Some Things I'd Do Differently

[Posted to PositiveGunDogs on 9-20-2009 at 4:52 AM]

On Sep 20, 2009, at 12:21 AM, in the thread "Laddie's first Senior ribbon" Bob Henderson wrote:

I enjoyed watching your Lumi's training movies from YouTube and
we copied your pinwheel drill.

Hi, Bob. It's exciting that you've begun training your dog to handle.

I had a good reason for training the pinball drill to Lumi when I invented it, but I eventually came to believe that it trained too much motivation to spin around and GO to my dogs too early if used as the first handling drill.

For my next puppy, if I ever get one, I plan to follow a more conventional sequence to train handling. All of the traditional drills can be modified to not use force. I think this is the sequence I'd try:

— Walking fetch
— Pile work
— Wagon wheels
— Bird-foot drill
— Baseball drill
— Double-T drill
— Diversion drill
— Combo picture drill
— Combo mark-blind drill
— Shore-handling toolkit
— Swim-by
— Cheaters

It's possible that the pinball drill would fit in there somewhere, but I'm not sure where. Possibly right after the diversion drill. Or possibly it's extraneous if you use the ones I listed.

If you're going to do this, I believe you need to get to the walking fetch early, and then never return to it once you go on to pile work. The two drills teach opposite lessons about what the dog is to do when she sees a retrieval article, and ultimately, the lesson you want to "stick" is the lesson that comes from pile work. But the walking fetch is a useful early intro to steadiness. Since you don't ever want to go back to it, you need to start with it.

I had a lot of fun training Laddie to handle very early, but years later, I see a serious problem with it. Handling drills involve retrieve to hand. But retrieve to hand strongly contradicts the dog's natural motivation for retrieving, at least in some dogs. As I see it now, the natural instincts for those dogs are for the chase, the pick-up, and the return, but NOT deliver to hand. When the puppy comes back with the retrieval object, she may want to show her prize off but continue to own it, eventually losing interest and dropping it. If you take it away from her, even if you then instantly throw it again, you are introducing a strong aversive to the dog's return, and since the return is chained to the pick-up, a strong aversive to the pick-up as well. By delaying the training of deliver-to-hand a few months, the dog can spend her early months without any exposure to that aversive. Eventually, it's not a problem because the dog comes to cherish the opportunity for another throw, but again, with my next puppy, I intend to hold off on deliver-to-hand quite a bit longer than I did with my current dogs.

I also intend to use much shorter sessions. Like many puppies, mine had and have a strong endurance for retrieve training. But a longish session removes a component that I think would be a good thing to keep in a young dog: hunger/longing/yearning to retrieve. By ending the session while the dog is still fresh and ready for more, she spends the time between sessions hungry for the next chance to retrieve.

Sorry to go so far afield. These are things much on my mind as I struggle with the fallout from particular mistakes I feel I made, even while slowly, gradually overcoming them.

LL&L