[nagdu] Owner trainers

[Danielle Nicole Larsen]

Shanna,
Your dog makes me think very much of Trinity too. I love that you shared this, because ei was very worried about this part of her. Although we are gaining a lot of control IN harness, Trinity has a high prey drive and a strong desire to chase etc. She is making a lot of progress with this in harness, but it has taken a lot of work and will require more before she truly gets it. I am not so sure any guide program would hav picked her either. She is very driven with that strong chase / prey instict. She is also a barker. we have been using a cliker to work on barking, coupled with a lickity stick instead of treats. and this is working GREAT!! Fortunately she only barks at home and never out in public. How do you guys feel about dogs that bark?

Danielle and Trinity

Sent from my iPad

On Aug 19, 2013, at 23:13, Shanna Stichler <slstich at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>    ;
> 
> 
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