[nagdu] Owner trainers

[Shanna Stichler]

Hi Minh,

Julie more or less stated everything perfectly, so I'll try not to 
rehash too much of her post. One difference for me was that I'd trained, 
or helped train, guide dogs before. I used to work for GDB in their 
training department, which gave me a general idea of how to go about 
teaching my dog. Except then I ended up doing it a lot differently 
anyway just because of the temperament and drives she has, which aren't 
all that similar to the GDB dogs I worked with. Just as an example, my 
dog is very toy-driven, so clicker training wasn't all that successful 
for us. She works well for praise though as well as, say, a ball on a 
rope, so I didn't have any trouble training her. I just had to use 
different techniques to do it. :D

For me, I had similar criteria when selecting my dog, although I did 
hire someone to evaluate her in addition to myself, so I could have an 
objective 3rd party view of her strengths and weaknesses. I chose to use 
my cane and pattern my dog to a lot of the guide work responses I would 
expect later on. She actually picked up on obstacles very quickly. Once 
I showed her a few obstacles, she just started guiding me around all of 
them, everywhere. I think I only did a couple of formal sessions of 
right-side clearance work. Curbs were the same way, but I think a lot of 
that was because I always rewarded Diamond for stopping at them when out 
of harness, before starting the formal guide dog training part. Traffic 
was harder because the dog I have now is very bold, so she just wasn't 
ever afraid of much. This is good for me because I live in an area with 
a lot of very fast-moving, loud traffic, but it was harder to teach the 
intelligent disobedience stuff.

The hardest part by far of owner-training for me was teaching my 
high-drive puppy impulse control. She'd been originally started as an 
IPO dog, so she had been encouraged to do a lot of things that are not 
ideal for service work. Also, Diamond has a lot of prey drive. Honestly, 
a guide dog school would never use her because it is so high, so it took 
a lot of work and practice around different distractions in order to 
teach her not to act on her impulse to chase fast-moving objects, or air 
snap at them, or any of that kind of stuff. Out of harness, she still 
has a lot of drive, so we are doing tracking and other competitive dog 
sports to give her an outlet for some of that. In harness though, she 
has very good self-control around distractions, and is a very 
responsible worker.

Shanna and Diamond
     ;