SD Photo Shoot

There was a request on the level training mailing list from a Canadian SD trainer. She needed pics of SDs in action for a presentation. So of course we volunteered what we have on our blog. But we didn't have much that showed the girls in action that much, especially not Molly in uniform in action.

So DH helped me out and we did a little photo shoot Saturday. The situation may be posed, but the work is real. This is some of what they do for me on a daily basis and even these better shots don't do their jobs full justice. I don't know what I would do without the Bookends. On a day like today, I probably wouldn't even get out of bed if it weren't for them. But enough of that. Here's the shots.

This is how I put on and remove Molly's vest. Bending over to do it just isn't an option.





We couldn't forget to include Shawnee. I think it is pretty clear that she has earned an SDiT status!

The Routine of Boot and Sock Duty

Now that I am feeding horses every day, Molly has the regular job of removing my boots and socks when I come back in. She actually seems to thrive with the job, loving that she has something that she has to do. It is probably the border collie need to work in her.

The advantage of this is that her skills have improved significantly and she's gotten quieter in the process. Removing a tightly-fitting pair of jodhpur boots is not exactly easy task. Having no hands with which to do the job does make it more difficult.

Molly firmly grasps the heel of my boot with her teeth. The heels are soft enough rubber to allow her teeth to sink in and get a good grip. She then backs away pulling it off, often struggling to hold her footing on the slippery floor. I give her a treat or two after she hands me the boot.

Before going onto the next boot, she removes the sock from the first foot. She's very careful when getting a grip with her teeth to avoid nipping my toes. She then backs away pulling it off. Again, Molly is treated when she hands over the sock.

The entire process is repeated on the other foot.

Shawnee has learned that if she sits quietly and stays out of Molly's way, she also gets a treat. I'm very relieved I no longer need to tell her what to do. When she was younger, there were often problems with her getting in Molly's way or trying to help when she didn't know what to do.

We have actually decided it is time to start teaching Shawnee retrieve. We started the other night at my in-laws without clicker. The dogs were little bit bored so we set Molly to work retrieving my keys and handing them around. To activate Shawnee as well, we took turns holding the flashlight on my key ring and encouraging her to take in her mouth. She did so several times despite it being metal.

Yesterday, I dropped the strip of leather that I use when punching holes with a thonging chisel or awl. Molly was occupied somewhere else, but Shawnee was immediately at my side. I pointed at the piece of leather and told her take. It took her a few tries and little encouragement, but she finally picked it up gently in her mouth and raise it high enough for me to be able to take it from her. Of course, she was showered with praise from both me and DH. This is a big step for her, because she is not good at returning a toy to our hands. Part of the reason I actually want to begin retrieve training her is the hope that it will pay off in a play fetch.

Boot and Sock Removal

It didn't work out well, but DH helped me film Molly removing my boots and socks the other day. Note that these are VERY new jodphur boots with strong elastic in the sides. Removing them is very difficult, even for DH--and he has hands! So it is QUITE a task for Molly right now, but one she is eager to tackle. She gets furious if someone else does it for her!

It's Good to be Home

Since we got home, we've mostly just been chilling out and trying to adjust to the time difference. I am trying to do some walking with Molly though to keep the muscles I built up on the trip. The good news is that on today's walk, Molly kept her leash loose for about 200 meters despite cars, horses, and people working on a fence on a property we passed.

Walking that far, even though it was on crutches, is really quite a work out for me, so as well as being very proud of Molly, I'm very proud of myself. One thing I learned on the trip was how and when to push myself and what the consequences are. The consequence is that I need to sleep 1.5 to 2 times as long as I've been active--beyond the 8 hours _at least_ at night--to recover at all. So I need a nap shortly even though I slept about 13 hours last night. I need 12-14 hours of sleep a day just to lie around and not really do anything all day. As soon as I add in any sitting upright or moving around, I have to sleep more. Such is life, but at least I have a better idea of how to cope now. Needless to say, I slept probably an average of two-thirds of the time that would normally be "waking hours" on the trip. I'm fortunately able to sleep quite well when fully reclined in my parents' back seats.

The past few days I've also started getting Molly back into a training routine. She is eating pretty normally right now although my DH is putting a lot of various extras in her food (not because she requires it but because we have stuff that needs to be used). She got pretty good, but not perfect, about eating while on the trip. I think she has more of a habit to eat now than not to, although there were days she skipped or we let it stand and she ate it later. But on the trip our schedules were all over and sometimes she seemed to need a rest before she could think about eating and we weren't about to get up int he middle of the night to give her 5 seconds to eat.

So, about this training routine. We got a lot of good tips from Erin for getting Molly working quietly. My DH hasn't had the extra energy to work with us to do the he-works-if-Molly-makes-noise routine, so I'm continuing with the retraining from scratch but requiring quiet routine. So the past few days she'd had several couple minute sessions with the old boot. It's actually going really well. I started with just touching the boot with her nose, what she first offered when I got it out, and am now up to short grabs and even a few double grabs. IF she starts making noise, the session ends, but I've managed to do a few minutes of training before it got that far. I'm going to try making my next few sessions even shorter to see if I can end the session _before_ she feels the need to make noise.

I've mostly been using shoes I can flip off without her help, so that way I'm not making her work and having to reward her for noisy efforts while retraining. Not much anyway. I've also been avoiding socks both for that reason and just because I generally don't like them.

My laptop died yesterday (screen won't get bright anymore), so my posting and activity checking out others' blogs and on my usual groups and forums will be very limited until I can find and install a replacement. Sitting at the desk to use the desktop machine is just too painful for me and even short posts like this one require a few breaks to get written.

Not Much

With the weather and Molly's heat, we haven't been up to much. I've also been suffering from some pretty nasty migraines.

We've worked on item recognition and on quieting her work with shoes, but nothing new. I am hesitant to push her hard while she is in heat--she can be so easily distracted by her hormones and I don't want to give her negative experiences.

I guess you can say that Molly is getting a very boring extended vacation. We won't take her for walks or to public places we might run into other dogs while she is in heat. There is no reason to risk an accidental breeding. I'm also unwilling to push public access while she is dripping.

She's had lots of time for playing with her Daddy and has gotten a large rawhide to chew. As usual, she's being difficult about eating. She does spend a lot of time with me and trying to take care of me. She knows I am not feeling well.

Yesterday and Ticks

Yesterday was another quiet day. We worked for a while on being quiet while handling shoes and relaxed a lot. Molly got outside time when it wasn't raining and a good play with DH before bed. She ate a bunch of Orijen while training, which is really great.

Now, about ticks. I am finding a bunch crawling on her or other places, but very rarely attached. This is great considering how long it has been since she last got a Frontline treatment. I think the garlic pills must be working really well on her.

This morning I found a tick crawling across the bathroom floor. Yuck. She hadn't even been out yet today.

I started killing ticks in a lidded glass of alcohol. I'm getting quite a collection of dead ticks in it. But I had to have something convenient. One of the disadvantages of DH quitting smoking is that there are no longer lighters and ash trays all over the house. Last year I burned the ticks in the ash trays, but without them around I went for the alcohol. Otherwise I'd have to get up and do something else with them every time I found one.

DH commented last night that Molly is starting to smell like a dog, especially when a little damp. I need to give her a bath again soon. I think the trip to the beach and getting her into the water is contributing.

Practing Shoe Removal

One of Molly's everyday jobs is helping me take off my shoes. She's done it for a while, but I change what shoes I wear a lot and some, like my cowboy boots, are really hard to take off. With all these variations and challenges and because she took on the job quickly out of need instead of having been trained slowly for it, Molly talks a lot when she does the job. This talking makes it unacceptable for me to use this task in public and it is just generally bad manners and annoying. When I really need something I can't always be picky, but it's time I started cleaning this up--she should have enough practice under her belt to be able to do the job quietly now.

So today I'm putting levels training aside and instead I'm focusing on trying to teach her that it's a better idea to be quiet when helping me with my shoes. I've done this before with socks pretty successfully. I knew I'd need to train this soon, so when I bought a new pair of hiking boots about a month ago, I saved the worn out pair for just this purpose. I stripped the laces out so they'd be easier work. When we get beyond that point, I can switch to the new ones. This way she can take them off hundreds and thousands of times in practice and I don't care what happens to them. I can throw them for thousands of retrieves, too. They're also cleaned off so I'm not bringing any dirt or into the living room when I come in to a comfortable spot to train.

One thing I've learned working with Molly is that she needs a reward or she gets noisier or starts throwing oddball behaviors at me. So instead of cutting down on the rewards, I need to give more or higher value rewards for the preferred behavior but still give something for the basic behavior.

Another thing I've learned is to put the clicker under my big toe. That way I can use one hand for treating and the other for managing items. It makes life a lot easier. I don't know how easily it works for other people, but I can move my big toe quite independently, so I just rest my foot on the floor and only hold up my big toe. Then I push it down when I want a click. I have no problems doing multiple quick clicks or whatever I need.

For my first short training session, at around 7 am, I worked with kibble. I wanted to make sure she got a good base of her quality food before I started mixing in other stuff. We worked through probably about half of a daily ration. DH had given her some before he left for work, too, so she'd eaten already.

My initial goal was to make sure she knew to go for the heel area of the boot. So I spent a few moments shaping that. Clicking for attention to the boot, then attention to the sole, then the heel area. She pretty much knew that anyway, but it is good to refresh. I'd never really shaped the job initially. She only had on the job training a day I came in from outside and couldn't do it so kept pointing and saying "PULL" and praising her and encouraging. Then I switched it onto the "boot" command (for both shoes and boots becuase I htink the word is most unique in sound).

Once that was worked out, I started working on the noise issue. I hung the boot heel up (I often don't have a chair when she needs to take my shoes off, so stand up with my foot lifted behind me) off my hand. She was barking and grumbling as soon as she started to take it, so I had to back up. Could she approach the boot without making noise?

I clicked and treated that for a while. I tried to catch her before she made noise, even if it meant she was just looking at the boot. Mostly I could get her to before she opened her mouth without making noise. Unfortunately I wasn't really making progress and it was time for a break. Plus she'd gotten a good bit of kibble and I didn't want her so full she wouldn't eat more for hours.

We took a second session around 9:30. This time I skipped kibble completely and broke out a can of shrimp. She loves shrimp. For a lower value treat, I used the cut up Frolic, a lower quality softer dog food that she likes. In addition to the boot, I got out a pill bottle that she can retrieve quietly. I was ready with another tactic.

I wanted to get Molly handling the boot quietly even if she wasn't taking it off me. This is what I'd done with socks before. If I first started her doing the basic retrieve behavior that she is good at with another object and giving her high value treats for silent retrieves, I can swap in the boot. If she is really noisy, she gets a low value treat. If she is only a little noisy, she gets a couple low value treats. No noise is a high value treat. If she is low value a few time, I swap back to the easier item. Slowly I should be able to build up the difficult until she is removing the boot from my foot. How long it will take is up to Molly, but it's a good positive way to do it and it doesn't make it impossible for me to keep letting her do the job in the mean time when I need it--I just have to reward with the appropriate value of treats depending on her noise level.

So I started with the boot first. She made noise. I gave her a low value treat. I threw the bottle. She was quiet. Shrimp. Bottle. Shrimp. Bottle. Shrimp. Bottle. Shrimp. Boot. Frolic. Boot. Frolic. Bottle. Shrimp. Boot. Shrimp. Boot. Frolic. Bottle. Shrimp. And so it continues. We worked for probably about 5 minutes. I'm not good at looking at the clock. Instead I watch Molly. I want to stop while she is still enjoying it but not so soon that she doesn't get the chance to learn the pattern. When she stayed stuck for a while, I threw in more items she was good with and also pants that she isn't, so she could see that it wasn't just boots=frolic and bottle=shrimp and the exceptions were me being crazy. That helped a lot. I also try to stop on something she does well if I can, preferably with a jackpot, even if it means I have to stop on the bottle.

We didn't get beyond retrieve successfully in this session though. I even tried having her pull the bottle off a finger then put the boot in the same position. She still didn't have quiet and the boot associated enough yet.

We took a third session around 12:30. Another 10 minutes approximately. Things really started clicking. It didn't take long to start getting noiseless retrieves, but it just wasn't working for that next step--pulling the boot off my finger. Then something clicked in my head--when she retrieved, she grabbed the flaps at the top of the boot. She has to grab the heel to pull off.

So I went back to shaping just the grab portion. I held the boot with the heel towards her. I took a big handful of Frolic and started shoving them in her mouth and clicking like mad as her mouth opened near the heel and she didn't make noise. It worked!

She started being able to touch the heel without talking. Then as soon as she made heel contact and started to pull, I used my thumb to gently shove the boot off my finger. YES! She "pulled" the boot off without making noise. Clickity-click-click-click. Lots of frolic and a shrimp. I didn't want to mix tasks yet, so I gathered up the boot from the floor and repeated a few times.

After several successful retreats, I had Molly also pick up and give me the boot. SUCCESS! I gave her a shrimp jackpot and a Molly pet and praise party. Then I took her outside to her fence in the yard that she loves for more petting and to let her have a good break.

When she came in again, the boot was lying on the floor where I'd dropped it to throw the party. She looked at the boot and up at me and back a few times. So I said "take." She quietly picked up the boot and brought it across the living room to where I lay on the sofa. Then she handed it to me without making a sound. Frolic jackpot.

So that's 3 sessions already today--a pretty intensive training. I'm not sure we'll do more. It depends how we feel. If we do anything, it will probably be refresher stuff instead of something as intense as what we've been doing with shoes.