Hello!
Since the end of the semester is near, I decided to do an assessment of Winnie’s training and the skills she’s learned since I began this journey.
I tested many of the skills that I have listed on this blog, such as:
She’s continuing to get better and better each day and I’m looking forward to keep practicing, help her learn new skills, and watch her improve as she gets older.
Hello everyone!
After a phone call with our group trainer to check in on how Winnie’s been doing, she mentioned two things we could teach her: “touch” and “turn.”
Touch is when you put a treat in between your fingers with your hand flat beside your body. The idea is that when you say the word “touch,” your dog will go to your hand, put their nose up against it, and grab the treat. Eventually, you can slowly move away by not having a treat in your fingers, and your dog will put their nose up against your hand, and then you give them a treat. This is another great way of getting your dogs attention, like “look” or “come.” However, this skill is different since the dog is not looking at you, but instead is physically coming to you and touching your hand.
Here is a video of me trying this skill with Winnie on a walk the other day.
Turn is when you put a treat in front of your dog and move it around them so that they turn in a circle. This is a little bit more of a fun trick than it is of an important skill. Although, having your dog always listen to you is very important, so continuing to implement tricks that enforces them to listen is great practice. Eventually the hope is to move away from putting the treat in front of her, and instead have her do it just from the command of “turn.”
The video below is my mom practicing this with her during the more early stages of learning this trick.
Hello everyone!
This week my family took Winnie on a group puppy walk. This walk is put on every Saturday by the trainer who did Winnie’s group training. We decided to enrol Winnie in this group walk because she LOVES to play with other dogs. However, she doesn’t know how to just be around other dogs without wanting to play. So we thought this would help.
We met at Mount Tolmie and had a brief chance to let Winnie meet all the other dogs. Then the trainer led us on a walk around, ensuring to keep 6 feet away from each other. Unfortunately, Winnie pulled a lot and really just wanted to play with all the other dogs. She did not heel very well because she was incredibly distracted by everything around her. This is why this group walk will be very good for her I believe.
Another dog owner talked to my mom after and mentioned how her dog came the week before and was acting a lot like Winnie. But she said that this week when she came, her dog was so much better!! We hope the same will be true for Winnie next week!
Winnie is still just 5 months old so we are continuing to work on her training with being around other dogs when it’s not play time. Hopefully this group puppy walk will help her improve in that aspect!
Hi Everyone! This week I decided to take some time and work on perfecting Winnie’s skill of “leave it.”
We have practiced “leave it” quite a bit since the training session where we learned it, but recently, we have needed her to really listen when we ask her to leave something. Since Winnie is a Lab/Shepherd cross, her nose is constantly up against the ground sniffing and trying to eat everything in sight. Last week, Winnie must have ate something not so good because she had an upset tummy for a few days.
This is why perfecting Winnie’s “leave it” would be very beneficial. So that if we see something on our walks, we can tell her to leave it before she ingests something bad again.
Here are some pictures that I took of Winnie practicing “leave it”:
This first picture is the easiest since she can’t see the treat in my hand. She nails this every time.
This second level is more challenging but Winnie has pretty much mastered this as well.
The last step is the toughest since the treat is on the ground right in front of her. Winnie is pretty good at this. Sometimes the very first time we do it, we have to say “leave it” more than once, but overall she’s very good. Especially since she looks up at us until we say “take it.”
Since Winnie’s last training session, we’ve been practicing her recall. We continuously practice this everyday when she goes out in the backyard to pee or play. We always call her into the house after instead of going out and getting her. We stand at the door and say “Winnie come!” and clap our hands to make it a really exciting event. Usually, she comes bounding inside right away and she gets a treat. Other times, it takes a little bit of time before she comes, but we just keep encouraging her with claps, and always reward her no matter how long it takes.
We’ve also been practicing “recall” by playing “hide and seek.” Our trainer told us this was a great game to help reinforce the skill.
We’ve tried this game multiple times with Winnie and she does a fantastic job! I caught one of the attempts on video to show you guys.
Yesterday was Winnie’s last day of group training!
The focus of the lesson was on recall. Winnie is generally pretty good when we ask her to “come,” but she’s not as consistent as we would like her to be. So it was good to have this chance to practice more with her and implement new skills.
Marker Word: The first thing that was talked about, was using a marker word. This is a word that is used immediately after your dog starts to “come” to you. Our word is “yes,” so as soon as we say “come” and Winnie makes a move towards us, we say that marker word.
Encouragement and Motivation: Make recall fun and worth it for your dog! It’s important to encourage them the whole way, as soon as they begin to come towards you.
Movement and Move Away From Them: This is where you take a few steps away from your dog as they are coming towards you and have them move towards their reward instead of you reaching towards them. This is because dogs are naturally attracted to movement and love when you play ‘hard to get’!
Practice and Practice More: The instructors emphasized the importance of practicing for fun 90% of the time and using the command only when you need it 10% of the time. If you practice for fun then they will want to play the game of recall. If you only use it when you need it, for example only when leaving the park or yard, then they might be less willing to come to you.
Winnie had her third week of puppy training last night. This week’s focus was on “leave it,” “take it,” and “drop it.”
Leave it: Is for getting them to back off of something they haven’t yet put in their mouth.
Take it: Tells the pup when they are allowed to take the object,
Drop it: Is for getting them to drop an item they already have in their mouth.
We started to learn how to teach “leave it” by putting a treat in our hands, showing Winnie, and then closing our hand into a fist and saying “leave it.” Once Winnie stopped sniffing at the hand and just sat there. We opened the hand and said “take it.” Next, we did the same thing but left the treat in an OPEN hand. And once Winnie sat nicely, we said “take it.” The last progression of this skill involved us throwing the treat on the ground nearby and saying “leave it.” Then once Winnie stops pulling on her leash, sits down and waits, then we say “take it.”
Our homework for the week is to practice “drop it.” The first step of doing this is by getting Winnie’s attention, saying “drop it,” and then throwing high-value treats onto the ground in front of her. This helps her begin to associate the words “drop it” with something good. The next progression is to put a toy in Winnie’s mouth, say “drop it” and then throw down a few high-value treats. The dog should drop the toy and pick up the treats. The key for this is to always give the toy back after you take it, otherwise the dog might associate “drop it” with never getting it back, and therefore, they won’t do it. The next step is to play tug with Winnie and then say “drop it” and give her some treats. Always remember to give the toy back to the dog after this!
We are loving this group training with Winnie as we have learned so much. Next week is our last class and we are going to be working on recall.
Last night Winnie had her first “professional” training class with Baby Dog. We met at a Bosley’s with four other dogs in the class. The session began with learning new praise and release words. These words are “yes” and “break”.
We learned that “yes” is said when your dog does a desired command, followed by giving them a treat, and “break” is used to release your dog from a command such as “stay.”
“Sit” – Winnie is very good at sitting but it was very good to go over it again with the new words we learned and in such a distracting environment. We would command her to “sit,” say “yes” when she did it, and then give her a treat. We did this multiple times to reinforce the behavior. She was able to do this very well and was even used as the demonstration dog for this skill.
“Stay” – The teacher taught a different way of this skill than the previous way we were training her to do this. We were told to tell her to “stay,” then immediately say “yes” and give her a reward, and then “break” to release her. We were told not to back up and make her stay but to instead keep saying “yes” while standing there but with the goal being to have more time doing that before saying “break.” This task was a little bit more challenging for Winnie with all the distractions and other dogs in the store. But she still did a very good job.
“Look” – The last skill we learned was how to make Winnie look at us. We did this by putting the treat right in front of her mouth, then bringing it up to our forehead so she looked at us. Once she did that, we said “yes” and then gave her the treat. This was a completely new skill that Winnie had never done before so she struggled a little bit at first, but we were actually very impressed with how quickly she was able to get it.
In this week’s post about Winnie’s training, I’m going to talk about playing fetch and bringing the ball back. This may seem like a simple task to some of you, but not all dogs like/want to play fetch and it was my mom’s wish to have a dog that she could play fetch with!
At the beginning, Winnie wasn’t that interested in even chasing a ball, so we started to throw the ball up in the air so that it would bounce. She was very attracted to this and loved trying to jump in the air to catch the ball.
Side note: I don’t have any training resources for this week since I wasn’t planning on teaching this to her. It just came naturally one afternoon and we did what worked for Winnie!
Once she started to run and chase after the ball, we would say “bring it back” and motion our arms towards us. At first she had no interest and would just lay down and chew on her ball. But the more we did it and encouraged her, she eventually brought the ball back and we would give her a treat. Now in order for her to eat the treat, she had to drop the ball and “leave it,” so that’s initially how she started to actually leave the ball for us so that we could throw it again.
She’s getting better each day at playing fetch with us, but her interest in it only lasts so long. Normally she will do about 5 and then give up. But it’s coming along!
The video I have included is from yesterday with my dad practicing with her in the backyard!
Good morning!
This week I really wanted to focus on training Winnie to “stay.” She already does a pretty good job at waiting until we say “okay” when we give her food. But I thought it was necessary to practice having her “stay” when we walk away or even outside where there’s more distractions. I looked on the internet to see how I should approach this task and found a really great resource online.
To begin, I decided on the words “stay” and “okay,” as my command and release words. I then told Winnie to sit, I gave her the command of “stay,” and then I immediately gave her the release word of “okay,” as the article said to do. We practiced that a few times until she linked the two words together. Unfortunately, I was not able to get this on video as it was very quick and she was a little bit hyper!
I then moved on by creating some distance. I commanded Winnie to “stay,” and then I took a step back and said “okay.” We kept doing this until she was able to do it successfully and then I took more steps back each time.
A few days after practicing these steps inside, we moved outside into the backyard to try with distractions. The first few tries were very difficult and Winnie had trouble listening. There were a few times that she was able to focus and “stay” without any problems, but it’s definitely still a work in progress!
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén