Stolen from Shade Whitesel without permission

This was on Shade’s FB post. For those who don’t know her, Shade is a well known, national champion, IGP (Shutzhund) competitor. She has dipped her toe in AKC obedience….her lowest score to date is a 198. This post should sound familiar…..

Ever feel like you are forever putting the brakes on your dog when they want something?

I'm normally pretty good at setting up scenarios where my dogs ask me for things they want, with eye contact-I'm looking at you SO HARD right now- give me the ball! and offered behavior.

Most of my obedience, and protection fits this.

But some life skills and all of tracking does not.

Life skills-I am forever waiting for him to stop screaming first thing in the morning to be let out of his kennel area.

Tracking-I am forever stopping him with the line, with his marker cues, etc..

I'm tired of it. I don't train like this! I don't fight with my dog, and I feel like tracking is a fight. :)

With the extra waiting before the track, several things exploded. His check in heeling deteriorated, he was pulling me to the start flag, etc... I had a couple messy tracks before I sat down, really thought about what I wanted attitude wise and implemented it. And yes, it involved putting reinforcement back into the tracking start ritual, and building it back from the beginning. I was resistant! I want to get the reinforcement out of the starting ritual, because I want to get to a trial legal start, and to stop relying on treats to slow him down. But, I realized that I am putting the brakes on him, asking him to jump through the hoops before letting him track and I need to flip that. I want him to ask me and then I give him access to tracking-which he loves.

So, think of the dish as the tracking start flag and here you have the start. I'll transfer this skill to tracking flags today.

The start will go (eventually) like this-

Offer heel to check in with judge (with no judge, we check in to trees, trashcans, etc...)

Walk with me-not formal heeling-to 2 meters before flag

His halt and eye contact gets me to put tracking line under leg and allow to track.

The difference from before is that I cued him to do all of the above, and he was getting more and more reluctant to listen to me and just wanted to pull me towards the track.

Why do I care? Because the out of body pulling and yanking me leads to speed and not careful tracking. When he has to think and offer sits and walking and eye contact like here, he brings his arousal down and I get better tracking as a by product!

So, how does this apply to you? What if you don't track?

This applies to everything!

What is something that your dog wants desperately to do?

how are you giving access to your dog to that thing?

Let's talk about it!

(this was today's Patreon post!)