Monday, it's cold and the ground is covered with all that nasty white stuff. No training outside this day and with the county schools closed there will be no group class this evening.
Of course the matter of a "little" snow certainly didn't stop the Newfies from showing up for their class. Sanity worked her two articles twice and by the second set was working more comfortably with the 11 and 12 o'clock positions. Spent some time during the afternoon working her on all three jumps. Then managed a few flat retrieves and a couple of retrieves over the jump. For the most part I will be working the three jumps as a training set for the next several weeks.
One change I just noticed today. After spending weeks and weeks fighting with her over just what, when and how heel position and come position are to happen, she is all of a sudden giving me straight and correct sits in both positions more than 50% of the time.
I am a pretty hardcore Koehler trainer who added ecollars to my list of training tools. Whereas, my bag of tools holds many, many varied and different tools, the ones I reach for on a daily basis are:
ReplyDelete6' leather leash
15' cotton canvas longe line
TriTronics Pro500 G2 series or Pro500 XL series ecollar
Two ring chain slip collar(sometimes called a choke collar)
8' nylon paracord (When I have a puppy or any new dog that still doesn't know the laws)
Nylon tab made of leftover lengths of paracord
I use the KMODT ear pinch method to teach all the retrieve based tasks I teach. This means I start the working retrieve with the ear pinch as the correction and then slide over to the ecollar when I deem the time to be right. Same goes for scent work. I start with ear pinch as my correction of choice and then slide over to the ecollar when I feel the dog doesn't need such up close and personal attention and help.
The biggest difference between what I do now and what I did 30 years ago is the actual time line for training. I tend to bunch the exercises together into what I think of as working groups. That means I teach all the retrieve or retrieve based exercise as a single block, moving from the most basic retrieve on the flat up through scent work, direction taking and memory drills. Same goes for the jumps, once I start on the jumps I teach all three of them.
This means neither of us ever has a chance to get bored with the training. Of course, when I teach someone else I always go by the book. This means we do Novice all the way through and then do Open to the end and then get into Utility.