So what are you working on?
- judisedwards
- Jan 31
- 1 min read
What does your snow training look like? Mine has useless fun things (Fletch is learning to retrieve his stuffies by name); and some intros to obedience stuff (we are playing with taking an object and holding it); random downs; and some various obedience like foundation exercises. OH LOOK!!! Two of those things transfer to tracking—the random downs and the retrieve random objects. And, of course, we’ve played find the hidden object too.
What are you doing to make your tracking better when we can actually walk on the ground?
We've been doing K-9 fitness, "find-it", hide-n-seek and an assortment of obedience games.
I’ve moved my incubators around to make room in my shed. I have a little more room than the pods in the annex. We play games that we’ve learned in classes and work on find the articles. Dozer loves to find the ones that are “lost” on top of the feed bags.
Hide and seek: I hide and then he tries to find me. He thinks it’s hysterical. Other than that we are working on our bonding by cuddling on the couch, while I knit!
Millie and Brigid are both getting inside article games.
For Millie it's a matter of getting her to work it automatically without thinking, "Is this one of those things where I'm supposed to go down?" You can almost see it ticking through her brain. In the house Millie is about 90% reliable; outside as a game with lots of articles it's maybe 75%. The challenge is getting her to carry that through to doing it while occupied with all the other business of tracking. When the glaciers finally recede we'll run the formal outside article tracks, but also something where she runs into articles frequently but where the various challenges of following something more complicated than a straight-line "10food15article" pattern…
George and I are working on impulse control & loose leash walking (arousal, focus, control, walkup, start, commitment, walkback) article games
Mary Ann