Apr 29 2009
From Communication to Training
While talking about training the puppies, I wrote yesterday that Wanda had become more comfortable in communicating with me. This has indeed brought about what I had hoped: turnabout is fair play.
I broke out the cheese and started some lure-label-reward style training. The Wanda of a few days ago would have lunged, screamed, and done everything she could do to try to fly to reach a treat over her head. The Wanda of yesterday thought hard, furrowed her forehead, and sat. On getting the treat, she rejoiced, then furrowed up her forehead again. The next time I put the treat overhead, she sat straight off. We had stands, sits, and downs, we had find-it/here. We have a cooperative thinking puppy!
The first sign of this was actually a few days ago. I had hoped, wrongly, that Bruce’s down was solid enough to take outdoors and put on a down-on-articles lesson. Wanda was dinking around the yard on her own and came to see what we were doing, and decided to guess the point of the game and how she could get some cheese too. She didn’t work out the down. She did check the second-to-last article (plastic) and earn cheese for investigating it, and that made her check the last article (paper) in a curious sort of way. That second piece of cheese set her thinking. Then she boinged off to see if she could find any other non-grass items nearby and hit the flag beyond the end of the track. She sniffed from bottom to top and top to bottom, put on her thoughtful expression, then bounced back to me to smack me with her paws and say yes, that was a thing like the other two.
She was right — it was a non-yard object which I had handled. I rewarded her at the flag. With a more solid down, this dog is a tracker. The abstraction of similar-because is in there, and so is the desire to share the knowledge of the nose.
Now if the AKC would only extend its companion-animals program for mixed breeds to include tracking…
