[nagdu] Obedience

[Tami Jarvis]

Tracy,

He's eager to please, huh? Sounds like a great kid you've got.

Do you use food rewards in your obedience practice? Click with or 
without food reward? Praise? Timing is different somewhat with different 
reinforcers, so that's why I ask. When I'm doing daily obedience review, 
I use treats liberally, especially with the younger dogs. Mitzi will 
sometimes take the treats, sometimes not, especially if they are not up 
to her discriminating standards. /lol/ Zay the mutt is food motivated, 
so if I were serious about training her for work, I would have to work 
to wean her off treats. Loki poodle thinks it's all a game, but he, too, 
is starting to want to skip the treats and move on to fun stuff. So I'm 
not worrying about whether I should remove treats from our obedience 
game or not. I haven't been using the clicker with him because at first 
I couldn't really tell when he was sitting or what and because I have 
sloppy clicker habits. /lol/

Okay. So what I would do using food rewards to teach the dog to wait for 
my command is to simply withhold the reward for the behaviors that are 
done before the command. There's also zen, where you teach the dog to 
wait for the treat in your hand. It can also help teach food refusal, so 
if you're interested, I can describe it or refer you to someone who 
describes it better. /smile/

To keep things interesting and to keep the dog from going through the 
routine by rote, I change the order of what I ask, as well as the 
location. And I just do short sessions -- one repetition for the 
poodles, although Zay could use more than that. Having the three get 
involved can make things fun as they compete, so we do that sometimes 
throughout the day. I do a lot of silly stupid stuff and say whatever 
idiot thing comes to mind in my happy voice, too, to keep them (and me) 
entertained by it all. It's hard to be original in expressing how 
inexpressably happy I am that my dog just sat on command, but the 
poodles love happy praise, and I love happy poodles, so I hope there are 
no hidden cameras in my home. /lol/

Which reminds me... I was doing obedience review in the yard when we 
would go out before breakfast and at other times, but now I need to get 
in the habit of doing it regularly indoors. My kiddo is getting to be a 
teenager, so this is not the time for me to fall down on the job!

Tami

On 11/20/2014 05:41 AM, Tracy Carcione via nagdu wrote:
> I am trying to be good and do my daily obedience exercises.  I try to do
> them in various places.  What else have people done to jazz them up and
> keep them interesting and useful?
> I would like to try them with food around, but I'm not sure I can be
> quick enough to keep Krokus from snatching the food without some help
> from someone.  He's really fast, and getting the food would defeat the
> whole purpose.  But I know it can be done, and would like to know the
> trick.
>
> Tangentially, when I learned OB at GDB many moons ago, I learned to wait
> a beat or two after the down before giving the sit, so the dog was
> responding to the command and not anticipating.  But it seems different
> at TSE.  It was down sit down sit down sit, with no real time between.
> Krokus expects that, and my classmates did it that way, so I was on my
> first or 2nd down/sit and they had done 3.  Seems odd to me, because
> Krokus pops up a second after I say down, thinking that's how it's done.
> Seems to me he should be waiting for my command.
> Tracy
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> nagdu mailing list
> nagdu at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nagdu_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nagdu:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nagdu_nfbnet.org/tami%40poodlemutt.com
>