Growing up at Blue Cedar, Ian and Tooie gave me lots of chances to play with my brothers and the other dogs, and we had lots of fun props and toys around so I got exposed to new and strange things all the time. We also got to do lots of tugging, recalls, etc. All good exposure for the future careers in flyball and agility that we puppies hope for. But they didn't give us a whole lot of obedience training, in the assumption that our eventual owners would want to assign their own cues and such. David has spent quite a bit of time training me, and he sometimes gets help from his flyball teammates who are some of my favorite people. I really like it when we do training, personal attention, a chance to use my brain, and lots of cheese is just the best!

"Sit" is easy. Their hand goes up, my snout follows it, and my rump hits the floor. Cheese!

"Down" is even easier, I love to be flat on the floor, that's where the cheese usually is, after all.

"Stand" we're still working on. I don't really like to be handled, and stand seems to lead to that. I'd much rather sit or lie down, maybe I'll get cheese anyways.

"Up" and "Off" are also something we work on. Off is usually fine by me, but I don't always want to jump up on scary stuff.

"Leave it" and "Get it" are commands we just started with last week. I made great progress on "leave it", but now I'm not always sure whether a treat on the ground is something I should back away from or pounce on.

"Come" - are you running away from me with a toy? I didn't think so, if you were I'd already be there.

Training Quasar is teaching me a lot, I've already learned several things in the process that I was able to transfer to Karma and improve her response to certain commands and situations. But a hyperactive, hyper-intelligent terrier puppy suffering from testosterone induced ADD is not always the easiest pupil.

Some things, Quasar picks up so fast it's scary. With "leave it", we went from nothing to him backing away when I drop a treat from waist level just a foot or two from his snout in the course of maybe 15 minutes. In fact he internalized leave it to the point that he started thinking he was only allowed to get a treat if I threw it behind him. Now I'm trying to introduce more variety into what treats he can and can't have, and interspersing "leave it" and "get it" commands on all kind of different treat throws so he doesn't get confused again.

"Down" seems to be his default behavior, which he'll offer whenever he doesn't understand what I want. At one point I could easily get him to go back and forth between "down", "sit", and "stand" at will, but that seems to have faded as he gets older, so we're practicing that again.

His recall is iffy. As with some of Karma's training problems, a big part here is simply the challenge of training this single-handed. If we're in a boring environment and he knows I have treats, he's not going to leave my side in the first place. If we're in an interesting place, treats may not be good enough to get his attention. I'm currently trying to figure out the right threshold between "I'll stay here next to the treat bag" and "I'm going to go SNIFF ALL THE THINGS" where I can do some long-line recall training.

I'm finally starting to get through to him on "drop it" after several weeks, like any good terrier puppy he's highly reluctant to drop his toy, whether or not it's acting like it's dead or not. But he's starting to get the point that when I hold his tug still, he should let go of it, and we're just about to where I can think about adding a cue. If we don't get there soon, there's always the technique shown here:

Posted by: Una at February 07, 2012 10:09 PM (dpdBy)

Posted by: Greta at February 07, 2012 10:44 PM (cBxti)

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