Zipper Adopted, Dogs Coming In and Some Creative Training

So Zipper has been adopted. He went to be cat tested with Meshum, my old co-worker and trainer at K9HQ. Well, he did so well with the cats, the kids, the other dogs that Meshum just had to keep him. He has been there about a week now. He should be starting some sheep training and will get some agility training too. His favorite is that he has a young pre-teen boy to hang out with. He'll have a full and varied life. I will MISS him though. I don't come across them very often -dogs I want to adopt myself- but he's certainly one of -if not- the hardest foster to come through. Good luck in your new home Zipper! His new name is Ziggy :)

We're fosterless and board dog less for the weekend, which is the first time that has happened in a long time. That said, Man and His Dog show is coming to Victoria this upcoming week, so we'll be getting a TG foster sooner than later. That might be fosters the way things usually go. Sign up for one, have two dropped off. What can we say, I'm a bit of a sucker.

As for creative training, I had a little bit of an epiphany today. It had to do with a question -can we have a command or even train a dog to nap? I wasn't sure -I'm still not quite sure-, but I knew where to start for set-up. First of all both my collies have a very good down/wait which we practice every day. For high-energy, fast, smart dogs it is MUCH harder to maintain calm behaviour than it is to teach them new things. So every day I pull out a Frisbee full of kibble -my dogs are also food nuts- and I start intermittently reinforcing their downs. --The nutshell version meaning I chuck kibble at them every now and again if they are in a down. So even the pup can usually down through most of a 20 minute show (getting a cookie at minimum once a minute). Jinks will do 20 minutes for 4 cookies. Yep, she's a cookie nut.

Since they've been doing this for months I wanted to see what else I could capture. When you feed, you feed for the behaviour which is called "Capturing". IE: The down is what I was capturing. But I wanted to know if I could ask for more than just the down. The down had become automatic.

We've shaped eye contact a lot, but the first step to a nap would be.... eyes closed.
So, I decided to start shaping any time Shane blinked. (They don't often actually, they are glued onto me or the food bowl). Have good eye contact already it was easy to start marking when it wasn't happening (meaning the dogs could catch on fairly quick). By 15 minutes of calm, Shane was readily closing his eyes, and boom, treat would appear. Jinks has had a longer time practice eye contact so she was harder to capture.

Things were shaping along quite nicely so I threw on another episode. By the end of about 45 minutes Shane was closing his eyes for 2-3 seconds before I would feed. I'm still feeding Jinks for a blink.

What was neat was that if I can teach them to close their eyes and keep marking that (eventually making it a command), I can possibly teach them to nap -in short periods at first-.

Now that, for a Collie, is a nice command to have "go take a nap". AND I can make taking a nap be work at the same time.

----alternatively instead of closed eyes/blink you can start marking the lowering of the head and eventually putting the head on the ground. This is easier for a dog to understand behaviour wise. I was skeptical I could mark/capture a blink to begin with, and it took both collies quite a while to understand. Many, many dogs would get frustrated and give up long before they would get a blink being the reinforced behaviour.

Anyway, it was pretty cool. We'll fool around more with the concept. It is always amazing to watch brain games being so darn calm. What you get with calm brain games is more work ethic. Especially for a dog who wants to do everything as fast as they possibly can like a collie!

Well, the collies have had their brain games, their couch lazies and now it's time to drain the physical. Updates soon as the arrival(s) come(s).