Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Come-in Drill, Alligator Drill

Summary
  • Series A. Come-in drill at Milestone (both dogs)
  • Series B. Alligator drill at Black Hill (Laddie)
Series A. Because Lumi was so sluggish when I cued Here during two blinds yesterday, and has shown that problem in the past, I thought I'd work on it with her, and with Laddie at the same time. The drill I came up with consisted of four lining poles, no dummies. One pole was the SL, the other were set out at distances, left to right, of 80-140-110 yards, within a 90° angle.

I ran Lumi first, then Laddie. With each dog, I cued "dead bird", then Back, at the SL, lining the dog to the poles in increasing distance. When the dog reached the pole, I blew WS, then cued Here. When the dog arrived back at the SL, I reinforced with praise and a high-value treat.

This drill was surprisingly difficult for both dogs, less so in the later send-outs than in the first one but still somewhat difficult on every send-out. The dogs wanted to hunt rather than come in.

My feeling is that the drill needs to be refined and re-run. Refinements would include starting with shorter distances and then building to longer ones, and using happy throws (with dummies or birds) and tug for reinforcement. Re-running would include daily, later weekly, and finally monthly, until fluency is established.

Series B.
Since I didn't have time to go to Cheltenham today, I took the dogs to Black Hill to give Laddie more practice on the advanced version of the alligator drill. In this version:
  1. Laddie and I run into swim-depth water together, me carrying the dummy, Laddie trying to get it.
  2. I throw the dummy to shore, send Laddie to retrieve it using his name for the send-out.
  3. I call Here when Laddie reaches the dummy. This should not be necessary, and currently may not be, but I see it as a safety measure, like the auto-recall whistle, for the time being.
  4. Laddie retrieves the dummy and brings it back out to me in the water.
  5. I start growling and Laddie and I play water-tug for a few seconds.
  6. I either throw the dummy further out into the water a few feet for Laddie to chase and bring back to shore, or I drag Laddie back to shore by pulling on the rope of the dummy. Laddie seems to find both of those games fun. I think the pulling game had more of a reinforcing effect in terms of increasing desired response, but I can't be sure.
  7. Back on shore, happy throws and more tug.
Today we did five retrieves, in the following order:
  1. The dummy thrown into shallow water
  2. To water's edge
  3. Onto the beach
  4. Again onto the beach
  5. Onto the grassy bank on a small rise beyond the beach
Laddie showed slight avoidance tactics on the first two retrieves, shaking off on #1 and looking around before picking up the dummy on #2. After that, his remaining retrieves were high energy and without delay.

A couple of days ago, I felt that Laddie might have stalled on any further progress with the alligator drill, after two sessions of the advanced version above in which he showed various avoidance behaviors on virtually every retrieve. But yesterday I saw the beginnings of further progress, and today's last three retrieves were excellent, far better than anything I could have expected a couple of days ago.

Tomorrow I plan to take the dogs to Cheltenham so that we can train in a channel. I'll have to decide whether to continue work with the channel we used yesterday, using the long line as necessary, switch to a channel that's shallow enough for me to walk in and build on the alligator drill. The problem with the latter strategy, besides the discomfort of me wading around in a channel, is that Laddie may not readily transfer his performance at Black Hill to a channel at Cheltenham. Meanwhile, we made rapid progress with the long line, and with another session or two, Laddie may have developed a solid land-water-land retrieve without me having to go wading in the channel again.

It's nice having two choices that I have reason to believe will work. It wasn't that long ago that I was worried that I wouldn't be able to come up with a solution.

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