Party Animal

We recently had a family birthday party for my daughter. It was a "flashlight dance party" in the living room. Woozle sure let everyone know that he was no wallflower. He wanted to be right in the middle of it the whole time, decked out with his blue/yellow glow stick collar. Too bad it really wouldn't show up on the camera. I thought it looked pretty snazzy. And he wasn't just underfoot, either. He was dancing around on his hind legs, bouncing up and down on our little trampoline, doing dips and twirls. Aside from occasionally mouthing my arms and sneaking away to give covetous glances at the birthday cake, he was a great dance partner. And tugs aren't such a bad addition to a dance routine anyway...lol.  I love this dog!

Daisy spent a quiet evening outside, protecting the house from stray cats. When she came in she took one look at Woozle's collar and seemed to say "Whew! Glad I escaped that indignity!"

Food Chase

I came up with a new game several days ago. Ironically it was for Woozle, who has plenty of toy drive. I just wanted to increase his intensity with food a bit. I have gotten lazy with him and lapsed into just handing the food to him after the mark instead of making him chase it a bit. It has some advantages because he can think clearer, but he was losing the "coiled-spring" look too.

I took him out in the yard with an old heel of bread and just started tossing bread pieces in random directions. I would throw a single piece, wait for him to find it and throw another one in a different direction. It soon became obvious that he sometimes needed help because he didn't always see where it landed. He has done lots of scent pads, so he would find it relatively soon with his nose, but it wasn't really what I wanted. I added pointing at the bread too. But now he's only looking at my hands, so I added the rule that he has to look at my face before I throw the bread. We have success! His drive is up and it's focused on me.

I played around with this for a few days before I even thought of adding Daisy. Sometimes it is really hard to leave one of them in the house, so a lot of times I just fall into the trap of training Woozle while having Daisy near me and doing something relatively simple and uninvolved (like a stay) and occasionally tossing food her way so she doesn't get jealous. But just as I was once again falling into this trap I had an epiphany. "Wait a second... Daisy can do this too! Duh." The beauty of it is it is just like fetch only with food and Daisy doesn't care for toys. It also doesn't have the "bring" or "give" parts so it really would work for almost any dog with a stomach.

So I alternated throwing for each dog so there wasn't any direct competition, but having them both participating seemed to up the energy too. Before long Daisy was dancing around like a doofus. Of course she isn't as fast as him, but she's a whole lot better at following the point. Yay! We found something constructive to burn off the old girl's energy!

Adventures in free-shaping: Be careful what you *click* for...

I've had a couple of epiphanies these last couple of days and since I've been meaning to create a training log anyway... Voila! And there was "blog".

Woozle was so cute yesterday. We've been working mostly on picking things up lately, but this time I was trying to get him to run around a chair in the kitchen. I've free-shaped this before and he was offering lots of behaviors (platz, back up, barking, mouthing objects, jumping on stuff), and I was marking just glancing at the chair, but for some reason this evaded him.

Enter Shadow. Shadow is an interesting cat. He loves water. He loves dogs (or at least my dogs anyway). He cuddles with Daisy and wrestles with Woozle. Shadow has supervised many training sessions so this isn't unusual. He likes being on the middle of things and is often very interested in the treats (or maybe he just likes watching the dogs make fools of themselves?).  He hops up on a chair (the one I am trying to get Woozle to run around) so he can get a better view of the proceedings and I am mostly oblivious to his presence..

Woozle looks at the chair. Click-treat. A few seconds later he looks at the chair again. Click-treat. And again. He sidles up to the chair. Click-treat. I of course am thrilled that we finally seem to be making progress. He kinda side steps around the chair. Click-treat. Then again, but this time as he is moving I *click* just as his nose touches Shadow's tail, which is gracefully draped over the edge of the chair. Of course I realized my mistake, but figured it was "just one click". Woozle sits down next to the chair and looks at me for a second or two as if he is pondering something then half glances at Shadow, which I ignore. Then he gives me a lovely sideways glance which clearly says, "Well if this is what you want... Who am I to argue?"  Then he nibbles Shadow's tail. This is way too fresh for Shadow who swats Woozle on the nose. At this point of course the situation totally disintegrates as cat and dog are careening all over the kitchen in a ball of flying fur. All hope for my training session is gone, but I am giggling too hard to care. All my fault and I should have seen it coming a mile away, lol.