More clicker games with a dummy this time

I'm very good at carrying things around, so this was an easy game. I think Mom was really happy with the way I played the game. And I was really happy because I got lots of biscuits. When we finished playing the game, Mom took away the dummy, and put it up where I could not get it. Too bad, it might have been fun to chew on.

Although hunting dogs are taught to hold a dummy at the middle of the dummy part, I am teaching Emma to favor picking up a retrieving dummy by the rope.

Most of the items used in PWD water work have ropes on them, and are better taken by the rope for various reasons. The gear bag is required to be dragged by the rope; grasping the fabric in the teeth might cause damage. The bouy ball is too huge and can only be taken by the rope. The floats on the float line will fit in a dog's mouth, but I've heard that too much damage to the floats can result. In the case of the dummy, a dog will get less water in her mouth when retrieving by the rope.

I felt it would be a good idea to teach Emma to take by the rope, but I double checked with a question posted on the PWD Pets group. Everyone who responded confirmed and reinforced this decision as being a good one.

This session is the first time since age 1 year that Emma has worked with a dummy. I used Diamond tiny puppy biscuits, broken in half. She was consciously choosing the rope end by the time we quit. I remember that she had a similar dummy when she was small, and chewed the rope off, so I put it out of reach when we were finished.

Kathy, Emma's 2lggd mom

PWD Portie Portuguese Water Dog work waterwork clicker training video

A good day for a romp

This is my play pal, Buffy. She's about 6 months younger than me. We play almost every day, in Buffy's back yard. Buffy knows how to play, but she was better at it before she got fat. Now she poops out after a short while.

Buffy is sort of a Beagle-Jack Russel mix. She has Beagle ears on a JRT head, JRT coloring, and a body somewhere between the two.

Kathy, Emma's 2lggd mom

PWD Portie Portuguese Water Dog play video PortieFlix

... I prefer a sand bath, thank you

I had a nice afternoon at Radio Island Beach. Mocha (Norwich Terrier) and I, and our 2lggd moms spent a couple of hours there. Mocha won't go in the water. She won't play either. And today Mom wouldn't go in the water either, but she threw the ball for me a lot, sometimes up the beach, and sometimes into the water.

Mom was clicking and treating me sometimes after I came out of the water. I'm not sure what she was driving at, but hey, the biscuits were great. Sometimes she seemed to be "herding" me away from the beach blanket (haha, she wants to be a Border Collie). She didn't want me to shake off there. So then I would go roll in the sand instead.

When we got home, Mom showered. She called me and then she came looking for me. She found me lying on my loveseat, NOT looking at a big pool of saltwater with biscuit bits dribbling across the floor. Don't know where that came from! Whoever did that, I'm sure glad they didn't barf it up in Mom's car on the way home. I hoped that she would forget about my shower by the time she finished cleaning up. But when she finished, she took my collar off, and I knew I wasn't off the hook.

Now I smell like shampoo, instead of like the ocean. All those perfectly good sand baths, down the shower drain.

Emma was certainly being a little thick at the beach. Finally, after four summers of seeing her happily gallop over to my beach blanket to shake off after each dip in the ocean, I have decided to put "shake off" on cue.

I'm using a combo verbal/hand signal cue. I waited to capture each spontaneous shake-off with a c/t, and a couple of times actually caught her shaking-off away from the blanket. I did in fact try to block her path to the blanket several times, and when I did that, she would either give up and not shake-off, or she would indulge in a sand bath instead.

What on earth goes through their heads??? So many dogs do that; wait until they are right next to people, or their things to shake off.

Eventually, I just gave up and started capturing shake-offs at the blanket. She happily snarfed down biscuits, but she never made the connection. It will take more sessions, but the weather has turned cooler. I don't know how many more beach days we will have this year.

Emma's 2lggd mom
Kathy

My Mom the Whistle Blower

My 2lggd mom played a new clicker game with me today. She was giving me the sit hand signal, and I was sitting, but then at the same time she started putting this thing in her mouth and making this loud whistle noise. She had the thing hanging around her neck. At first when I heard it, I found the sound a little distracting. I got confused, and forgot that I was supposed to sit for the hand signal. But then I figured out that the whistle sound meant sit TOO! After that, the biscuits came really fast! FUN! (Yum).

I think that I could learn a lot from the ways that hunting dogs are trained. The only problem is that too much of that training involves coercion (shock collars, ear pinches, and so on). Emma and I just do not train that way; I will only use positive motivation. The only things Emma gets punished for are things that are always patently wrong (such as climbing up onto the desk to eat cat food out of the kitties' LeBistro).

Last week I saw a couple of videos of Lindsay Ridgeway working with his Golden Retrievers, Lumi (age 4) and Laddie (age 4 months). Lindsay dislikes coercive training methods just as I do. The "Pinball Drill" shown in these videos is an exercise that Lindsay is using to teach the dogs the "handling" cues to direct them to retrieves in the field. I can see that such fine control to direct the dog at a distance would be just as useful in PWD waterwork. Whether its dead birds, or fishing gear, a retrieve is a retrieve, right?

I joined the Dog Trek group so that I could learn more about this pinball drill, and how Lindsay trained it. He provided an excellent explanation. For me, teaching the whistle sit is the first step. The whistle sit is used to cue the dog to stop and visually check in with the handler for a new directional cue. When the dogs are working in the water, they apparently have no problem translating the "sit" as stop and swim in a tight little circle to check in for another hand signal. I got out the whistle which I once used for teaching sailing to 10 year olds, and we got to work. Right now, I am continuing this work, trying for more distance. At greater distances, Emma has a tendency to want to step toward me before sitting, so we are working on that, reinforcing only the prompt sits, ignoring the traveling sits.

An unanticipated minor problem: now when Emma sees me with the whistle she starts offering uncued sits.

Here are the LL&L videos:



Laddie, at only 4 months then, is astonishing! Such a great testament to clicker training.



And Lumi is such perfection, she is a joy to watch.

Kathy, Emma's 2lggd mom

PWD Portie Portuguese Water Dog work waterwork clicker training whistle sit

My kitties

Or one of them anyway. Actually, I have two kitties, sisters, almost twins. Their names are Prima and Fina.

We like to play. Sometimes I chase them, and its fun when they run, but then when they stop, I stop. Sometimes they think my tail plume is their own personal cat toy. Once when I was standing in the middle of the living room, minding my own business, and Prima ran up, stopped right in front of me, reared up on her hind legs, boxed my muzzle with her paws FOUR TIMES, and ran away. It all happened so fast that I didn't have time to do much more than blink!

We were playing on the couch, but then as soon as Mom got the camcorder, we just watched her instead.

Yeah, the minute I start recording, they stop playing and watch me. I so hard to catch those sweet moments when they are happening. Prima and Fina were the two females in a litter of five, and were the first and last born, hence the names.

Kathy, Emma's 2lggd mom

Another clicker game

I'm not sure what this was about. I already know how to lie down, but it seems like there was s'posed to be more to it. But, what the heck, I got lots of biscuits!

Some dogs can learn to roll over in a single session. I've seen a number of people teaching dogs to roll over by luring, but, as you can see, that just doesn't work for us. We're not so lucky (or talented). My attempts to lure Emma over just result in her whipping her head around the other way. So we are taking it slow. I'm using a clicker, and Charlee Bears treats. In this session Emma gets down on her side, with a couple of legs waving in the air. I called that a good start for now.

Kathy, Emma's 2lggd mom

Technorati Tags: PWD, Portie, Portuguese, Water, Dog, clicker, training, roll, over, video

Last haircut of the summer (maybe)

Mom says I'm getting a little shaggy. And I must admit that I'm losing the tennis ball in the grass a little more often these days. Perhaps I do have too much hair in my eyes. What do you think?



I don't much like the process of having my face clipped, but I like the nice clean feeling afterwards. And now I can see again!

Emma has been clipped short for the summer, only leaving her tail plume and the rasta-do on top of her head. By now however, it's grown a bit. The only part that bothers me is all that moustache and beard. And it gets long enough around her eyes that she loses sight of the ball she's chasing. And the hair gets in her eyes - I mean actually STICKS to her eyeballs. Emma is my first non-shedder. I had no idea that their eyelashes just grow and grow; I never thought about it.

The second video is after trimming Emma's face. Personally, I like her with a neatly clipped face. I don't much care for the beards and moustaches styled on some PWDs. I must say, I think this is the tidiest face job I've ever done. I have an Oster Sculptor rechargeable clipper that I use on Emma's body, but for her face I have been using a Conair beard trimmer that runs on AA batteries. It takes two AA batteries, and I always have lots of rechargeable AAs around. It's lightweight, so its very easy to handle. And while I hate snap-on combs for clipping Emma's body, they don't seem to be a problem on her face. I think the reason it turned out so nice this time is because I removed the comb and blew out the comb and blade so frequently - every 2 or 3 passes. And I kept going back over in different directions. I also scissored around her paws. Tomorrow I will tidy up her earflaps and then start kind of a "creeping lion cut."

Kathy, Emma's 2lggd mom

PWD Portie Portuguese Water Dog grooming video

Me and Boy George

My 2lggd mom found these pictures of me in the family photo album. Boy George was my first kitty cat. Well, I wished he was mine. He would come into the boat for a visit, and a little canned fish, but he would never stay. I think he wanted to play; I sure wanted to. I hit the play-pose, but he didn't get the message.

These pictures from January '04, Emma's about 9 mos. old. Boy George was the friendliest of the boatyard cats. Loved people, but would be owned by no one. Note that Emma is tethered. Boy George willfully entered her perimeter to tease her. Emma's trying hard to figure out how to get this creature to play!

Kathy, Emma's 2lggd mom

PWD Portie Portuguese Water Dog puppy cat play video pictures