam in the hotel pool, we ate Chinese buffet...just like home, only 15 degrees hotter!

It was a little difficult to balance my school responsibilities and my desire to spend time with Dave. I had someone taking care of the dogs in the morning, but I still stopped by campus twice a day for quick training sessions, just so my charges wouldn't forget who I was or what heel meant.

I brought him to campus once or twice, showed off what my dogs could do, introduced him to my roommates, and gave him the grand dusty tour. It was fun, and he acted appropriately impressed with the whole thing.

I dropped him off at the airport at some ungodly hour on Monday morning, came home and crashed out for half an hour, and spent the rest of the day a bit melancholy. Lucky for me it gets so busy so quickly around here that it's difficult to hang on to a mood for more than a day. You just get so distracted that you can't help but forget why you are so bummed out...unfortunately it means the really happy moods are also short-lived, but that's how life works, I guess!

Test time, yikes!

We’ve now had four written tests and our first practical/hands on exam too. I did great on three out of the four written, and got an 80 on one that I think was pretty poorly written and unfairly graded. But written tests are only 10% of our total grade, and I’ve done well enough on the others that I don’t think I’m going to care. I do plan to write a note to the instructor just to get some things off my chest (nicely!), but I don’t care if she doesn’t change my grade. It doesn’t help at all that I got that test back on what had to be my worst day here. More on that in a separate post.

So, that practical exam…whew! Here were the requirements:
Heel on leash
One minute sit/stay
Three minute down/stay
Five minute place/stay
Sit at the door
Sit while friendly stranger greets handler
Recall

The down was the scariest. We were taught to train it using treats, and we had about a week to go from “yes, my dog will lie down when asked” to “my dog will stay in place as long as I leave him there, up to 3 minutes.” That’s a pretty significant leap. Joker turned out to be the bigger nightmare. Sugar seems to have figured out that, even when I step more than 3 feet away, I still almost always come back, and I bring food with me when I do, so she’s pretty chill about the stays.

But Joker was a lunatic. He got the sit pretty quickly, and we’d been working on place for so long that all I really had to do was phase out the treats, which wasn’t to hard. But down was a disaster. He would mouth all over me as I was putting him in position, he would bounce up the second I moved, he would roll on his back and throw a tantrum, he even learned to army crawl towards me when he started getting bored. So we worked REALLY hard at down, and on test day I would have given about 50/50 odds that he’d actually do it.

We had to test both dogs, and I did Joker first. My thinking was that I was much more nervous about him, and Sugar is much more sensitive to me, so if I went in nervous with her, she might screw up too.

First was the five-minute place. We all placed our dogs and all hell broke loose: barking, whining, dogs breaking. Blessedly, the instructor gave us a redo, and told anyone who wanted to move away from a dog that was antagonizing their dog to do it now. The second round went much better for everyone. Joker was perched, as is his wont, on the slippery edge of the place bed looking at me, and suddenly he started to slip. So I stood there helplessly as he scrabble-scrabble-scrabbled his little feet on it, and somehow he managed to stay on. Phew. Actually, I was even able to appreciate in that moment how cool this was. Not only did he not break his place stay, he very clearly demonstrated that he gets it. He knew the rules well enough to work hard to stay on the bed when gravity was working against him. Good little dog!

During the place exercise I was next to roommate M, whose dog, Heath, decided that this would be the day that he discovered how delicious leather leashes are. So we both stood their amazed as he chewed right through the leash. She totally deserves extra credit for an off-leash place, because he spent the last minute or so totally not connected to her, but stayed right where he was. She had to borrow a leash to finish the test.

The sit was next and went fine, and the down was similarly uneventful. I could not believe my good fortune. In fact, the whole rest of Joker’s test was astoundingly good, and the instructor told me that his recall was the best one she’d seen all day. Woohoo!

So we did our victory lap and I walked back to put Joker away and get Sugar, thinking “this is going too well, what kind of crazy stunt is she going to pull?” But she was her wonderful reliable goofy self, and did everything nearly perfectly. She was a bit laggy on her heeling, but kept catching up with me, which I also found pretty cool because it made me think that she actually does know what heel is supposed to look like, even if she's sometimes to lazy to actually get herself there. The only other thing was that when I put her into a down, she popped back up slightly, and I had to readjust her. If anyone saw it happen, I probably lost a point or two.

But all in all, I could not have been more proud of my dogs and myself. We all worked really hard in the week leading up to the test. Of course I know there was a fair bit of luck in it too, because there were plenty of dogs who didn’t do nearly as well as I expected them to based on past performance, so I’m thanking the stars as well.

More on clickers

Wow, I am so behind. I will try to hit a few of the most relevant topics, and then hope and pray that I can get back on a daily schedule. First, a word about clickers.

Several of you have asked me what this clicker business is all about, and I will now do my teacher proud by explaining it to you in scientific yet understandable terms.
The clicker is a “marker,” in that it marks a behavior. It works much the same way as a “yes” or a “good dog,” but it has a few advantages – it is very short, so takes a snapshot of the exact moment the behavior is taking place (if you’re timing it right – see previous post about box-peeing for an example of a poorly timed click). Also, it is totally consistent, because it always sounds the same, while your voice might change.

So, you pair the clicker with a reinforcer (food, usually), something the dog understands inherently to be good. You could also pair it with a swat on the nose if you wanted to use it to stop behaviors from happening, but that’s not what we’re doing here. So you make the good association: clicker = food/yay. Then you can use it in a number of ways that are too complicated to explain, but for example, you can sit around watching your dog and waiting for a desirable behavior to occur, then click it. That’s called “capturing.”

Right now we are using it for a bunch of different things. First is “target,” where we ask a dog to put two front feet on a raised box. We started by rewarding any acknowledgement (other than peeing on it) of the box. Then increased it to movement towards the box. Then it was touching the box, then finally putting the feet on the box. Then we started adding the command “target.” I think eventually we phase out the clicker, but I’m not positive, we haven’t gotten there yet.
We’re also teaching “spin,” which is just a cute little trick where the dog literally spins around once. Joker does this at 80 mph and about two feet off the ground. Sugar moves at her own sweet pace, but she still seems to be enjoying it.

We’re also teaching “back,” where the dog just takes a couple steps backward. As I understand it, this will be useful for a number of different obedience commands later on.

Finally, we are working on “touch,” which is when the dog puts its nose to a target (a plastic lid for Joker, and my hand for Sugar, because she’s scared of the plastic lid…weird dog). Joker already has the command for this pretty well down. Sugar is a bit slower at all of this, but she’s making progress. I had basically written her off as a clicker dog, but she had a breakthrough with target and touch this past week.

Speaking of poorly timed clicks, I’m deeply embarrassed to report that Joker’s first pee-on-the-box episode was not his last. And, bless his wee heart, the second took place in front of the entire class. We had just done dthis AWESOME session, everyone was very impressed with us, and I was all proud of myself, and then right at the last second, he lifted his leg and emptied out on the box. Much laughter ensued. It really was pretty funny, but I was a bit embarrassed, and when the teacher asked how I was going to fix it, all I could come up with was “potty him before each session.” The correct answer, class, is “don’t let him do that again.” He almost tried one more time, and I caught him, so I believe we are safely past the box-peeing portion of Joker’s training.

July 21 and 21, 2008: An embarrassment of...mortification

Things continue to be very much up and down (and up, and down and up, and down and down and up...) around here. Some training goes really well, some crashes and burns.

We've started talking about puppy imprinting, and I totally love that stuff. It's so empowering to feel like "next time I'll do it right!" And also, puppies are cute. We haven't played with any yet, but I'm promised that it's coming soon.

We've also taken the next steps in clicker training, trying to get the dog to put its front feet on a target. I volunteered to be a guinea pig for class yesterday and in the first round, I must confess, I rocked the house. I was so pleased to have impressed our teacher in front of everyone, and Joker even seemed to carry his head a bit higher. When it came time for us to do a second demo, all was going quite well, until Joker decided to do a little repeat performance of the weekend's pee on the box incident. Everyone laughed, and I was mostly amused, and partly humiliated, but then as things progressed I got more humiliated and less amused, and as is true of most things lately, I ended up in tears. Luckily that part wasn't in front of the whole class.

Anyway, lesson learned...that little fucker was gearing up to pee on a box AGAIN today and I caught him before it started. I hope that nipped the whole thing in the bud. He is doing totally awesomely with the clicker still, and I think I even made a breakthrough with Sugar in that area too.

Sugar is showing some increased fear responses when we're outdoors, especially in the kennel area with all the barking dogs. It seems to be getting worse, not better, which is disheartening. I am hoping to talk to a trainer about it tomorrow. I think I'm doing everything right...ignoring her when she acts scared and praising her when she feigns bravery...but I'm sure I'll find out I'm totally wrong about that.

I created a virtual tour on flickr for anyone who's curious about the campus:
Check it out. It's hard to get a really good idea of what things look like until you get here though.

I guess that's plenty for now. I have two tests in the next two days, so I gotta get some studying in.

July 17-20, 2008: One day at a time? Ha!

Well, the grand plan to do an entry every night has clearly fallen to pieces. Maybe I can just offer the highlight reel for the past few days, and then recommit to a 10 minute typing session every night.

Lessee… Thursday and Friday we learned a fun way to start training the recall (come when called). You have on person hold the dog while you stand in front of it with something very tempting. You can back up a little but you need to keep the dog’s attention. Then, when the dog is raring to go, you say the word (“come” or “here” or whatever) and the helper releases the dog. We were assigned to do this 100 times between Thursday night and Sunday night. It would be fine except it can be tricky to find a partner. We’ve all really tried to help each other out, but we’re not on any kind of similar schedule, so you’re really relying on the fates to bring you someone to help you, or you have to set up a bunch of recall party dates.

Two of my roommates and I did a session late on Friday night after a few glasses of wine, and then decided it would be fun to bathe three dogs. Heck, it actually was pretty fun! We were so productive we felt it necessary to reward ourselves with a few more glasses of wine. Next thing we knew it was after 1 a.m.! I was pretty exhausted on Saturday, but still had a productive day.

We also had a great lecture about dog aggression on Friday, and since roommate A has a dog-aggressive dog, we are now helping her with a desensitization system, which involves walking past him and pelting him with chicken. Awesome! He had an OK session yesterday and a great one today. They want her to do this 5 times a day, which is pretty much impossible, even on weekends when there isn’t a whole lot going on. Just getting people with calm dogs together in one place when it’s not ass-blazing hot out is a challenge.

The dogs are doing fine with their current commands: sit, heel, place, and come. We ended up not learning the down yet. I think it’s going to be challenging for Sugar, whose only down is a flop-down-roll-over-please-pet-me-now maneuver. Joker is going to take to it fine, I’ll bet, but the problem will be keeping him down. That dog is spring loaded.

Ha, funny story. The clicker assignment this week was to get the dogs to show interest in a box, so you click whenever they look at the box, walk towards the box, nose the box, paw the box, do anything to the box. I was doing this with Joker today in the Club House, and he was doing so well: he put a foot in the box, and I clicked. He put both feet in and I clicked. Then he put all four feet in the box, and just as I clicked, he started to pee in the box. Fabulous. I then tied him to a chair so I could throw out the box.