21 Months: Training - December 9th - 13th, 2013

Tired after a long day of training.

Monday - Friday

Jack is working on Retrieve and Tug skills this week.  Ronda has a possibility of having surgery in the future and with it needs Jack's ability to pick up anything, including delicate items, built up to a fine art.  This means I need to soften his mouth and reduce his silly behaviors when performing a retrieve.

Ronda has been doing her homework and his retrieves are less pounce and bounce and more controlled and focused.  I am using a pencil to gauge his bite strength on an item and have run into the problem of his flipping it back into his rear molars and crunching when I get to the stage where he holds it on his own.  This is a huge issue and needs to be addressed to improve his retrieve.

We started the week with my holding the pencil and his taking it and making the "first tooth contact" behind his canines.  We built up from there to a solid 5 second hold with both of us sharing the pencil together.  I then released it to let him hold it for a second and he flipped it into his molars and crunched.   No treat.  That shook him and we managed to get up to 2 seconds on his own before a crunch.

Coffee, please?

By Thursday he got up to 3 seconds before flipping it back and crunch and then he snapped the pencil.  Sigh.  I decided he'd need to stay at 2 seconds and I would only reward for not flipping the pencil back into his molar for a while.  This seemed to help and his bite strength on the new pencil decreased.

On Friday he broke the second pencil at 3 seconds again.  We ran out of pencils during that time and Ronda said she'd buy more pencils for me to work with so he could continue to learn to not bite down and damage them.  Once we have that I can work on his picking up a plastic egg without harming it and then build him up on more delicate items.  Softening his mouth will take time.

We also worked on learning to open the cabinet by the tug attached.  I shaped him to taking the tug into his mouth, lifting it and then pulling back until he opened the door.  That took 3 separate lessons.  I then went to work on the fridge door and he once again went back to flipping the tug into his molars and trying to chew through it.

I decided to take down one of Malcolm's tugs and teach him to tug and not chew when there was pressure.  The first lesson was when I was holding the tug and he picked it up and eventually began to pull on it.  The second lesson I attached it to the fridge and clicked for the same pattern.  The third lesson is below - what an amazing process to watch!

Level 1

	Zen	Target	Come	Sit	Down
Step	Completed	Completed	2	Completed	Completed

Level 2

	Zen	Come	Sit	Down	Target
Step	3	4	2	1	Completed
	Focus	Lazy Leash	Go To Mat	Crate	Distance
Step	1	Completed	2	5	1
	Jump	Relax	Handling	Tricks	Communication
Step	1	4	Completed	1	4

Level 3

	Zen	Come	Sit	Down	Target
Step	0	2	2	1	0
	Focus	Lazy Leash	Go To Mat	Crate	Distance
Step	0	Completed	1	0	0
	Jump	Relax	Handling	Retrieve	Communication
Step	0	0	Completed	2	0

Level 4

	Zen	Come	Retrieve	Target	Relax
Step	0	0	5	0	0
	Focus	Lazy Leash	Go To Mat	Crate	Distance
Step	0	Completed	0	0	0
	Handling	Communication
Step	Completed	0