Thursday, February 14, 2008

Private Training: Alternation Drill

Renee offered to help with today's training (yay!), so I planned to run first an alternation drill with Renee throwing the longest marks possible in our local area, then a follow-up of yesterday's bail-out drill with Renee videotaping.

Unfortunately, time ran out and we had to skip the second series. So we ended up doing a single series, Laddie first, then Lumi:
  1. A duck and a pigeon at 30 yards, separated by 15°, thrown as a poorman double.
  2. A white dummy at 160 yards, thrown by Renee after a gunshot.
  3. A duck and a pigeon at 30 yards, separated by 15°, thrown as a poorman double.
  4. A white dummy at 260 yards, thrown by Renee after a gunshot, 30° to the left of #2.
  5. A duck and a pigeon at 30 yards, separated by 15°, thrown as a poorman double.
  6. A white dummy at 230 yards, thrown by Renee after a gunshot, 30° to the left of #4.
I used auto-whistles on all the poorman retrieves, and on none of the three long marks. Neither dog had any problem picking up and returning with the long marks without the whistle.

Both dogs did well on most of this. The only problems:
  • Whereas Lumi's returns with the birds showed little or no sign of resource guarding, Laddie threw his head quite a bit and also angled out from me as he got closer a couple of times, requiring me to use an additional verbal "here" to reel him in. I don't know whether this is a cascading behavior that will deteriorate into something worse, or simply the way that Laddie is going to retrieve birds at this stage. But to me, he's not ready to retrieve birds under more exciting conditions while he continues to behave that way in private training.
  • Lumi ran around a muddy baseball diamond the first time we ran #4, putting her off line and causing her to run to Renee instead of the fall. Since Renee was holding the dummy she would later throw for #6, Lumi became fixated on getting that dummy away from her and required a lot of help before she saw that the real #4 was still on the ground. I had Renee run #4 again, throwing a different direction so that Lumi wouldn't have to run across that diamond (as Laddie had not), and Lumi did fine with it.
Comment. Today's series was what I call an "alternation drill".

To reiterate my concept, I give the dog one or more short poorman retrieves (keeping the dog close to me for control) with difficult retrieval articles (dead birds, in this case with blood on one of them) to groove the Retrieval Paradigm. Immediately afterwards, we run a long mark (in this case to a dummy, since Renee won't throw birds). The hope is that even though the dog is much further out on the long mark, the pattern from the short retrieves holds and the long mark becomes more reliable than if we hadn't run the short marks first.

After a long history of alternation drills, the dog will hopefully have a well-developed habit of returning promptly on long marks that some day will hold up without further need to run short marks first.

Based on both dogs' dramatic progress with long marks after we began running the alternation drill, I continue to feel this is a useful training concept.

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