Walking on Loose Lead and Recall

Before I continue with Sadie's first class I would like to clear something up from my last post. When I said that I did not believe in treat training what I should have said was that I do not believe in using treats as a reward for good behavior. However, I am not opposed to using treats as a last resort to enticement the dog to perform a new behavior. For example if I am training a dog to crawl I will use a low table and try to talk the dog into crawling under it while repeating the command. If this fails I am not opposed to using a treat or his favorite toy to entice the dog to crawl under a low object while repeating the command. The treat will however be eliminated at the earliest possible opportunity. I want the dog to perform the behavior because he wants to please me not because of some artificial stimulus. Now let's return to Sadie's first class after being so rudely interrupted with my little tirade about treat training.

The next exercise that the class was ask to perform was walking on a loose leash. Everyone got up and was told to walk in a circle. Some of the dogs were being pulled around, some refused to move, some jumped all over the place and others were being lead around with a treat in front of their nose. Sadie was the only one that walked next to me and actually watched to see what I was going to do next. My point here is that these dogs had 3 weeks of training and are still not able to walk on a loose lead. Up to this point Sadie had had one 10 min lesson on how to walk politely on a loose leash. The more I see of this class the more frustrated I am becoming.

Next the instructor ask everyone to return to their chairs and take a seat. I had released Sadie so she was free to do whatever she wanted and the instructor did say take a seat which is exactly what she did. Now Sadie is 50 lbs of puppy and she did not quite fit in a plastic lawn chair. Her but was sticking under one arm rest her feet under the other and when she laid down she rested her head on the arm rest. This drew a big laugh from the rest of the class. It was like she was sticking her nose in the air to the other dogs saying I deserve this because I am so superior to the rest of you that I should not have to sit on the same floor with you. Being the strict disciplinarian that I am I went right over and grabbed..............another chair and sat down beside her and waited our turn to be called for the Recall.

The instructor started calling us up one at a time for recalls. Since I was last in line I had to watch while about a dozen dogs and owners went thru the process. The procedure for this was to have an assistant hold the dogs leash and then have the handler go across the room and call the dog. This process would have been fine, however with the handler 10 to 20 feet away and no way to get the dog to come to them other than voice, treat or toy these dogs quickly learned that if they were not in the mood there was nothing the owner could do to make them come if they did not want too. One owner finally gave up went back and picked up the dog and carried it to where she was. This was evidently OK with the instructor because noting was said. The other dogs ran the gambit form totally ignoring their owners to running around the ring in circles. When it was Sadie's turn she stayed with the assistant, which was all I really cared about since she does not usually like strangers. I bent over and said "HERE" and she came running. This was her first recall in public and I was very happy with the results. After one night I could see that she was way ahead of the other dogs. I would have quit the class at this point if it were not for the socialization issue.

Because of the socialization (passing the dogs around) I decided to complete the next 2 classes and see if she improved. The next time we went I allowed her to be passed around as I observed and she was fine only looking back occasionally for reassurance and by the third week she had no trouble at all with the strangers handling her I think she was actually starting to enjoy it. In any case she finished the class head and shoulders above the rest of the dogs, which is pretty good considering that I did not work her at all between classes and the other dogs had been attending class for 6 weeks instead of Sadie's 3. My next dilemma will be what to do with her next, I can not take another six weeks of untrained dogs and owners. If I do take her back I will skip at least one level.

Next time Winter arrives.

Sadie's first class.

Recently I have been writing about training Sadie to pull either a skier or other object. I think that she is on track to make exercise a daily part of her routine. Now its time to address Sadie's other issues. In this case I am talking about Socialization. She has had no problems adapting to Me, my family or the other dogs but after her LER (Litter Evaluation) the breeder had some concerns about her flight and fight drive. Because of Sadie's LER I had some advanced warning and was aware of what to look for so that it could be corrected as soon as possible.

Even though I was told that Sadie had a Hard temperament I have seen no signs of aggression other than normal puppy attitude. However, I did notice that she would back away from strangers. Strange objects were no problem, she would stand her ground and investigate anything however she would back away from strangers and occasionally bark at them. This is one activity that has to be stopped as soon a possible. I knew that the answer to the problem was socialization but because of my lifestyle this would take some extra effort on my part. Even though I take her to pet stores with me and take her along when I meet with clients and their dogs it was just not enough so I decided to take her to a puppy class where she would be handled by one stranger after another.

Before I moved here about 30 years ago I lived in Canton Ohio and was one of the instructors and a member of the board at a Training Club there. They have since built a new building and moved to a new location that is about 45 minutes away from me. I decided to take Sadie there and put her in a puppy class because I knew that part of the class included sitting on the floor in a circle with about 10 other people and their dogs and passing the dogs around the circle. This is exactly what Sadie needed but trying to fit another evening out with the dogs into my schedule would be a problem. I managed to rearrange my clients training schedule so that I could have Thursday night free to attend the class.

I drove down with Storm and Sadie for a visit and found that the class was 6 weeks long and I arrived on week 4. I talked them in to letting me come into the class in the middle and while I was at it I enrolled Storm in the advanced class that was after this one. He loves to work and I figured that since I had to make the trip anyway I may as well use the opportunity to work Storm around the other dogs as well.

The class started with everyone sitting in a chair with their dog beside them around the out side of the ring. Well I should say Sadie was sitting beside me, the others were jumping all over the place. Keep in mind that these dogs have had 3 weeks of training. The first exercise was getting the dogs attention. The way they teach this is to put a treat in the dogs face then bring it up to their mouth so that the dog looks at them. I forgot to mention that each of the handlers had a little bag of treats strapped to their waist because they used treats to train these dogs, which I do not believe in and which was one of the reasons I left the club 30 years ago when their training started getting more politically correct and less and less effective every week. They went around the room one at a time and ask them to get their dogs attention. Everyone with the exception of Sadie required a treat stuffed in their face and then slowly moved up to the owners mouth to get the dog to look at them. Some did not even respond to that. When it was my turn I looked down at Sadie said her name and she looked up at me. No treat just a word of praise when she responded. I could not have used a treat if I wanted to because I do not carry them with me.

The next exercise was the one that I brought her for. Everyone split in 2 groups and sat in a circle on the floor. Once seated we were instructed to pass our dog to the person on our right. Well, Sadie wanted no part of this she was bound and determined not to leave my side. This would normally be fine with me because I have no problem with a dog that would rather be with me than with someone else unless, they do not want to be with someone else out of fear, this I can not abide and I had a feeling that fear was part of the reason Sadie did not want to leave me. I also did not want to traumatize her and force her to be passed around a bunch of strangers. I opted to get up and walk her around to each person and let them hold and touch her. She was all right with this so we both went around to each person in turn and had them hug, pet and talk to her. She look at me a number of times for reassurance but accepted the attention without a problem.

During the trip around the circle I helped a couple of the owners fit their collars properly and in one case reversed a choker that was on backwards. The owners probably thought who does he think he is, he comes in her 3 weeks late and tells me what I did wrong. If they only knew how hard it was for me to sit there and see all the mistakes and do nothing they would understand. I wanted so badly to stand-up and say all right everyone get up and we will straighten these puppies out in about 10 minutes. What they teach in this 6 week class I teach in the first night of a private lesson.

Let me interrupt here to get up on my soap box for just a moment. I am not saying that I am a better trainer than the instructors there but its more of a comment on what happens to organizations like these. Years and years ago clubs like these were started with very good intentions, in this case to help people train there dogs. The founders had a vision and a talent that they passed on to their members. They refined there techniques until they were able to produce very obedient dogs that performed at the top of their game. When I was an instructor here I remember graduating classes where half of the members competed in obedience trials and all of them scored in the 190's. Today they are lucky to get one in a hundred that competes and then they are satisfied to qualify and will never see scores in the 190's. So what happened? What happened was no one was willing to stand up for what they knew to be right and they gave in to one or two outspoken individuals that complained about the techniques used. The club became "Politically Correct" resulting in watered down training techniques and the loss of good trainers that got frustrated with the new methods. It was during this period that my mentor and I left the club and started our own. This was also where I learned that you could get paid for what I had been doing for free for a number of years. A few years later I moved further away and we parted ways because we could not agree on the financial end of the business. Now that I am older I regret letting money come between friends.

The club continued on and over time the new members lowered their expectations and their dogs performance showed it. Soon new members were quitting because of it. Their solution was to shorten the classes and add more classes to the schedule. This increased the number of new members and help compensate for the increased turnover. Classes were shortened from 10 weeks to 6 weeks and training nights went from one night a week with 3 classes (Beginner, Novice and Open) to classes 5 nights a week with 4 classes (Puppy, Beginner, Pre-Novice, Novice). Basically what they did is replace Beginner and Novice with 4 classes, this increased the time to get through Novice from 20 weeks to 24 weeks. Then because more and more people lost interest they dropped Open and replaced it with a night of run troughs for the one in a hundred that continued on their own. They found that even with more classes more and more people were failing to accomplish what was required for the next class so they started recommending that they repeat classes. Now by the time they get through Novice some of them have been training for over a year and are still not as proficient as my clients that get 4 weeks of training. What a waist of a dogs short life.

All right I will get off my soap box now and get back to Sadie's first class.

Next time Walking on loose lead and Recall

"$^!# happens"

I was time for my next practice session, this time I was going to have them pull an old tire where the grass was shorter and it would be easier. It was a beautiful day so I decided to go to a local park that has a very large open area. I talked my wife into coming along to help. We were the only ones in the park so the dogs did not have a lot of distractions. I hooked up the team to the tire with Storm and Lizzy in the lead position with Pepper and Sadie behind and off we went. I had to help them get started because the tire turned out to be a bigger drag than I anticipated. But, once they got it going they did fine. Sadie and Pepper kept getting tangled up in the line and I was having a problem getting all of them to pull at the same time. Storm and Pepper did all of the work while Sadie and Lizzy just walked with them. After about a half hour we returned to the truck and decided to take them around again in teams of two. I remove the gangline and put it in the truck. My wife took Pepper and Sadie and I took Storm and Lizzy. We let them pull us around the park again but this time we went to the wooded edge of the open area taking a path thru the woods that took us out of site of the parking lot and my truck for about 10 minutes. We made a big circle and returned to the truck.

All in all it was a good outing until my wife opened the door to the truck, reached under the front seat and found that her purse was gone. You see when I put the gangline back in the truck I forgot to lock it. There were no other cars in the lot and no one around. Her purse was under the front seat and with the tinted windows it could not be seen from the outside of the truck. (Does it sound like I am making excuses for not locking the truck) The only explication that I could think of was that someone was hiding in the woods watching and when we went out of site for 5 minutes they got into the truck stole the purse and ran away. She lost her ID a couple dozen credit cards and $250 in cash. Needless to say I don't think she will be too willing to go with me again. I later found out that they had been having a problem in the area with someone doing just that. In one case a jogger locked her purse in the trunk and they broke the front window and went thru the back seat to get it out of the trunk while she was jogging. As it turns out I was probably better off not locking it because they would have most likely broken the window to get it anyway.

At this stage in my life these things don't bother me like they did when I was young after all its only money and no one was hurt. We just reported the incident and I went home to prepare for my next adventure.

Now that they have pulled as a team I was ready to take my team on the road. I went out and got an old tire, packed up all the equipment and off we went to a local park. I hooked the gangline up to the tire and brought the dogs out one at a time and hooked them up to the gang line. I hooked Pepper up first and went back to the truck for Storm and just as I got him out of the truck two ladies came over to meet him and while I was talking with them about Storm and Sadie, Pepper used the opportunity to wiggle out of her harness. I realized that I had hooked up the harness but neglected to hook up her collar and she took off for the woods.
Of all the dogs to get loose Pepper is the only one that likes to play catch me if you can. None of the others would have been a problem. Pepper is my rescued border collie (too smart for her own good) and she knows as well as I do that there is nothing I can do to get her to come back if she does not want to. Pepper was my demo dog before I got Storm and will do anything I ask her to, Obedience, Agility you name it and she always came when called. However, since I got Storm I have not had the time to work all the dogs so she gets left out. To get even with me for not working her she will play "catch me if you can" any chance she gets. If she gets out of the yard she will go on a "walk about" for a couple of hours before returning home. If I am with her when she is in one of her moods she will run about 30 yards turn around look at me stick her tongue out at me and say Naah Naah.... Naah. Well at least it seems like that's what she is doing. Being a professional trainer this can be a bit embarrassing. And wouldn't you know it she would take off while I was talking with 2 potential clients about Shiloh's and training. I just ignored her and went on with my conversation like I was not concerned. Once she realized she was not going to get a response out of me she came over and sat down beside me and I finished hooking her up.
The dogs did great. They pulled the tire down the trail for about a half mile we then turned around and came back without a problem. They were exhausted. The tire was a large truck tire and the grass was long so they had to work extra hard to pull it. Because of this I kept the distance short. Tomorrow I will take them to another park that is more open and has short grass.