Trialing Questions

[Sankari]

Hi all,

I went to our first and only trial back in september we didnt pass as i think both myself and my dog werent quite ready. Well it was a double trial and she did a double knee injury which thankfully wasnt a surgery case, and have just been thinking about getting back into it. We havent done any training since then so she's probably forgotten alot...

I would like to know what's the best way of training her to heal off lead without her losing focus. She's got brilliant healing on lead (most of the time) but off lead she walks away. If I have food shes perfect, but of course food isnt allowed in the ring.

I am going to start training her again tomorrow, so any pointers of what things to do to get her back into it and make it as enjoyable as possible are appreciated.

Also she was really bad at her sit and down stays, they're perfect if shes the only dog but in a group she is distracted.

Anything I should know?

[MrsD]

I would suggest using a clicker & a food reward to mark when she's done the right thing, there are hundreds on threads in the forum & literally thousands of pages online about clicker training, Karen Prior is one of the disciples of the method, so you could google for her page or just google clicker training & then add heeling & you should get some good results.

Using the clicker you should be able to smarten up her heeling, drops sits etc, increase her distraction threshold & wean her off the food - it won't be instantanious but you should get an improvement once she works out how the clicker works.

Goodluck .

[Prydenjoy]

I always train off leash, lately I've been hiding the foodor a toy somewhere before I go out to start a training session, as far as the dog knows I don't have anything, but if I get the right focus and attention etc it just magically appears, he's learnt that even when I "don't have" a reward it is still in his best interest to do what I want because there will always be something! You need to make heeling a highly reinforced behavior, even in the absense of food. Berri has to do some heel work before his meals, during play time, when he wants to come inside or outside, when he wants to play with the cat etc, so the association with food really isn't all that strong.

ETA a conditioned marker, such as clicker or word marker and release word is very important, they need to know they are getting access to this goodie because of what they are doing at that moment, otherwise it wont work (eg the dog is heeling perfectly, suddenly you break off and open the door to let it in, it follows behind you to the door - What is the dog being rewarded for?).

Edited April 6, 2010 by Jeanne

[Sankari]

Thanks for your assistance, I have a clicker and am reading up on it and i did one session, did quite well. I did some distraction training a few nights ago. That worked very well. I have issues with her heeling, she heals reasonably well on lead but the minute she's offlead shes in another world, but only like that with her heeling.

I'm watching lots of videos on youtube, and educating myself on clicker training. Hopefully we'll nip the heeling in the bud soon.

[Prydenjoy]

All the best

[JulesP]

Just start slowly with the heeling. Try and get just a couple of steps with nice attention and then reward. Slowly build up the number of steps before rewarding. Switch it around too, sometimes reward heaps, then go for 10 steps and reward, then go back to rapid treating.