Protection - first up was Satan (alias) a dobe female. She just turned 8mo and is like a clean slate, like a christian after baptism... I don't think she's had a single bad leg biting experience. I caught her crappily on an arm sleeve once, but other than that she's progressed perfectly. Today she worked on going through some bottles and pom poms to get to the bite, no problems. She does like half length drag ins to free sends. Little bits of intro environmental stuff while she's biting, that part is new, it's all been prior to the bite in the past. She did great, but I'm going to rig something so that there are bottles with rocks in them suspended from something like 3 feet high so I can keep the stuff impersonal, so it's not like I'm smacking her with them, it's more like passive desensitization. She doesn't need decoy opposition much yet. She has great entries and is biting hard and full and learning to thrash a bit , but not enough to be worrisome. Today was the first time she did holding the down at the line of departure work. She downed and when she looked up at her handler he sent her for the bite, she was picking up on that easily. She does a little puppy defense of handler, we are just working on her holding a sit, I walk up and talk a bit and shake his hand, she has to hold the sit and watch me for the hit, then bite. Today she was a little dirty in this, but thats ok, she'll have it soon.
Tank bitch #2 (alias): This female mali is 10 months old. She has alot of drive and willingness to work. She has had some issues with lazy biting a bit, but I think with reps and experience she will learn how it goes and it will come together fine. Today we tried to see if we could get her un-fixated on the legs and to take whatever was there. The first send she was trying desperately to get through the arms to get the legs. hmmm bad planning, so we put her on the line, targeted her to the legs, then as she's dragging in blocked the legs with the arms, success! She took it easily. We did this over and over, but still she will fixate on the legs if she were to send free. This is going to be the focus for a bit, exercises will have to go on hold until she gets this with arms blocking as well as with solid accessories blocking the legs. The bites looked good, although I wasn't in the suit so I can't say how it felt from the decoy perspective. Bites need to be shorter. Must remember that. She did get to do some longer flee attacks free as well. Her drive and speed are great and she got him each time. She doesn't know to hang on for dear life here, she bites well then loses it then gets it again and then realizes she has to hang on tight. Rotating between flees and blocked legs are going to keep her occupied for a bit. She likes flees, who doesn't, so that will keep her excited. I think it is just a matter of maturation and repetition and not worrying too much on the human side that will help out and get her clamping hard every time. She needs to be starting recalls off the bite.
Roscoe - not an alias: Roscoe finally learned some flee bite placement. For some reason this has been totally ignored with him, so we did like 4 bites with me posting and the decoy coming in targeting the back of the bicep/armpit, then 1 free. Dusk was setting in and it was a new field and I think it had an effect on him. He was not outing as fast as usual and not wanting to come back to me, more than usual. Anyway, he did well on the targeting, thank you Tanner! His free bite was so beautiful, nice and high and great punch and speed. Loved it so much I ended on it. Roscoe has worked his last 2 sessions just on getting the bark in the blind clean and on rotating around me while the decoy circles on the defense of handler, so this was a good fun session for him to break up the teaching of the exercizes. I hope to have him ready to trial in December if not, then February. It's coming together nice so I'm happy.
hmmm dog #4 doesn't have an alias: anyway... She is an about 20 mo old dobe. She has had some bite placement work high and legs. Her foundation was in schutzhund at her previous owner's, so she naturally gravitated into high biting the moment she got her first free send earlier this summer, so it was decided that if thats where she wants to be then why fight it, so she's been doing high target work since. Her targeting is still not super consistent, part of that is my fault I suppose. I'm not a good, willing upper body decoy, I work leg dogs and a little young dog intro upper work. I CAN target high, but I worry about the girl parts, since well I am a girl, so I pass off the high biters to the boys. Unfortunately that means her owner has to don the suit while I handle her, or she gets worked on a new decoy, which is hard to do since both of them are trying to learn at once (dog and decoy). What she really needs is some super bad ass upper body decoy who's not dad to take her for a few weeks and get the targeting down. Until then, we muddle through. We started the defense of handler tonight with just her sitting calm while the decoy walks up, shakes hands, then hits. She did well in wanting to do it, but doesn't know the targeting again well which is a big handicap, but she did her best and was starting to get it by the end, she wants to do it right. I think next time maybe an arm cuff would be better for that to keep it simple and obvious for her so she can just focus on the sequence of the exersize.
It's hard as a handler to just do targeting and not want to see some progress in the exersizes, I understand that and have been there with one of my previous dogs- Meina. She took forever to be consistent in the targeting on the jacket and even then she'd target randomly if in a new situation sometimes. She also was started in schutzhund, switched to ring on the legs, but then had to be switched again to being a high biter when it became obvious she wasn't going to stick to the legs once she was free. But she did learn, she did progress, and she did trial. Her failing scores were completely my lack of motivation to work on the obedience at that point in my life, not through some shortcoming of hers.
No comments:
Post a Comment