Some Tricks

I’ve gotten back in the swing of training Lilli every night.  She’s actually trained me I think – after a week or so of steady night training, she’s asking me for it. 

It started with contacts – Lilli needed to learn 2 on and 2 off in preparation for her first agility trial in February.  I’ll post a separate article about our progress with target training.  Once she got that down, we needed some other stuff to work on.  I began to touch on some behaviors I had started training a year ago when we were focusing on obedience and beginner disc dog skills.

To help me to remember what we’re working on and to track our progress, these are the behaviors we are focusing on now.

• belly – basically a play dead and wait for release
• over – roll over
• “quiet” down – Aussies tend to bark a lot so we’re working on only quiet downs
• stand & around – Lilli has her stand on back legs down pat so now we’ve added turns
• left – turning to the left – helpful in agility handling and for freestyle – working on only verbal cues
• right – turning to the right – we’re just beginning this side so still using hand cues
• tidy up – started tonight – she brings her toy and puts it in her toy basket – not sure of the value
• touch – 2 on 2 off w nose touch – we’ve moved from the step to the treadmill – nice progress

I appreciate training a bunch of fun behaviors instead of just one.  Susan Garrett mentions on her blog that training (specifically referencing 2×2 weave pole training) should only be a few minutes at a time, then moving on to a new activity.  Agility has helped to fine tune this process by proofing.  You work on the behavior, get a great result and leave it alone.  Come back to it the next day or in a week, and it’s amazing how well the dog remembers and how the skill has developed while they’ve been “thiking about it”.

So we work on something, then move to something else, then back, always moving from more difficult or new behaviors to more “fun” behaviors that give the dog success and reward.

All this to train 2 on and 2 off.  Which by the way, is going beautifully.  I’m very impressed with her progress.  And we’ve trained it all in a relatively small space in our living room – no large field or rental facility required.