26 February 2010

Training Goal: Ringing a Doorbell to Signal Potty Needs

The border collie forum I frequent is now adding a clicker training club for those of us who want to so we can help encourage each other to get training and give advice and feedback on problems. HEre is my first goal with these two.

problem: at this point, Molly is pretty easy to understand because she barks when she needs out. Shawnee is more confusing because she tends to just stare at you.

Overall goal: to have the girls ring a doorbell placed at their height when they need to go out to potty.

rough training plan: both the girls already have a strong hand target with their noses. So now I want to add a Post-it note to the target then be able to move the target to other things. That way I can place the target on the door bell itself and get them ringing it with their nose. Then finally I can phase out the target. Once they are ringing the bell and training sessions, I can start trying to teach them to ring the bell when they need to go out. I am not sure whether I should use a cue as an intermediate between training sessions and potty ring.

Current status: I last trained a few weeks ago. I had both the girls relatively successfully nose targeting the Post-it target placed very close to me.I will probably need to back up to having the Post-it on my hand because of the time since I last worked on it.

Intermediate goal one, which is probably actually due on 6 March: getting the girls to target the post it with their nose when it is placed on the doorbell. Hopefully this will at least sometimes ring the bell.

I will try to post progress reports frequently. Maybe even after every training session if I can get the time and energy for it.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Please do post progress