Quote:
>What a good girl! That's a great story -- so good of you to be aware that
>Ginger was focusing and performing for you.
Ginger is a pretty amazing dog. She's 8 months old, which makes her focus and
willingness to work even more surprising to me. I'm used to seeing dogs at
that age play a lot of "I don't feel like it, so I don't see you." She
apparently never doesn't feel like it. :}
One of her problems is she will dart out the door, so I was teaching her how to
wait at doors. I teach it in two steps, and start with a non-tempting (inside)
door. First, I ask the dog to wait and allow me to open a door without moving
towards it. I open slowly, praising quietly, and if necessary to keep the dog
from moving, feeding treats. Ginger focused on my eyes and my voice and didn't
even attempt to move towards the opening door. The second step is to turn into
the doorway, facing the dog, and body block if she starts to move through the
doorway, then slowly move backwards - again, praising compliance quietly and,
if necessary, feeding. No treats necessary. One body block, and Ginger sat
back down, focused on me, and didn't attempt to take a step until I released
her.
"She wasn't supposed to do that," I told mom. "That was way too good for a
first attempt." So I had mom try. Same thing. She understood immediately
what was required of her, and never attempted to move forward through the whole
thing until she was released.
So we moved to an outside door (into the fenced back yard). This is a dog who
is used to barreling outside the moment the door is open. First attempt, she
performed like she understood English. I get it, you don't want me to move
when you say wait. Okay.
After the lure phase, she doesn't need treats for rewards at all. She loves
them, so we do use them, but she'll perform for praise alone once she
understands what's expected of her.
Not that she doesn't have mischief in her. At one point I was talking to the
owner's boyfriend, who wanted advice on introducing his scaredy-cat chihuahua
to over-exuberant (and large) Ginger. We weren't paying any attention to her,
so she deliberately went into the kitchen, found a sponge, and trotted with it
into the middle of the living room. She dropped it immediately on command
(just learned that one, too), and then I realized what she had done. She
didn't want the sponge. If she did, she wouldn't have brought it straight to
us. She knew that would get her attention. :}
I love working with this dog.
On my first session with her, mom told me all these horror stories about her
behavior, and obviously thought that she had a juvenile delinquent for a dog.
Of course, she described a perfectly normal untrained adolescent. I was
wondering why mom was so surprised when I told her what a good dog she had, and
then she told me that I was the second trainer she had brought to the house.
The first one observed Ginger, and then told mom that she had a serious
*** problem and needed to go to doggie boot camp ($900). She told her
*** was the reason she was, for example, tearing things up.
Grrr.
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