Problem Solving

It's kinda funny how things change year to year. Last year, I was reminding you the goal is to train the dog to follow the track and find the glove. And that remains true--the time your dog spends investigating other stuff isn't helpful.....to a point. Your young, inexperienced, dog needs to learn to follow the track. The track leads him to food, and to articles, which are essentially opportunities for food. As your dog masters that (most of your dogs have), it's time to start teaching the dog to re-acquire the track when he faces challenges (the very first challenge we give them is a turn). After they can turn we make problem solving relatively easy--jump to the right or left of the track, and resume tracklaying from that new spot; toss an article a foot off the track, over time making that 2-3 feet off the track; face the wrong direction at turns so we know the dog is making the decision independently; and then, when the dog is confident on all of those, start adding true challenges. Small ditch in the field? Go through it, or turn in it. Tree line? Go right up to it and turn, bouncing off the tree line. Go up to tree line, parallel, then turn away. Same with a fence, path, small road. Let your TD dog learn to problem solve! Train overshot turns, so your dog can solve the problem of the track being behind him.

All of scenarios above fall under the concept of problem solving. If you're doing your rotation of training tracks in lovely open grassy fields, you are training in ideal conditions. That's great, but you aren't training your dog to solve problems. And the ability to solve problems is key!

Let me remind you to TRAIN, don't test! Identify the problem to be solved on today's track, and set the track up so the dog will succeed, and so that succeeding was so reinforcing that the dog wants to find the next problem and solve it! When we have class, or when you post in your blogs, tell me what the problem to be solved was, or what dog solving problem you need help with.