The Spaniel Annals

Kerrie’s heeling needs to increase in duration and focus to prepare for AKC Novice obedience. One of the major ways I work on duration is through Laura Romanik’s heeling grids. Laura is an outstanding trainer in Ohio who introduced heeling grids to me in a seminar many years ago. I’ll explain them briefly here, but to get the entire system, you’ll want to buy one of Laura’s booklets on heeling grids. Unfortunately her Radiant Obedience Training site is down due to hacking, but you can find her on facebook. (I’ll provide a link once her site is restored.)

The concept is to provide reinforcement after a carefully randomized set of steps, with those steps gradually increasing in number. Doing this follows the principle that intermittent reinforcement is the strongest of all forms of reinforcement.

The number of steps are laid out in sequences of four numbers. After each number, or step, the dog is rewarded. One of the four numbers is the highest, and so for that harder work, the dog receives 3 treats instead of one.

For example, at home Kerrie is working on a later sequence of 8, 25, 17, and 49 steps. For each of the first three numbers, she receives 1 treat, and after 49, she receives 3. In this “grid,” the numbers are then rearranged in 4 different sets; for example sequence number 2 is 25, 8, 49, 17. I typically do 2 sequences per session at this point. When we get up to the higher sequences, we might only do one. For example, the very last grid is 19, 57, 38, and 113! (113 is a typical number of steps you might walk in a Novice obedience heeling pattern.)

In the video below, Kerrie and I tried heeling grids away from home for the first time. When I’m away from familiar training grounds, I start over again with the grids because the distractions get so much harder. So I wind up with two different charts of checked off grids; one for home, and one for away from home.

At this covered shopping area, we tried an easy grid of 3, 7, 4 and 14:

This turned out to be very easy for her! She has been accelerating her understanding of duration and focus lately, which is great. Next time we’re away from home, we’ll jump up to the next grid and see how she does.

As you can see, we simply do big circles with no halts, turns or changes of pace. That can certainly be added in later, but for now, focus for longer periods of time is our only goal. Good girl, Kerrie!