Freestyle 9/26

The freestyle routine we are doing with Peggy is coming along. Today, she wanted to change our hand movements and get rid of the treats. I told her we had to do one thing at a time. I hope she doesn't change anything else in the routine because I am geting dizzy with all the changes and I may just quit. While I am getting frustrated with Peggy, Morgan is cooperating better and seems to be having fun with me which is FABULOUS.

Generalization

I learned something very interesting about Morgan and it has taken me 6 years to figure it out. The dog has a heck of a time generalizing AND LOOKING DOWN! It is amazing about the looking down part because it took her six months to realize there was stuff above her head. She was living with a toy and a mini and looking down was what she did. When she looked up, she never looked down again (unless I dropped food there :)

Today,I tried to practice our freestyle routine with tiny little pylons as compared to the big ones we have been using. She never saw the pylon and would not look at it when I tried to point it out. It seems she thought 'It is small, it is insignificant and I don't want to acknowledge it.' I realize some of her reaction was confusion but that knowledge didn't keep me from losing my temper with her. I started out with the clicker and why I didn't just shape the behavior, I do not know. It would have made the session so much happier. Yeah, I do know why I didn't shape it, it was because in my head, she already knew this sequence and I only had the clicker to increase the number of times she would need to do it. I was not willing to go backwards with her.

She eventually got it but not after I yelled at her "What is wrong with you?" 'Well what was wrong is that I don't generalize and you are going to have to teach it to me again, stupid,' (she probably thought).

I really wish I didn't get so mad at her. She is such a smart dog but I just have not figured out how her brain works. I can't do high reps with her and she loses attention quickly and when she is confused, she just checks out.

Training Pen is so much more fun.

Freestyle

Morgan is doing a lot better with her freestyle routine. I think it is because she did not have any distractions. I think that I need to train alone for a little while and then get back together with Peggy to practice. Morgan and I need about 5 more sessions alone before we rejoin Peggy and Matt and I think, then, we will be able to do so much better with the music.

Swimming

Morgan hasn't been up to a lot since I last wrote. Most of my training was cancelled because I was so immersed in work, I didn't get to train the way I want to. We did do weave poles on Monday. We were in a different room and I opened up the poles so that she would be successful. When she was, I quickly closed the poles back up. At first I closed them too much and she was having a difficult time. Then I got it just right and she had a couple of very successful entries. I still haven't been able to get the poles straight up. She pops out after the first two poles or she will do the first four poles and skip the last two. It's hard to figure out what I am doing wrong. Maybe it is time to go back and look at the video :)

Friday, I was very pleased with her heeling. I used the technique we did in Pen's class (run away if she looks away) worked like a charm. She thinks heeling is fun now. I think I will have to mix it us a lot more to keep this girl interested. We will start doing more proofing next week.

Today, I was most proud of her. She would not go into the water and the water was too icky for me to wade in. I was about to be bummed. Then one of the women who is training her puppy had him retrieving a duck and Morgan was very interested. I didn't think she would retrieve it because she has left ducks in the water before. However, we had the added dimension of a cute little puppy retrieving right before her eyes. Yep, she started going in. After she returned with the duck, we would throw it back out and she would whine about the duck being out there and eventually, she would go out to it. The last couple of times, she actually swam to the duck. I was so proud. YAY! She may be a duck dog yet.

Augusta Match

I took Morgan to Augusta today to practice our Novice routine. The good news is that she did better than she has at any trial as far as heeling is concerned. The bad new is that she had very little attention and the even worse news is that I hadn't even planned on doing what I did with her. I think the reason my planning was put in the hopper was because we could not use food in the ring. That just discombobulated me. I didn't have a plan after that. However, the minute I lost her attention, I should have stopped and waited for her to realize she had done something wrong before I continued. I should have only done heeling until she paid attention to me. I didn't need help with SFE or Recalls. I could have done 3 heeling patterns. ARRRGGGG! All that driving and entry fee just wasted on a forgetful mom. No more matches that I can find until October. I really beginning to think I won't EVER get this girl in the ring.

No more NRMs

Today, I tried not saying anything to Morgan when she messed up her weave poles and it was like night and day. If she missed her entry, I would not throw the bumper, but I would smile at her grab her collar and enthusiastically send her again. She seemed to stop and think, why no toy? Then she would actually alter what she was doing the second time and fix it. It seems my NRM must have interfered with her problem solving. All she could think about was what she did wrong. With no reward and silence from me, she started thinking about how she could get me to throw the bumper again. YAY! After all, isn't that the point? I thought by saying something I would let her know when she was going wrong but it seems it is better to let her figure it out for herself. I started seeing her think about her mistakes much more today. I hope it continues.

A quick note

I've been doing a tiny bit of training on the weave poles. Two weeks off has made me go back to where we were three weeks ago. I probably realized this before but it is finally sinking in, Morgan does NOT like no reward markers. What they do is to turn her completely off. "If I'm wrong I don't want to play." I'm really not sure what to do about that. I have heard people say that we should make training so that the dog is never wrong. Somehow that does not make sense to me. I think we learn best from making mistakes. I go back to the Diane Bauman advice I got 17 years ago. If I see that the dog gets something wrong 3 times (or that she is confused), then I make it easier and then work up to the next level. The trouble I have with Morgan is that I cannot do many repetitions so the learning is SOOOOOO Slow. Now I can't tell her she's wrong? WTF? Okay, I'm getting frustrated here so I have to sign off. I'll sleep on it and see what I come up with in the morning.