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I’m a retired English instructor, now devoted full-time to training, showing and enjoying my spaniels in many sports.
I’m an English college instructor by trade, a dog trainer by vocation. And lifelong baseball fan.

New Year’s Day Training

New Years’s Day was a perfect day to spend with a training buddy of mine, Terri Pope.  We rented an obedience building in Olympia for a few hours and helped each other with our dogs.  Today I wanted to see how Reardon’s heeling was coming along, so we made a video.  Videos help immensely with seeing the progress of a dog’s training, and often reveal important mistakes I’m making with my handling.  Not only did I spot various details to work on, but it was a good record of how long Reardon could handle fairly demanding training–about 6 minutes.

 I’m fascinated by the question of how to increase duration of certain behaviors, especially ones that require intense concentration.  Spaniels were not bred to concentrate on a single behavior for very long; instead as hunters they were required to respond quickly and alertly to any changes in environment: changing scent, the flash of a rooster pheasant’s wings in the brush, the sudden flush of the bird out of cover.  So long-term concentration does not come naturally to a spaniel.  Anyway, here’s the video:

When I got home I watched the video and made some notes in my training journal.  A training journal is another tool I’ve picked up in the past few years, and its current format is inspired Lanny Basham, the Olympic gold medalist in rifle shooting, who has created the best mental preparation performance program I’ve found.  His website is http://mentalmanagement.ipower.com.  More on Lanny some other time. 

My notes for Reardon are:

  • our take-off is messy; I’m moving as I say “trot.”  I need to stay still, say “trot” and then move forward with him.  The messy startoff causes his head to drop and his body to get out of position;
  • work on his anticipation of the about turn; work with barriers where I don’t always do an about; stop and feed in the middle of the about turn; make sure my body cues are clear;
  • work on maintaining attention, especially as his interest lags.  In this video at about 5 1/2 minutes, I simply brought back out the food as a lure.  Instead, I need to play more, break things up, try a toy in the arm;
  • overall great work in a new building with attention and attitude; transitions into the slow looked better than I thought they would;
  • work on forging, especially in the beginning.  Go back to a dowel;
  • Geez, I need to go on a diet.  Sitting around for 6 weeks has not done me any good!
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3 responses to “New Year’s Day Training”

  1. Donna Ewing Avatar
    Donna Ewing

    I have bookmarked your blog. I have a Springer bitch (black/white bench bred) who just turned 2 a couple of weeks ago. She is my first dog to train. We completed our Rally Excellent title in December and are beginning to do some training for obedience. Watching this video gave me tons of insight and things I now know I need to work on. Darcie is a ‘lagger’ when heeling and any pointers that you might have for correcting that I would certainly appreciate it. Darcie is also training for agility with my husband – and she certainly is NOT a lagger in that sport. So, I believe part of my problem is I’m not making it ‘fun’ enough.

    Thank you for posting the video – I’ll be looking at it a lot in the near future.

    Reply
    1. ballylynnspaniels Avatar
      ballylynnspaniels

      Donna, thank you so much for writing. I’m really glad you got something out of the video–I think sharing more videos of how we all train can be really helpful for all of us.

      It might be interesting to try to trace how and why Darcie started lagging. I LOVE rally, but I have a suspicion that all that stopping and starting, if that’s all you do in training, could become demotivating. That is, it’s possible she’s starting to lag in anticipation of the next halt, or down, or the various turns and spins. It might be time to open Darcie up and heel in big loops and circles for a while, encouraging her a lot and releasing up with food treats. (Release UP along your left side, not forward–or else you might start having a forging dog!:-)

      You’re right to see that heel position needs to always be very positive. In the video you see that when Reardon comes up to heel when we’re stationary, he’s always getting a food treat before we start. I’ll be doing that for a good long while. It will never entirely stop, but eventually I’ll randomize it.

      There’s a really fun game to play with a lagging dog. It’s a variation on Dawn Jecs’ “Choose to Heel” method. Throw a cookie away from you, tell Darcie “get it” and let her run to get it. In the meantime, you walk in the opposite direction, saying “heel” as soon as she turns towards you. Walk exactly the same way you do when you usually heel. Most likely Darcie will try to come to you and find heel position, but if she’s confused, entice her with some food in your left hand. She’ll catch on. As soon as she finds heel position and has heeled with you a few steps, release her with the cookie. Make sure as soon as she hits that heel position and before you release, LOTS of praise in a very happy voice. Then throw another cookie away from you, and start the game all over again. Most dogs catch on to this quickly and really have fun. They find out that heel position is a FUN place to be.

      Getting back to my second paragraph–see if you can figure out what triggers Darcie’s lagging. With Reardon, as the video shows, at a certain point he just loses focus. That’s okay–we have years for him to mature and be able to concentrate for longer periods of time. But typically he’ll lag as we’re coming up to strange barriers and walls. (By “strange” I mean new and unknown to Reardon.) That’s not a lagging problem–that’s a barrier problem that I need to help him through, using cookies first as a lure and then as an immediate reward if he can heel to the wall with me and halt or do an about turn without lagging.

      I sure wouldn’t do any correcting (collar pops) for the lagging until you’ve exhausted all other possibilities for quite some time. Often collar pops won’t work, or even make the problem worse.

      I hope some of these ideas help. Let me know. If the heeling game doesn’t make sense on paper, I can always do a quick video clip of it. Thanks again for writing!

      Laura

      Reply
  2. Donna Ewing Avatar
    Donna Ewing

    Laura,

    Thanks so much for your reply. I’ll give you a little history here. I have never really trained in a true obedience class. I took one class and was bored to tears – and so was Darcie. They didn’t make it fun for either of us and I do think it should be fun. It was a huge class with very little individual attention. So, basically I ‘train’ with a lady who owns and has trained Cavaliers in obedience. We go to a parking lot and set up rally courses or call obedience courses. With the inclement winter weather we have had here in North Texas, even that has been rare lately. So, watching others’ videos will be a great help.

    I see that your Kani was the ESSFTA 2008 Open Obedience Springer. Simon (Darcie’s Dad) has won some ESSFTA awards, too. He was the ESSFTA 2004 Novice and Open Agility Springer. Simon has both his conformation Championship and his MACH2. So, that is a little history and why we are so into Springers.

    Since I saw your video today, I have already started working on our ‘Let’s go’ – which is my release word. She sometimes does the ‘head down’ thing when we start off. So, I am doing short (very short) sequences of ‘Let’s go’ with lots of treats/praise if she watches me instead of going ‘head down’. I am also going to start with your suggestion of the ‘cookie toss’. What a great idea! If I don’t think I’m getting it, I’ll let you know.

    I’ll be watching your blog for new posts. Anything you add will be a big help for me I’m sure. Thank you for taking this time to help! I really appreciate it.

    Donna Ewing
    Plano, TX

    Reply

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