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(22 Weeks 2 Days) 41.3 Lbs Rosie began handling drills yesterday. We did over and back on the table. All were successful but it should be understood that the commands were given in a manor that left no opportunity to take an incorrect action. She was placed on our 100' table at the half way point. She was required to sit while a live pigeon was place in the right over position. At that point she was released with the over arm cue and the audible command. It took a little encouragement to get her to respond to the new verbal release command but she managed it. We repeated this with left over and then "Back" from the end of the table. Same results with the same encouragement required. These drills were simply to introduce the new verbal commands and it will be repeated until all are accepted as release commands without hesitation. What we are not doing here is requiring her to understand the difference in the directional commands. We are deciding that for her by giving her only one bird at a time. The directional understanding will be imprinted during this but the formal teaching is done by allowing a choice of birds and requiring her to pick up only the specified bird. We are not at that point yet. Problems? Well, not really. If there was one this week it was in getting her to understand the new release commands. Again this was not "Fixed" by anything negative. It was worked around by attempting to increase the excitement level by being very animated. I actually considered this as a good sign. She was simply trying to be steady. Rosie also made several trips to the training pond this week. We really did not teach anything new there but we did add in working with a third dog. We used Rusty and Pepper. The results were the same as if it were only Rosie and Rusty. The only complication was in the fact that Pepper and Rosie are trained to heel on the right. In other words Rosie lost her spot to a bigger dog. She adapted to it quickly by heeling next to Pepper. You may have noticed that the above two training sessions are complementary to each other. The first drill was teaching her to become unsteady by responding to a new release. The second was re-enforcing the fact that she is still required to be steady on all of her drills that are now old news. We chose that route because of Rosie's wonderful skill at understanding when the commands are for her in a multiple dog situation. We were looking for success so we used something she is good at. Next week I will be making several hunts out of town. I doubt that we will get much training in but we might be able to get a couple of table sessions in. We shall see. For the next diary entry, please visit Week 28 of Rosie's Journal. |
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