training 9/10/08

New field, very nice, fenced, and secluded from nosy neighbors.

First up - new female puppy alias pure hate, but she's too cute for that.  She is sooo much improved over when i have worked her in the past.  Before she wore a tiny flat collar to work and I think she preferred breathing to biting - who can blame her.  Today I saw a 180 switch in her behavior.  Before she was entirely reactive, waiting for me to move enough to excite her enough to react with a snap at the tug.  Today opposite, she was barking and lunging in order to make me move, she got that concept down in about 3 seconds of holding still to see if she'd try to initiate it and yeah she did.  Beautiful bark and lunge, that alone made me happy to see from her.  I tried to only reward her with bites when she was barking and lunging for it.  It's easier to get more excitement out of her if I have the leg sleeves not on my leg and I'd prefer to keep working her that way until she's crazier to bite overall, with them on intermittently during a session.  She badly wants to have a full grip, but I hesitate to make her regrips too easy for her to get, working a bit for them will do some good later.  Overall she did great, I hope to get her crazier and crazier until she's a nut straining constantly to get anything.  Then introduce drag in bites to really make a nice strong confident entry.

Roscoe - he did some bites through the bottle wall with the decoy way back from it.  basically I just made him be in it while he was bouncing up and down waiting to be sent.  It made lots of noise, he seems not to care.  Targeting and bites looked good to me.  He's flying in to bite.  His recalls are better in that he comes off and heads in my vacinity, but takes a wide loop past me before settling to his place between me.  It would help if he would take some sort of reward in exchange for coming back, but he wont.  The DOH is very nice specially for being on a new decoy.  He waits for the hit and watches from all sides of me.  Out was sticky.  Recall here kinda is iffy at best.  His bite looked not so full and pulling on the doh, he semed a bit stressed on the bite, or overstimulated or something, but he's not going to let go, so oh well.  

Tank bitch #2:  Miss tank is still in the throes of learning to target high so she can be a well rounded mondioring dog.  Or FR dog for that matter since she desperately prefers legs, so no amount of our high bite target work is going to make her go high unless the legs are blocked.  That is exactly the goal anyway, so perfect.  If she does do an FR trial she will be all over the legs.  she may take an arm on the doh, but unless your barrage was hugely covering your legs she won't go high.  Her high bites are specifically to avoid her getting lost in a giant mondioring accessory and being held off the bite with it.  So using a tarp strung in front of the decoy and feeding the bite over the top was working pretty well to get her to bite where she needs to.  Plus that works her grip since if she munches or doesn't bite hard she'll fall off.  Flee attacks were better in that she didn't pop off today.  Targeting is good too, but the bite was munchy here according to the decoy.  We talked a bit and think she needs to go back to the tire tube or the bungee for lower body bites to help the grip.   I'm not sure how much to worry about the grip, or how long to try to keep working on it.  I'm going to seek higher advice on that - no not god.....  seems at some point you just have to be cool with how it is as long as she can keep her grip on the suit, but again I want to try the tire tube maybe long term first.

training Mon 9/8/08

So this session didn't start off well with a neighbor pestering us to leave - thats the short version.  so when we finally started working.....

Roscoe did a couple sends through the bottle wall for the bite.  The bottle wall was way back like 10 feet from the decoy, but going through it still messed with his targeting and he ended up with a crotch bite.  I'm not sure if its from the bottle wall, or residual uncertainty from Sunday.  Either way we backed up and did some on leash targetting and then a free send or 2.  Much better.  Also worked the DOH which as I said before I am so happy with.  I never explained how we taught it:

Roscoe was put in a sit next to me while a decoy just wearing a schutzhund sleeve circled around me while I helped him stay in the right position following the decoy.  When he did a good job the decoy came up and stood close then hit me with the sleeve.  Roscoe bit and the sleeve was slipped.  This was soooooo much easier because it doesn't involve a fight and bite and out in order to repeat.  So consequently Roscoe and decoy had plenty of energy to do literally 20 of these in 1 session without breaking a sweat.  It made it very clear very fast for roscoe as opposed to trying to teach all that with the suit.  We did 2 sessions of this and now roscoe has the circling and staying with me down pat.   

Tank bitch #2:  This was a clusterfuck of trying to figure out how to get her to go high between using a hard barrier the decoy holds while she's sent free and not allowed the legs to using my bottle wall and trying to feed the bite over the wall.  Nothing worked quite right, I think this session of all of ours was a little nervewracking as nothing went quite right.  The bottle wall seemed to present problems with timing in getting her over it onto the bite and the fact that is crashes down.  The physical block of the legs with her sent free was better, but in retrospect she was learning too much circling around instead of going up.  Couple of flee attacks which she liked better.  She always has fun even if we are having some challenges getting her to branch out in the targeting.  

Satan:  Satan went through the bottle wall and to the bite about 7 feet on the other side.  This definately threw off her concentration.  Her target work is usually 100% consistent, but this put her biting a little higher than she normally does.  Now if you never saw her work you wouldn't know it was off, but I have a variety of bruises to map out exactly where she normally bites.  She did 3 passes through and each was better than the last.  Her bite once she was on it was perfectly confident and hard and full, so she didn't carry any stress from that through to the bite which is exactly what i want.  She will get to where that doesn't phase her and it can be moved closer and closer to the decoy -me and her reaction time will be unfazed enough that she won't miss a beat or a target.  She also worked on patience...  She had to sit quietly next to dad while I shook his hand a few times and waited.  She lacks much patience and would bite randomly when she decided it was taking too long.  But when she was good I hit the handler and she got to bite.  We did a couple of these.  I hope to have the timing with her down to where she is through all the environmental part of her training and progressing to the end of the DOH by Decemberish so she can transfer to the suit (which i know her owner secretely puts her on ;)) officially.  So right around there before that transfer we will need to introduce the whistle recall and most importantly get the escort under way.  The escort we can start with the leg sleeves but not yet that is more control than she's ready for.  

Sunday 9/7/08

Roscoe and the decoy had a miscommunication.  He thought Roscoe was going to bite low because he will bite legs if you attempt some lateral esquive stuff.  BUT if you don't do that he bites high and prefers it.  So basically it turned into a test of how he handles getting no target help on face attacks.  He was all over the place, it wasn't pretty.  He kept his grip wherever it happened to be but....He needs more target work still.  I know he's a full grown boy, so it's hard to remember he's only had 3 months of any sort of bitework in his entire life other than a seminar when he was 6 months old.  Not to mention about a month of that was spent only working leg exercizes like the escort while I waited for his appointment to get his teeth fixed from him chewing chainlink at boarding.  So bottom line is he still is just a baby when it comes to targeting at all.  Next was DOH which is looking reallly good, lots of circling before the hit, he does  the whole exercize basically and with only a few corrections.  He just needs to build on this introducing 2 decoys and utilizing random props like he'll see in a trial.  So now the fun will begin :)