Trialing this weekend!

Saturday is our big day! We will be trialing for the BH, finally, down at North Myrtle Beach Schutzhund Club. Because we are at the hottest time of the year, the trial starts at 8 pm, and will run as long as we need to finish all dogs in obedience and protection. Tracking will be in the morning on Sunday. Kane and I are only doing obedience though, and I found out there are 7 dogs entered for BH. Wow! We are going to be up late! That doesn't even include the SchH 1-3 that are trialing!!!! I feel like we are ready though.
Hopefully we'll be paired up with Julie and Nobi so that all goes well. We're driving down tomorrow afternoon so that we can have one evening on the field with lights to get used to all that.

So, last weekend seemed like an excellent time to start training something new! :-) The sendout.

Our club has a trial date now of Nov 21-22, and we will be getting ready to do our SchH1 title at that time. This will include tracking, obedience and protection, and we need to get hustling on some of these things like: the retrieves and the sendout. The sendout is done while heeling at a normal pace, the handler then stretches his/her arm out in front and says Go Out (or Voraus in German). The dog is to run in a straight line away from the handler until the handler gives (yells!) the command for down (platz in German). Then the dog must lay down immediately. It's a hard exercise to do. Many people fail even at higher levels. So we started at a distance of 15 feet with a ball on a post and sending Kane to pick up the ball. He did it beautifully all 4 times. After a few improvements on my end for giving the command more effectively, I think we're on our way. :-)

We also started back up with the retrieves, starting out with holding the dumbell.

We had an excellent protection run last Saturday as well. Kane was in fine form and we ran all six blinds. We had a few issues around blind 4, but I think we have a plan worked out on how to deal. We tracked on Sunday morning, food in every 7 steps, and apart from one so-so corner and a few almost headlifts, it could have been a 96 point track. :-) Gotta go out tracking more!

Please keep all fingers and paws crossed that we pass the BH!

4 blinds!

Woo-hoo, we're running 4 blinds!

Well, technically I'm not, Kane is. :-) I'm so excited!

Now that he runs four blinds with a heel and sit in between each, we have started alternating with no heel and sit, just a direct send to the next blind between 1 and 2, then a heel sit between 2 and 3, and a heel sit between 3 and 4. So far so good.

We have finally also formed a REAL Schutzhund USA club: Piedmont Schutzhund Club. We have our affiliation trial on Saturday June 6 and we hope to have a real trial in November, maybe. The affiliation trial is a mock trial, so Kane and I have entered for the BH which will be a practice run before the real thing. I'm getting a bit nervous, I think. The BH is obedience and "temperament" testing only making sure Kane is not nervous around other dogs, people, cars and bicycles.

I still have to learn the pattern for the obedience - guess what I'll be doing this weekend????!!!

Still working on the blind search

Let's start at the beginning. At practice on May 3, we tracked a 80-30-80 track with 2 corners, food in every 5 steps and 5 step corners. This time I had brought a rock to drop at my first corner. I noticed that as I get nervous about not knowing where my corner is, Kane feels it and gets flustered by me and so he messes up. I absolutely have to get better at reading my track. Luckily Sean is an expert at tracking wildlife, so teaching me how to see my own stomping shouldn't be a problem. :-)

So....with me knowing where the corner was....Kane did an excellent job. He vacuumed through the corners like he was on a rail, and only once did he go slightly off track but found it with no encouragement from me. I'm so happy.
Obedience was good as well. We showed Richard how far we've come with calm holding of the dumbell in front and he said it looked nice. It's aggravatingly slow though, but I'm determined to stick with it. It's one of the exercises he doesn't exactly enjoy.
In protection we're continuing with blind search as an obedience exercise. My friend Julie has been gonig out on the field with me to help coach me. It's working great since I'm so into what I'm doing that I don't notice the little things. Today we worked Kane a little harder than we had before, because now we're seeing that he's in this for himself and not doing it because I ask him to. It needs to be a mix of the two, but he needs to do what I ask him to.
When he goes into the blind, I call "Kane, come" and immediately after "heel" and I'm standing still with my back towards him. If he goes past me, he gets a correction and continuous command until he is in heel position. As soon as his butt touches the ground I point and say "revere."
I also stopped grabbing the leash as Richard pointed out it may increase his drive with the little tugs he gets. It's better to use it when I really need to.
In the end, I think he caught on to the message, so now we have to continue to enforce it and we should be good. Thanks for the help Julie! And thanks Richard for being patient with me and Kane!

Turning Blind Search into an Obedience Exercise

Ever since we started having practice at the new field, Kane has been having issues with the blind search. At the old practice field, we only had 2 blinds, and we always ran them the same way (there's our problem, I know!!!!).

Kane got used to the helper being in the blind that was closest to where all the people were. Now, the people hang out near blind 3, with the helper in blind 2, so when I send him, he runs around blind 1, hears my call and next command to "Revere!" starts going towards blind 2 and then he turns back towards blind 3 (where the people are.) This results in a down and we do it again. We've tried with the helper popping out of blind 2 and slapping with the stick, and when he hears/sees that - he goes full speed for blind 2. Then we do it again and he goes for blind 3. I asked Richard if he thought my dog was stupid (lol), and he said no, he's just "being stupid." Well, we can train past that!

Enter the "retraining the blind search" session. A few of my friends already do this from scratch with their dogs, and I think that is a great method. Their dogs learn to run blinds with rewards and positive motivation. The idea is to get the dog to run around an object (be it a tree, a blind (if you have one), a cone, a barrell, a garbage can....whatever ya got) that is indicated by the handler pointing and issuing the command. We are doing this at practice as well, but I wanted to reinforce it by training it at home (where I don't have access to a trained helper), so we're using positive marker training instead. Here's what I'm using to start with:

A tree.

A tug.

A ball (= reward)


A dog that wants to train. :-)

Kane likes the ball A LOT more than the tug, so my proposition to him for this exercise is " If you go around the tree and bring me the tug, I will let you play with my ball." We started out just a few feet from the tree, we heeled to our starting point and I made him sit while I went around the tree and placed the tug where he couldn't see it.

Then I went back to him, pointed my arm like I do on the field and said "Revere!" The first time wasn't all that great. I could tell his brain was going "But where's the blind, mom?" I ended up grabbing his collar and running with him saying "Revere, revere, revere!" until he saw the tug. Then I quickly backed up, said "Kane, come!" and when he saw me and was running towards me I threw the ball behind me.

The second through eighth time were much better. I even increased our distance from the tree a little bit. We've been doing this pretty much every day in the past week.

At practice, I am using the "Kane, come!" command as he rounds the blind, and then I make him come to me before continuing on to the next blind. I use the remote collar if he does not listen to me. It went pretty well this past weekend, but I need to make sure he comes and sits in front of me before the next step. We stepped it up to 3 blinds at practice and only once did I have to put him in a down.

Kane's impression of NASCAR - rounding the blind at a 15 degree angle!

Eventually he will come to me, sit in front of me, and I'll give the heel command to turn towards the next blind and send him to that, call for him to come to me, sit in front, heel around and send again.

I think this is good for him. Whereas previously he has seen protection as a big game being played on his terms, he is now learning that he must do what I ask of him. It's noticeable also in how he carries the sleeve all the way back to the car and even doing a victory lap around the car with the sleeve. He has never done this before - choosing instead to drop the sleeve as soon as he gets to the car. Now I have to tell him Out! to get him to release the sleeve. It's almost as if now he feels like he did the work, and he earned carrying the sleeve - it's his price!

Oh and this week I got a nice bloody lip courtesy of my beloved dog. We did a recall from a walking down, and I placed the ball under my chin, intending to drop it as a reward for a correct front sit. Well, Kane decided himself that his front sit was pretty darn good, and he went for the ball....I'm sure to all the onlookers it looked like he was going for my throat....lol. Anyway, he bumped my teeth and created some internal and external holes in my chin. Nothing that needed stitches, but made for an interesting conversation. :-) I can't whistle!!!