Gundogs/training In Drive

[Luke GSP]

I find it a bit of a copout. Not that I don't agree on some level, I am just cynical. It's very easy to have some kind of success with dogs one way or another. It's very difficult if not impossible to know when you're having the 'most' success you can with a dog. Kivi is a training machine at the moment and I have no idea why. About a month ago he just started getting really enthusiastic about it out of the blue. It was remarkable. I'm still waiting for it to plateau. Did I think he was doing just peachy a year ago? Hell yes.Evidently he had more to give and I just didn't know it.

In honesty, I'm not sure that what you describe has anything to do with you or the methods you were employing, I think most entities, humans and animals go through periods of development and additional motivation, it's really a matter of exploiting them when they occur to maximise the benefit. :)

[Luke GSP]

You cannot reward your dog with food or toys for calling off stock

I did with Weez :) Worked great for him specifically.

Ok, there are always exceptions. maybe "cannot" was too generalised. I will change to " it would be very unusual if you could"

I did try it once as a joke...I was working Fly, (who is about as ball obsessed as a dog can get) and I said "where's your ball?".I wish I'd videoed it. She flipped, gave me the wild eyes, looked at the ball, then looked at me in disgust & went back to her sheep.

That's funny! The first time I had game and food side by side Em spat the food out :laugh: I did teach her to accept whichever I chose but I'm not sure it would work on live game. In terms of other behaviours around retrieving I work on conditioned responses away from the activity using dummies and food - deliveries, sit stays, recalls, whistle sits, distance handling etc. Then I add game (which sends her over the top and works as both a fabulous temptation and a brilliant reward), followed by the excitement of a trial.

Ah yes, the old, "get that treat away from my mouth can't you see I am trying to make that bird, rabbit, possum explode just by staring at it!" syndrome :laugh:

[Weasels]

You cannot reward your dog with food or toys for calling off stock

I did with Weez :) Worked great for him specifically.

Ok, there are always exceptions. maybe "cannot" was too generalised. I will change to " it would be very unusual if you could"

I did try it once as a joke...I was working Fly, (who is about as ball obsessed as a dog can get) and I said "where's your ball?".I wish I'd videoed it. She flipped, gave me the wild eyes, looked at the ball, then looked at me in disgust & went back to her sheep.

It was part of a peripheral training goal: I wanted to be able to let the dogs roam around off-lead at herding training. Since we were there for hours I preferred it to tying them up, so I specifically taught them that the reinforcer that's available is the one I'm giving you, i.e. if I take you into the sheep, we are working for sheep. When I say enough, we are working for something else. Meant they weren't constantly trying to get into the sheep while other people were training, in the absence of any other activity. So it wasn't an automatic thing, it was a trained thing, and worked well to the point I could switch Weez on and off inside the yard to train other things more quickly as a side-effect. We even did a few sessions of normal heelwork inside the beginner yard to teach him to walk out to the first obstacle nicely without pushing the sheep off the set-up.

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Incidently, I'm on record as saying I use aversives in herding. By that I mean yelling, pointing a stick at them, and stopping training. It works better when I make the yelling constructive (stop!/down!/back!) but I'm the first to admit sometimes my brain lets me down and all I can come up with is "hey!". Work goes much slower when I am vague like that. I think it is very hard to permanently damage the 'drive' of a dog that is doing its innate job, but I think it is possible to cower them to the point they are overthinking their footfalls or checking in and out of the task (eating sheep poo or going off to pee being good indicators). So I try to be adaptive.

(And whenever people talk about the right tool to train a dog, my first thought is "yes, the best Tool is me" :laugh: )

Edited July 3, 2013 by TheLBD