Cue Discrimination

For the new AKC Cue Discrimination Exercise, your goal will be to teach your dog to listen to a specific position cue like sit, down or stand without creeping towards you. How might you accomplish that? First I would suggest separating out the challenges. 1, Listening...

Brito Ring Prep

I took Brito to his weekly ring prep class today.  A miracle happened. For two minutes and fifty three seconds, he stayed in the ring with me and focused on his job.  He did not run off to visit dogs outside of the ring.  He did not  leave work to look for a promising...

Lyra – Four months

Most of my training time with Lyra is really structured play – play that gets me the behaviors I want with maximum joy and energy. There are also a few skills that are more easily mastered when the dog is calm.  For these, I use food as the reward.  Food leads to a...

Lyra and Structured Shaping

I’m a competition obedience trainer.  Someday I might play in agility as well.  As far as I can tell, there are certainly no more than a couple hundred tiny behaviors that I need my dog to master, and many fewer that I’ll actually name or consider an “end” behavior. ...

Lyra – 12 weeks of age

I’m switching from “time she’s been here” to “age” for the titles of my blog posts about Lyra.  Makes more sense over the long run. Lyra’s doing great!  Either her food drive is increasing or I’m doing a better job at...