October 6, 2013

 

I haven’t written much about Pie but I hope that’s about to change. My fearful little flower is blooming into a real agility dog. The dog Pie wants to be is wild and crazy and a bit on the mouthy side. The dog Pie turns into when she is frightened is anything but that. She is almost 2 years old and recently competed in jumpers’ classes at three USDAA trials. She had 5 out of 6 clean jumpers runs and is one leg away from masters’ jumpers. Her runs at the trials were fast and “on the edge”, nothing less than I would expect from a fast and excitable young border collie. Until a few months ago I did not know if I would be able to compete with her. This is the story of where she’s come from and where we are today in dealing with her fear issues.

Pie came home with me at 8 weeks as a happy-go-lucky young border collie; smart, playful, athletic and fun to train. Her parents are emotionally stable dogs with hugely successful herding careers. She was raised by the breeder in a perfect environment for puppies, but by the time she was 10 weeks old I realized I had a problem. Pie is fearful of moving cars. It started with walking from our house to the agility yard. Pie and I had to walk through the parking area where cars were arriving for classes and she decided she was inconsolably afraid of those moving vehicles.

Within days this transferred to her being worried about walking past our parked cars at the house, which then transferred to her not wanting to put the leash on and even begin the walk to the agility field to play. We have a yard in front of our home where our dogs hang out part of the day. She decided she did not even want to be in that yard because she could see traffic arrive. She would claw the front door in panic to come back indoors as soon as she heard a vehicle. We really don’t have that much traffic, we have only 14 scheduled agility classes per week. We have 15 acres of fenced hills and fields surrounding our home and training field where I exercise my dogs and it did not take long before Pie could identify a car coming down the road from a quarter mile away while we were on our walks. At first she just froze, but then she decided if she was off leash that she could run towards home until she came to the last fence, leaving me and the other dogs out of sight in a far off field.

An individual car was scarier than a busy highway. We live on a quiet country road, one car is obvious. In places where there was a fair amount of traffic she was better than she was in my own front yard. This fear is very similar to the wariness a dog may show when one person approaches directly towards you while walking down a quiet street or across an empty field. One car was suspicious, and hard to miss. A bunch of cars was just noise, just like a group of people will often not worry a dog that is reactive around a single stranger approaching. Her fear is not as simple as that explanation, but it reminds me of other reactive dog behaviors towards a single salient object. Pie is better around a freeway than a country road with cars passing intermittently.

Lucky things about Pie’s fear- It did not carry over to other kinds of noise sensitivity. She doesn’t seem noise sensitive or reactive to other stimulus. She does not care about riding lawn mowers or tractors or all sorts of other machines in and around our home. Her fear is isolated to pretty much one thing. Remarkably Pie is not afraid of riding IN a car; she just could not tolerate watching and hearing one approach. Once a vehicle moves away or is out of ear shot she recovers almost immediately. Her fear reaction is immediate but her recovery is almost as fast.

Training, exercise and socializing my puppy were difficult. During quiet time on the property she did reasonably well playing and training in my back yard, that is until she heard, or thought she heard a car. Her typical behavior was to freeze and lie down at best. At times in the agility yard she would run to the gate to leave, or in my back yard, she would return to the house. The times she had the biggest reactions was when we had a transition between training or play when there was nothing going on between her and I for a moment. When she was really tugging on a toy or doing some kind of high arousal or running activity, she was less likely to think she heard a noise suggesting a car was on approach.

Stay behaviors were especially difficult because while she was on a sit or down stay she had time to think about how she wanted to react to a perceived noise. The noises she would hear were often imperceptible to me. From the agility yard it is a least 400 feet to a quiet road, and the yard is surrounded by tall hedges that obstruct all view of traffic, but still at times she would stop what she was doing, flick her ears back and forth, and wait to discover if the noise she heard meant a car coming up the driveway.

Traveling with Pie was easy once she got into the car or RV. After she got through the door and into her crate she totally relaxed and fell asleep. Getting out of the car was worse, parking lots are full of moving vehicles. Even stationery cars were suspect.  Any activity that did not put her in a high arousal state was difficult. She liked going for runs with my family of dogs and her best friends Laura and Brew as long as there was no traffic within view. If she was IN an aroused state she was less likely to notice that a car moved through the vicinity. But she will not take food or play if the moving vehicle was noticed before she was aroused. Trying to actively work on counter conditioning this fear seemed to make things worse. For a long time I would schedule walking her to the field when I knew traffic was coming and attempt to do some targeting, food rewarding or play, but most usually this ended with her wanting to run back to the house. At one point I decided not to take her off the property for about 6 weeks. I gave up on asking her to hang out in the dog yard in front of my home, she stayed in the house with me and went where I went if it was “car-safe”. We did not walk through the parking area when there was any threat of a vehicle arriving for a couple months. For more months we didn’t walk in the fields closest to the road. In other words, I just pretty much avoided most car fear meetings and hence reactions. This may have helped or it may just not have made anything worse.

I consulted with canine behaviorist Daphne Robert Hamilton for ideas on helping Pie get through this fear. She had some great suggestions, like teaching her to target stationary cars. Pie has a “feet” cue. She will put her front feet on any item or wall which I indicate, so I would walk around my cars and RV asking her to put her front feet on the vehicle and then I would mark and reward the behavior. Eventually she could target stationary cars with their motor running. Targeting as well as other ideas of Daphne’s all helped but still we were making only tiny steps of progress. It didn’t get worse, but it also didn’t get remarkably better. And then about 4 months ago we started to take little steps forward that gave me hope she would recover from this fear well enough to at least live a happy life here at our home and in the fields where we exercise and play.  I am not willing to risk her life in order to have an agility career with her. If she decided to leave me while doing agility at a trial the possibility exists that she could get lost or run towards a busy road in her effort to get away from a moving vehicle. That’s a risk I am unwilling to take. But today I think a career in agility with Pie is more than just a possibility!

Here are some of the things that I did with her that helped and didn’t help. (I think!)

DIDN’T HELP

• Walking her on my country road meeting the occasional car using food to counter condition- too scary, not good
• High level of exposure to individual moving cars-she can’t tolerate that much exposure
• Walking her ON leash in the scary fields- no way for her to retreat,  not good
• Trying to use a recall with high level of food reinforcement  to me after she saw a scary car- good bye recalls there and everywhere else for a while
• Taking her places to socialize on her own without a stable dog friend as support-really bad
• Trying to distract her using food and toys after she was in a fear scenario- useless at best and possibly counter-productive as when the toys and food appeared she was already frightened. Rewards = fear?
• Doing any kind of control training (stays, positions, static targeting) with her if there was even the slightest chance a car might arrive. If she had a fear moment when she was on a sit stay, she did not want to stay again in that environment for a while. Her ears would flick and she heard all sorts of imaginary cars.
• Trying to train anything when she was having a “moment”.

 HELPED

• Spending hours hiking and playing around fields on dog show weekends that have constant traffic sights and sounds.
• Foot targeting cars.
• Going out for occasional car “experiences”, but not flooding.
• Making her tug toy crazy.
• Making agility crazy fun- The catch 22 is that it’s hard to make agility an “arousal activity”  when you can’t train agility.
• I never start training when she is in a fear moment-I always wait for it to pass, but she will train and tug now through a car arriving if I don’t let the arousal end before the car disappears or turns off its engine.
• Comforting her when she is afraid- If we are in the field when a car arrives and she is far away from me, I kneel down and praise her and she runs to me, or if I am next to her I just kneel down and cuddle her. We play the “you are such a brave girl” game. I cover her eyes and whisper right into her ears that she is the bravest girl ever. She can’t see the car, and my silly vocalization helps to distract from the car noise. I think:)
• Ignoring her if she does leave us on a walk, and I just loudly play with the other dogs making her jealous until she returns.
• Sending her to my friend Laura’s home for visits when I am out of town teaching- This really helped. The social experience was good since she missed out on much of that growing up. Laura and her dogs go for a few mile walk daily where they meet cars on a more regular basis than she does on my walks with her and she was with her best friend Brew. I think those visits made a huge difference.
• Letting her grow up and not really trying hard to be perfect in our agility training, but using agility NOW as something that can actually distract her from her fears.
  

  Walking with Laura & Brew

 

Where we are at now

I can train in the agility field as often and anytime I want, when she is doing agility she never notices the cars that might be out on the far road. She will only stop working if a moving car is close and especially if it is noisy. When the noise is gone she goes right back to work. If she is tugging she is much less likely now to stop, and will tug through a car arriving on the property. It has been a few months since she stopped working/playing when we are in the yard behind my home where she cannot see cars. She is happy being in our front “dog yard” and does not seem to react now when a car is visible. For the last month she has stayed with us in the scary field next to the road on daily walks and I never avoid hiking in that field. If a noisy car comes by, she may move farther away but comes right back. She would rather run to the agility yard than walk, she wants to get past our parked cars as fast as possible, so I let her. If she is on leash we run together. I have given up trying to make her “like” being around cars, but I haven’t stopped rewarding every glimmer of nonchalance and willingness to play around the parking area.

At this time if she continues to progress along this path, and we don’t end up with a scary setback along the way, I am very hopeful for a normal agility career with her. And I hope we will BOTH be brave if we do have a setback.  In all of Pies’ runs in agility competition, she has tugged on her leash coming into the ring and all the way to the first jump; exactly the same as she does at home. That will forever be my signal that she is happy and wants to play the game. I can’t imagine trying to compete with her if I didn’t have that level of arousal and happiness that a simple tug toy can show me.  I don’t know if I really know the reasons Pie is better, likely there are many of them. Fear is a strange beast, I don’t profess to totally understand it, but I am certainly more familiar with it’s inner workings now and have better tools to use to help my students. While our road to this place seemed frightening and long, now that it is mostly behind us (HOPING!) it seems to have passed rather quickly!

NJG

Photos of Pie as a puppy by Lali Miramon

March 2, 2011

Scoop is wild, maybe feral. He looks a lot like the photos at the top of this page, only bigger! I was only gone 5 days but he went south on me while I was in the east. I got home from teaching seminars at Clean Run yesterday afternoon and immediately took him to the field to play and train. Maybe I was too tired and he just thought he could take advantage of my obvious deficit in brain power. He barked his way through teeter, frame and weave training. He was still crazed today even though I got him and the rest of the dog family out for some vigorous exercise in the fields a few times.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that even with him acting like a feral beast, he still had a good sit stay. ha! I think taking him off the course 10 days ago at the show, as well as lots of really high value rewards last week in training made some lasting impression on him. ( i can dream can’t i?)

The weather is bad, every jump in the field was lying on its side when I went out to train this afternoon. Wind and light rain on and off then clearing for tonight’s classes which was nice. I have a show this weekend and want to train lots in the next two days. On the list: dog walk and teeter targeting and proofing; start line rewards, 20 A-frames and no more, lateral distance on weaves. Rain rain go away.

I wish I had time to do some of the fun drills I did at the seminar. Maybe next week. I put up five of the drills I did on the first morning. They are somewhat elementary as that is how I like to start a seminar, but there are a few threadles thrown in because it was a masters level group and I just couldn’t resist. They are at the end of this post, maybe you’ll have time to run them even if I can’t!

I put up a new page on the epilepsy study which can be accessed on the front page of the blog on the right side. The email of the researcher, Allison Ruhe is on the page, and the form you will need to send a bloodwork sample is there too. Just click and it will open up.

The ETS study is on track. The researchers are setting up a web page for information about how to participate, and there is more cool stuff to tell you about in the coming days. Thanks for reading, thanks for participating, thanks for your patience.

I hope you have a great week training your beast this week, even though mine is wild, he sure is fun and I sure do love him.

NJG

CR 2011 first set1CR 2011 first set2CR 2011 first set3CR 2011 first set4CR 2011 first set5

January 25, 2011

Scoop and I had a great time at the Portland AKC trial. I have been to that show almost every year since 1996, and this was one of the best ever. It is indoors on good matting, the same as the AKC Nationals. The courses were fun, the Time to Beat demo on Saturday night was perfect, allowing the handlers to run as often as they liked for $5. a run for charity. Some of the 2010 World Team Members (and coach:)) were at the event and we offered to run other handlers dog for a further $20. donation to the World Team. Those dogs that were willing to go round the ring with us had a great time as did we!

The weekend ended with ISC jumpers which I obviously do not enter with my dogs because as the World Team Coach I believe it would be inappropriate. However fate stepped in this year. My 7 year old BC Ace tied with a team for first in Excellent JWW and the course was torn down before we could have a run off. The ISC jumpers was offered as an alternative for the runoff and we gladly accepted. We ran at our 20 inch height at the end of the class, and thankfully had a fast and clean run on the challenging ISC course as the very last run of the entire show weekend. The grandstands cheered, and Ace and I had a blast.

 

Scoop was a pretty good boy. We made our debut in Novice standard and got 2 out of 4 legs. The wheel sort of fell off the last two standard runs. A ticked broad jump, refusal on the teeter, a tunnel off course when I was trying to reset to take the teeter, and a couple more bumbles in there as well.  We did get our third Novice JWW leg and got to move to Open JWW the last day. We had a pretty nice run but pulled a bar. You can watch our run here.

 

It took Scoop a couple runs to get used to the mats and the indoor trial setting as he has never trained in that environment. My bad, I should have made some trips to work in that kind of setting, but we got lucky anyway and he adjusted to the different footing just fine. He didn’t show as much speed or turning ability as he does on grass, and he added some extra strides I wish he would have left out, but fine for his first experience on mats. The first two days they held the FAST class as well and we qualified both times. So the weekend results were fairly nice for my green green boy. 2 Fast legs, 2 standard legs and a finished title in jumpers over the 4 day event.

Today is a training day. Scoop’s 2o2o behavior on the DW and teeter were pretty funky at the event. He stopped short on both contacts and reached back between his legs and nose touched the board. Two things going on there. First, I think the surface change from wood to rubber was something he thought was odd and he just doesn’t have any reinforcement history on that surface change. And maybe a bigger reason is that last week when running the contacts he was stopping with his feet barely off the board in 2o2o, and when he reached between his legs to nose touch, his nose came back almost to the board and I inadvertently marked that exaggerated behavior. Whoops!!

I am going to do a refresher course this week on 2o2o to remind him how far off the board his feet should be and that he needs to touch straight to the ground not reach back for the board. We already had one session this morning and it went well, but I have the plexi target out and we are just working on proofing on a flat board. I need to get the target away again, and proof on lots of different surfaces. This morning we worked wood to cement. I will drag out a long rubber mat to work on later, and I am going to skip wood to grass training for a couple days.

I am thinking about which alphabet drill to work on today….maybe letter “J”.

Thank you Mia for sending the nice photos of Jerry Ross from Santa Barbara a couple weeks ago. Can one ever have enough dog photos? Nah!

If you got to run your baby dog at a show on the weekend I hope you had as much fun as I did and that your dog did perfect start lines like Scoop did, and played every time you asked as well. If you accomplished that then the weekend was a successful one.

NJG

January 23, 2010

October 16, 2009

Time flies! Can’t believe it has been 6 weeks since I wrote about Scoop. I was away from home 30 out of the last 50 days. On a handful of those days Scoop was with me at agility trials. The big adventure was the trip to Europe and the World Championships for two weeks, which was immediately followed by a trip to Colorado for a week and then Portland  for three days. I am glad to be home, and have been enjoying every training moment with Scoop.

Luckily even though my blog has been suspended in time, Scoop’s training has not suffered the same fate. He looks and acts sort of grown up! He was 7 months old yesterday. He weighs 35 pounds and is over 20 inches tall. And really, really good news, no more tape and glue on his ears:)

Scoop seems quite mature now until I take him into a way too stimulating environment .  At home he is silly and playful, but will train attentively for a very long time. He has a lot of control… unless I am trying to demonstrate a specific agility move with someone else’s dog during a very serious dog agility lesson. Then he might be naughty enough to warrant being taken back to the house rather than get to hang with me in the field while I teach. At agility trials like one I went to today, as long as he is on his toy or I am actively reinforcing him with food for behaviors he is really great and attentive. His biggest distraction right now is greeting people. He wants to visit with everyone, and truthfully that also means jump on them. Short leashes, lots of rewards helps, but the issue is ongoing. I think I will ask for some help from friends tomorrow, to see if I can get in some reinforcements for sitting before he gets a chance to jump up to greet everyone.

We play and train as often as possible. That means we spend individual time together at minimum a few times a day when we are together. He hangs with me in my office when I am working indoors, and if I have a break that doesn’t include training him, he likes to cuddle on my lap. Well, sort of on my lap; those legs dangle off to the side cuz they are so long. I really like his willingness to settle down and cuddle. Mostly my dogs aren’t that fond of cuddling. Well Jack and Panic would sleep under the covers and crawl under my skin so to speak, but Wicked , Riot and Ace count the dog minutes on their toes, hoping I will let them off the couch, out of my arms, and onto their dog bed on the floor where they can act very non cuddly. Riot at 14 still wants to be right next to me all day, but cuddling is out of the question. She is too cool for that.

New stuff for Scoop

Scoop will drop his head flat to the ground and hold it there on the drop command. Since he also knows feet means to put your front feet in my hand, or up on a table or chair, I can now combine those two cues to make some fun tricks. Feet on the chair from the sit position, and then head down can be say your prayers. Feet in my hand, and head dropped low between his legs is sort of exaggerated praying while stretching. His body looks sort of weird on that one, so we don’t do it too much. He will also walk with me on his hind legs while his front feet are in my hand. That is another trick we do only once in a while since he is standing on his hind legs while doing it. I think the moral of the story is that anything that is much of an athletic feat is trained but practiced minimally while he is still all legs and growing like a weed.

 

Walk backwards.

Scoop now takes some steps backwards on cue. I use the command walk. I shaped it like this. I sat in a chair and waited for him to move one foot, then I clicked and gave him the treat. I watched his feet and waited for the movement again, then clicked. As soon as he started to understand that he was reinforced for taking a step backwards, I upped the ante and only clicked after he moved one foot and then the other, so I went from marking one step back, to marking two steps back. I decided to reinforce the beginning steps of walk by him returning to me for his reinforcement cookie. That way he was already reset to move away from me again. There are different ways to reinforce walking backwards and to pinpoint where the dog should move backwards to, like the dog walkign backwards and placing his rear feet on something like a rolled up carpet, towel, or a board. Sometimes I have used gates to help a dog walk backwards in a straight line, or I have trained while using a wall on one side to help in getting the dog straight while going back. At times I have reinforced all motion away from me and at the point of the last step I wanted to reinforce, I did not let the dog come forward, but moved quickly to the dog to hand him the treat. Anyway, this time I just decided to mark only straight steps back and reinforce from my hand with Scoop coming to me for the cookie. I counted steps before I clicked, continuing to build till I got up to 5 or 6 steps. At that point I switched to throwing my reinforcement toy or cookie to him. I had to be careful on delivering the reward to him or I got a head turn away from me when he caught the reward. Since I would really like him to go straight back and not curl or turn, I want to reward him while he is in straight line directly in front of me.

This is still a work in progress. Sometimes he sort of hops backwards on the first few steps. I want him to go quickly but take steps not jump backwards. I like to teach this behavior as it uses the dog’s rear end rather well and is a good athletic endeavor. I am not trying to strengthen his rear, or build muscle, I won’t do enough of it to do that yet. But as he grows older I will use it for strengthening, and it will probably be part of my warm up drill before I go into the ring.

I have lots more stuff to write about with Scoops’ training, and I hope I will have time to do it in a much more timely fashion rather than waiting 6 weeks to tell you how he’s doing. On my list: toy control games, recalls, using high value toys that put my dog over the top, and lots more.

I have three more days of agility coming up this weekend and Scoop will be with me . I hope my show report on Monday is that his greeting manners have made a remarkable improvement! I hope you have as great a weekend with your puppy as I am planning on having with mine.

Nancy