June 17

I didn't submit this to my blog but I copied it from the entry on Obedience Poodle list.

I just want to kick myself when I do something dumb in my training and have to back up and fix it. Here's the story. I have been training heeling with Morgan and would keep my treats in this little apron thingy that I won at a trial with cute poodles on it. I taught her to focus on my left hand by putting the hot dog in my fist and luring her with it. It worked great. She was heeling straight and happy. Gradually I faded the cookie so that she could not see it but it was there and when she was especially good, I'd reward her with it.

Here is the bad part, ya'll. I decided to go with nothing in my hand and I discarded the apron (a good thing?) BUT I put the cookie in my mouth where it is when I do most of my teaching in obedience. (You know what's coming.) We have been working on left, right and about turns for the past few days and I noticed that when I exaggerated my cue for the right turn (turn my head and shoulder looking down and to the right), Morgan would lose all focus and get out of position. It happened several times and I couldn't understand what was going on. I finally went to the mirror to see what was going on and I found out two things 1) she was crabbing and I hadn't noticed and 2) when I looked in the mirror she lost focus and moved out of position.
Damn it, SHE WAS LOOKING AT MY FACE as her new focal point. When I turned my face away from her, she lost her focal point and didn't know what to do. I had been stupidly taking the food out of my mouth to reward her-no wonder she was looking there.

Now, I have to go back and re-train the focal point AND get rid of the crabbing. What was I thinking?!!! I wasn't, obviously. I do NOT want another crabbing dog (Merlin crabbed because he is so little and wanted to look in my face) so I have to get her focal point back to my hand where she was in a good position. I'm hoping that it won't take long to re-train because we haven't been doing the 'no cookie' in hand routine long-two weeks tops. I probably have to go back to the beginning with the focal point and name it. What do you think?

There was one good thing. I found that after all that practice, if I just moved my eyes and shoulders, she finally got the right turn w/o lagging. She kinda reminds me of myself in 5th grade when the teacher was trying to get us to do long division and wanted us to show all the steps. I would invariably skip a bunch of steps because I didn't need them. My teacher was outraged that I had done that and couldn't conceive of how I got the answers without going through the steps. And she was teaching a gifted class???!!!
Anyway, I'm thinking Morgan in some cases may not need all the tiny little steps but we will take them and speed through them if she seems to 'get it'
more quickly. OTOH, she needs teensy, eensy, weensy steps in retrieving-I'll ask ya'll about that next.