September 3, 2014

Video from Obedience Training

Squid and I had a great day yesterday, training with our friends Louise and Louise and their dogs Snipe and Kite. Snipe and Kite have the same mother as Epic and Squid, and are born here. This month is obedience and conditioning month for Squid. This day was the perfect kick off for our obedience. I have been logging all training time with my dogs since the beginning of May (really since the beginning of the year, but I changed systems in May). Squid gets an average of 5 minutes of obedience training per day (an average that was 4,43 before yesterday’s massive 70 minutes of training). I think 5 minutes is a decent number considering all other things that we’ve done during this time – agility trials, traveling and resting. It’s far from what the best obedience dogs clock though, so I hope to improve that average by quite a lot by the end of this month!

Obedience is a lot of fun right now. Squid knows all the exercises and I really like how she performs most of the behaviors. She has speed, precision and a happy tail. It feels like pay back for years of training sessions. We’re far from ready to be competitive. When you’ve taught the exercises, you still have a long way to go in terms of stability in competition. I’m excited to do our first obedience trials in the highest class this fall, but I’m happy that we still have many years to find stability and flow in competition.

Here’s a video that Louise posted from our training:

August 25, 2014

Foundation Class fall 2014

As much as I love summer, I’m always happy when fall arrives. I certainly don’t like the darker nights or the fact that we’re getting closer to winter, but summer is such a hectic time for us. In mid-August, things start to calm down. I have time to take long walks in the woods, to train my dogs, even watch some TV at night. I have friends visiting quite often, but at least I’m home enough to know where I can find appliances and food in the kitchen. Hopefully, this also means more time for blogging. I really want to document a lot of Wilco’s training. I love to go back and watch videos of my dogs as puppies, and I’m sure it’s interesting for others as well.

I’ve also had time to make some changes to the website. We’re now ready to offer a new Foundation Class this fall! We’ll start on October 1st, and you can sign up now.

10551125_10152605453812456_7028856998511544893_n

Poor Epic had some time off because of a cut in his paw. He’s back in training now.

Thomas just left for the north of Sweden to hunt ptarmigan and grouse with his pointers and spaniels. I’m at home with our big gang of border collies. I hope that he gets there safely and has a lot of luck with hunting.

August 14, 2014

Update

So – back to some kind of every day life after an intense summer. My dogs have been healthy and we’ve had a lot of fun in the agility ring. European Open in Hungary was a great experience. I had some great runs with my dogs, but they both took a few bars too much. Squid usually doesn’t drop bars, especially not at 60 cm, and I don’t feel like she’s back in shape yet. New visit to the physiotherapist is scheduled, and I hope that nothing is wrong and that we just have to work some more to find her strength and form. Epic is just getting stronger and better, and his form is excellent. Unfortunately, he cut his paw during play by the stream last week. So he’s just resting and bumping into everything with his big cone. One more week before we can take the stitches out and start playing again.

Squid and I haven’t done any obedience training for a long time, we’ve been to busy with agility and traveling. We started again this week and we’re having a lot of fun with the elite exercises. I am tempted to start planning for competition this fall, but I’m not sure if we’ll have the time. I need to focus on a lot of trial preparation with her, not just the exercises. This requires both time, training partners and new locations.

Wilco has turned 6 months and I feel like I haven’t trained him enough this summer. He’s mostly been with me or with dog sitters or just hanging out at home during camps. He is such a cool puppy and adjusts to everything without problem. He is confident, but sweet. Calm, but always happy to work. Now, we have some more time for training and we’re working on agility and obedience foundations, conditoning and some herding (although that should probably wait a few more months).

I’m always excited to get back to normality after the summer. I feel like I have a good balance between competitions (we really look forward to Norwegian Open this fall!), time at home and traveling during the rest of this year. And oh! Win is in Norway to get mated to Tod, and we’re expecting puppies in 9 weeks. Cross your fingers for many, healthy puppies this time.

August 12, 2014

Learn Faster with More Mistakes?

Summer is coming to an end and things are starting to slow down a bit. It’s been a very busy summer with competitions both near and far away (European Open in Hungary), camps at home and abroad and not much time for anything else. We’ve had technical problems with the shop part of the website, so we had to postpone the start of our next Foundation Class Online. We promise to find a solution soon! I’ll also get back with more reports on what Wilco and I are doing. He just turned 6 months.

I came across an interesting article today regarding learning. Trainers often have the idea that error-less learning leads to faster and better results than learning based more on trial and error. While I like to keep my dogs successful, I’m never afraid of letting them try different things and try again when they’re not rewarded. I was therefore glad to come across these studies that suggest that off-target actions can be a key ingredient in quick learning. Even making mistakes happen (applying a force that pushes the action off target) can make learning go faster than striving for error-less repetitions.

Learn Faster with Messy Moves

Of course, we don’t know if this applies to dogs (although I would think so), and I don’t know about the quality of the studies or if there are other studies that suggest otherwise. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or added knowledge on this subject!

June 11, 2014

Managing the little sheepdog

Wilco is really a very easy puppy to raise. He loves both play and food. He relaxes really well. When he doesn’t feel like sleeping, he plays with his toys and leaves the furniture alone (he didn’t do that a month ago, but now he seems happy with his toys and bones). He doesn’t go crazy over other dogs running, playing or working. This is such a good trait in a border collie puppy. It makes having him with me everywhere so much easier.

There is really just one annoying problem. He loves herding sheep and he’ll go in the sheep field on his own to push the sheep around (really nicely, but still not a good idea). He won’t run away when we’re training (sheep are just across the driveway from my obedience/agility field), but he will if he’s just hanging out in the garden, or when we come back from walks. And the more you try to stop him, the more determined he is to go. He’s been on a leash around the farm for weeks now, but I miss having him just hanging out with me outdoors.

Solution:

Caught in the net:

June 8, 2014

Obedience Inspiration

Some inspiration from last weekend’s Norwegian Championships in obedience. This is the winner – young Kylie with handler Aina Fatland Røine. Speed and precision for sure!

June 7, 2014

Wilco in the woods

It’s been a while since I updated about Wilco. I’ve been teaching abroad for a couple of weeks, leaving my dogs at home with Thomas. I really missed them, and it was especially hard to leave Wilco. Things happen all the time, and a lot happened during the weeks I was away. Mostly good things! Wilco turned 4 months old yesterday, and I really, really like him! He is so easy going. He can relax ringside at agility competitions, he has such great skills with both dogs and people, he loves training with me. He also loves herding, and when I got home he started to go into the sheep field on his own. I had to keep him on leash around the farm for a while, but he seems to have better thoughts now and is more allowed off leash. His herding looks really good, I can’t wait for him to grow up so that he can be trained!

Yesterday, we went to the woods for some fun. I usually don’t take Wilco on my longer walks with the grown up dogs, but take him out on his own for 10-20 minutes before or after I walk the others. Our adventures in the woods are both for his physical development and for building our relationship. For relationship building, I try to do a lot of recalls and play fun games with him, like hiding his toy and letting him find it with his nose. Sometimes we just walk and he can sniff and explore. Other times, we do things together. I want to have a nice balance between the two.

For his physical development, I like him to work in different speeds. When we’re just walking, I love that he chooses a relaxed trot. Trotting is great for recovery. For strength and coordination, I like to walk my dogs slowly in brush and on uneven ground. In a slow walk, the dog has to use a lot of muscle to move his legs, especially when he is walking in brush that requires extra high leg lifts. This training builds great stabilizing muscle around hips and spine. With Wilco, he is just doing a little bit of it to get used to the idea and to help him coordinate his long legs. I reward him a lot, and I try to reward when he is looking ahead rather than at me. He needs to see where he’s going. Finally, I also want him to do some full speed running. Restrained recalls are great for this!

We also find fallen trees and work on balance and coordination. I haven’t done a lot of body awareness things with Wilco. My priority has been for him to find balance using his own body. Compared to my older dogs, he knows less about climbing things, but when he does (this was his first time on a fallen tree!) he knows how to balance his body. With him, my priority is quality in posture and movements. Less is more, I hope. What are your thoughts on puppy conditioning?

May 1, 2014

Wilco learning down

Another “first” video today: I decided to try to teach Wilco a fold back down. The goal is for him to fold back while keeping all four paws still. This is just one of several position changes that he will learn, it felt like the best one to start with. I will later add the cue “dekk” and use this for position changes. In the first training session, I thought I would just start and see what he did. I normally capture downs in everyday life before I try it in formal training sessions, but I haven’t done that this time. I was just about to stop the session, and wait a few weeks before I tried it again, when suddenly he went down:

In the next session he quickly got back on track and we got quite a few decent repetitions:

The next step is for him to become less dependent on having the reward hand so close to his nose and I will increase the criteria for his paws to be completely still.

April 30, 2014

Wilco learning to heel

Time really flies, and I haven’t had time to do as much training with Wilco as I had envisioned. He is a very easy going and happy puppy (although he does like to bite me – hard!). When we do find time to train, he learns frighteningly fast. I often don’t understand how he can make the connections so quickly. Today, we started working on heelwork. I think it’s great to get video of the first time we do something, so the camera was ready today. Here is our very first session on heeling: