Fetching A Specific Toy

[Dame Aussie]

I want to teach Lili to collect a certain toy.....

She is at the point where I can tell her to go get her toy and point in the general direction and she will go and get it., but I would like to train her to collect a specific toy, does anyone know how I would go about doing this?

Thanks guys ;)

[TerraNik]

Have you done any object discrimination yet? You would need to teach that first, then add on the retrieve.

Edited November 10, 2008 by TerraNik

[Erny]

Mandela does this. He has "Flea" and he has "Shrek". They are the main two that he 'knows' the best. Although there is also "ball" and "stick" and "sock". Anything else is pretty much "toy". I can tell him to go get "Flea" and even when the two toys are both together he will discriminate. If he gets Shrek by accident, I tell him "nah .... get Flea" (or vice versa). Flea can be in one spot and Shrek in another. And he can and will discriminate. Although sometimes his short puppy attention span gets in the way and he forgets what he was running into get when he sees a bit of fluff or whatever that I haven't vacuumed up . Or sometimes he'd give me the big flip 'cause he'd rather try to chew my shoelaces undone, or nosey parker into whatever else it appears that I might be doing.

All I did was take the opportunity of naming each of the aforementioned toys and repeating their names fairly regularly and frequently whenever he had them and give him some praise for having them. In the very early days when he just didn't have a clue I'd be saying "where's Flea?" and at the same time walking to wherever it was that I knew Flea was. "Oh look, there's Flea" as I bent down to get Flea and then I'd have a bit of play with Mandela and Flea giving him a bit of praise for having found "Flea".

One day I was out the back and Mandela was being a prize pest. I told him (with absolutely no expectation) to "go get Flea". To my surprise, he bolted inside and down to the other end of the house, grabbed Flea and brought Flea out. He was about 12 weeks old then - certainly no older. It went on from there (ie that's when I began teaching him names for other toys).

Does that help you? Is this what you meant? Or were you looking more for the sort of training you need for trialling?

Edited November 11, 2008 by Erny

[mcq]

I did something similar with one of my dogs with his toy "dog-dog" He really started to get the knack of it but then got over excited and destroyed "dog-dog" now he's hell bent on wrecking any toy, we never have them around long enough to name them