Maria Hagström is a Swedish dog trainer who is extremely successful. She has been at the top in obedience and working trials for a long time and her young working kelpie Ylle was qualified for national championships in both tracking and obedience last year, only 2 years old. He also made the national obedience team. Maria’s training is a lot like ours, all shaping and reward based. We just love training with her as it always leaves us with both motivation and inspiration. This time, we had invited her to do four days of seminars at a riding facility close to where we live. I worked Missy on Thursday and Friday and Squid on Saturday and Sunday.

With Missy, I got a lot of new ideas for her training. Obedience with her has been frustrating this winter, as I have felt that she always is too high and that there are some details that I just can’t fix. Maria made me realize that the details that we are struggling with has to do with her level of arousal. When I got Missy to calm down, the details started to look much better automaticly! I have been struggling with position and straight sits in heeling, with stimulus control on stand, sit and down from heel and on keeping back feet completly still when working on distance control. I now realize that all of those things will be much easier to fi if we get Missys level of arousal down.

Maria talks a lot about active and passive reinforcement. With a dog like Missy, you would like to keep the dog as passive as possible while rewarding, and also doing a lot of “its yer choice” while rewarding. While heeling with Missy, I should mostly reward her sitting at my side, and reward her when she can focus on me while I move the treat around. It helped a lot and I can’t believe that I have had trouble with getting her arousal right when training heeling. When her arousal was right, her sits where perfectly straight.

Maria also puts lots of emphasis on preparing your dog for trials. Getting all the exercises perfect is not enough. You should do lots of training on longer sequences (2 exercises or more) without rewards (of course, dog gets rewarded at the end of the sequence). For most dogs, this is the biggest difference between training and trialing. They get lots of rewards while training, and then none when in a trial. Doing lots of longer sequences will prepare the dog for trials and also give you valuable information on what needs to be worked on. You often get problems while doing longer sequences that you don’t get when you are just training and rewarding a lot. You also get to see if your dog is doing well on the first try. If you don’t do this in training, you will have to make those misstakes in a trial, wich is both expensive for you and demotivating for the dog. It is also important to do this kind of training in new environments and in situations that look like a trial.

On Friday morning, we got to choose a sequence to do with our dogs to try this kind of training out. With Missy, i choose a short heeling pattern, a recall with stand and down and then my plan was to reward her for heeling with me to the next exercise (it’s very important to have good transitions between the exercises). I put a lot of thought into the warm up and Missy was really good outside the riding facility, calm and focused. When we got in the trial setting, she was higher, but not as bad as the day before. We need to work more on it before it works in a trial, I think, but we’re definatly on the right track!

Keeping Missy lower on the arousal curve is something that I really need to think about in agility as well. She is so high while doing agility that I don’t feel that we’re making progress while training. It is mostly my fault, since I have a tendency to just run, run, run with her. Never calming it down. I have taken the new knowledge about Missy’s obedience into our agility training. We have a really long way to go in agility, but I think it is the best way in the end. Missy has great knowledge of jumping, weaving, contacts and handling, but when she is too aroused, she will just throw herself over bars, pop out at the third weave pole, fail to collect and get out of balance on the dogwalk. This is a video from our first training session with lower arousal as our primary goal. I have edited out the most boring parts, there was a lot more sit stays and “its yer choice” in it:

We’ve had a great weekend! Saturday was agility trial with Shejpa and our chance to get those last Q:s and move up to class II. She did so well! She was clean and fast in both jumpers and standard and won both classes. She was 8 seconds faster than the second fastest dog in standard. I was worried about her contacts, as we haven’t been able to train more than a couple of times during December and January. Our training field is all snow and ice and we haven’t had many sessions in the riding facility. We did a team run that didn’t go very well, but all contacts were perfect. Then, in standard, her dogwalk was really bad, but she still hit the yellow. I’m not very concerned about that, I knew that it was a gamble to run her in standard with almost no training for two months and I know that she’ll be fine as soon as we can start training again. I’m very happy with Shejpa and I can’t wait until the next trial, in two weeks, where she will be running in class II in both standard and jumpers!

Jumpers run:

Standard run:

Sunday was obedience trial at our club and we were helping out. Two of our students were competing in obedience for the first time. They both have Kleiner Münsterländers, a german birddog (HPR) breed. There were about 40 dogs in the trial and one of our students actually won the whole class! In front of all te border collies and working breeds. Both of them did really well and they are now qualified for the next class. I was so proud watching the happy, focused and confident dogs!

We’ve had a fun filled week. Last Friday, we drove to friends in Sweden for a weekend of herding. Squid got to meet the sheep for the first time and did really well. We were all very pleased with the way she was starting out. She was happy, confident, focused and balanced the sheep to me. She showed a lot of the traits that I have been looking for in a puppy. I can’t wait ’til next time we’ll be herding (in about a month), but I need to start jogging, because I got so exhausted from running backwards and sideways trying to help the dog and not get smashed by the sheep. Good thing that all that walking backwards in obedience is helping in other areas as well… Here is a video of Squids first day with the sheep, 16 weeks old:

Tuesday was Squids first time flying in her crate. The trip to Bergen is a short one, about 50 minutes. I was at the airport about an hour early (when has that ever happened before?) to give her time to get used to it and maybe get a bit tired. She was truly a perfect puppy at the airport. Walking nicely on leash while I was pushing the heavy cart, sleeping by my feet when I sat with my computer, wagging her tail to all the people that came by. We played some crate games and trained some tricks and then I left her in her crate with two raw turkey necks. I don’t even think she knew I went. When we picked her up in Bergen, she was relaxed and happy, I think she had a good time.

We were teaching in Bergen for two days. Squid turned 4 months on Wednesday. She is a great puppy to bring to classes, she stays in her open crate while other dogs are working and I’m teaching, she does demos and concentrates really well, she sleeps by my feet when I do lectures. I’m really pleased with her. I finally got the video camera back (along with my husband and three dogs) and I did some recording in Bergen and I’ll try to do some more at home. It’s time for a new video of Squid and the things we have shaped.

Squid at 16 weeks

It’s really a depressing time of year. I did wish for the snow to go away, and I guess I got what I wished for. It’s windy, dark, rainy and the road to our house is covered in ice with water on top. I have had to park the car by the postbox since it’s impossible to drive up to the house right now. I have caught a cold and is coughing constantly. Thomas is in Bergen again, working on his master thesis. Indoor training yesterday was cancelled, I guess because many of my friends have exams today. Indoor training tonight might be hard to get to, because of the icy road to the riding facility (a friend of mine got stuck on that road on Tuesday and it took us a good halv hour to get out of there). Maybe I can start training on my field again now that the snow is gone, but I have a feeling that it’s too wet and slippery.

Ok, enough of the whining. We’re soon heading for spring! Puppy Squid is now 13 weeks old and huge! She weighed 8,4 kg yesterday. She is very coordinated and has full control over her body, so it doesn’t concern me. I don’t think she’ll be a big border collie, she’s just a big puppy and has always been (like the rest of her litter), but her parents are normal size border collies. She is so far all that I wanted from a puppy. I wanted a social puppy with lots of confidence and no fears. She is all that. She loves people, especially children. She is not afraid of anything and can relax anywhere. I also wanted a puppy with a lot of brain. I want a dog with an open mind who can be thoughtful in drive and never loose her head. Her parents had the qualities I was looking for and I think she got them too.

It’s extremely easy to change her behavior. If she shows a behavior that I don’t like, it’s usually enough with a few reinforcements for good behavior and then she never looks back. She started to show interest in other dogs running agility or tugging at an early age. She would kick and scream when she saw even the slowest dog run around an agility course. I started rewarding calm behavior right away and it took me just a few repetitions to have a completely different puppy. She can stay in an open crate and be totally relaxed as other dogs run and play.

She loves food and she loves to tug and her openness to change makes it really easy to train her, she will just accept any reward from me without thinking twice about it. She loves to climb things, I had to rescue her from the seesaw already on the first day. I have some balance toys that she just loves to climb on her own and she will climb the peanut ball and use it as a resting place We had a jumping seminar here this weekend and she got to do her first puppy grid, wich she did nicely.

Time to go out for a walk with the dogs. I was waiting for daylight to come, but I don’t think it will get much brighter than this on a rainy and windy day like this.

We did another session with the running contacts this afternoon. Our goal was to get her to run from the top of the higher plank. It required Thomas to hold both Shejpa and the plank high up in the air, but we managed. She was a bit confused at first when I started her from the middle of the plank and seemed to have some trouble with where to place her feet. It’s hard with the not perfect ones. I don’t want to reward them, but maybe I should. I get inconsistent with them. When we started her from the top of the plank, she was more confident and picked up speed. She jumped when I was ahead of her once and when Nina switched from kibble to hot dogs. We have a lot of proofing to do! I think some of the last ones on the video are very nice. This is only the third session with the plank on an angle.

It’s June and the weather is even warmer. We had about 29° C today (84 F), wich is very warm when you live in Norway. I unfortunatly spent most of the day in the car, as we drove north to buy our new car (a Toyota Yaris Verso). It was very warm this weekend as well, but we spent it indoors, listening to Ken Ramirez and Kathy Sdao who gave a seminar on many interesting subjects. The best thing about seminars is that you get a lot of inspiration to do what you pretty much have known for a long time you should be doing. Kathy held a good lecture about counter-conditioning for dog-dog aggression. It made me see why I have failed some times in the past and gave me inspiration to try it at home. We have to female dogs that really don’t get along. I have no hope in getting them to accept each other (one of them is 11 years old), but the conflict has made Missy bark every time some one walks out the front door. I would really like to try counter-conditioning, but as Kathy pointed out, you need to make sure that you do it right. If I’m starting this project, I need to make sure that no one uses that door when I’m not around to feed Missy. I also have to do training sessions where we plan the door opening. She should get all her food (her raw food is the best food she knows) during these sessions (she can have kibble when we do other training). It’s also very important that the food comes after she hears the door (about a second later).

Another thing I want to try at home is Ken Ramirez’s concept training. I want to teach Pi modifier ques such as left and right (not left and right as a behavior, but as a concept that can be used with many differend behaviors). It was also very cool to hear about dogs doing mimicry, but I think that will have to wait… We had dinner with Ken and Kathy on Saturday night and we had some interesting discussions about how to add cues (Clicker trainers here often want to add the cue as the dog performs the behavior, but Kathy agreed with me that it’s more effective to give the cue just before the dog offers the behavior).

After the seminar yesterday, we wen’t to a nice beach where Pi had her first experience with going in the water. She was not reluctant to go in the water at all and she seemed to enjoy it a lot. I hope that we can go swimming with the dogs tomorrow if the weather is still warm. I havn’t done a lot of training today. We did recalls with Pi and she was really good. Missy got a session with some obedience and some double box training. She is still knocking a lot of bars, but I think she does some really nice things as well.

As a puppy, Shejpa would always run away from me when she got a toy in her mouth. Her behavior has improved since then and she usually gets praise for her nice retrieves from the field trial people. However, during the last couple of weeks, she has started to run away with toys that i throw for her or let her win during a game of tug. It wasn’t all that bad at first, I could usually get her to come if i called her, and sometimes I just had to wait a little longer… But then it got worse, and yesterday, she wouldn’t even come to me with a boring toy and trade it for chicken necks. I suddenly realized that her reinforcement didn’t come from running around with the toy, but from my reactions. I think this is very common and we often don’t even stop and think about it, because we’re so into getting the toy back and running the sequence again. The behavior gets even worse and then we stop throwing toys to avoid the behavior…

When I realized this, it took me about five minutes to fix it. I wish I had been wize enough to take action the first time she ran off with the toy, but I often do whats the most reinforcing right now (getting the toy back so that I can run some more agility) just like the dogs. How did i fix it? Well. I had my tasty chicken necks (that Shejpa really loves) and I gave her an easy task: Give the toy back to me when I let you win it during tug. She failed. So I went to Pax, our german pointer that was resting on the field, and I gave him her chicken necks. She came back and I put her back in her crate while i did some training with Pax. I wanted her to leave me. I didn’t care about what she did once she got the toy. Her toy was of no interest to me, but I had the chicken necks and I really like to feed it to the bearded dog if she isn’t around… After a few repetitions, she started to give me the toy right away (and got fed for it, of course), so I challenged her some more by throwing the toy to her during agility. She came right back to me! I couldn’t get her to not come straight to me every time. I’m curious about what she’ll do in training today, but I’m sure that I’ll bring another dog out with me.

“Dog’s are better at shaping people than people are at shaping dogs” Susan Garrett