Weekly Review 2/22/19 : Boots and Stimulus Control

 Review Of This Week

Drake and I are working on three main things lately:

Boots: My first goal was to get Drake comfortable wearing his new boots.  I wasn't really sure if this was something we could do in one week or not, but Drake killed it.  You can visit the academy lesson on this here.

Stimulus Control:  My second goal was to keep working on his stimulus control.  This was something we have struggled with over the last couple of months.  Drake likes to throw behaviors (he just keeps offering behaviors over and over without waiting for cues).  Now this is something he only does during formal training sessions (when I have a clicker and am standing or sitting in "training" posture), so it's not like he's throwing alerts randomly in Walmart. 

But still, in order to move forward I really need Drake to wait until he hears a cue to offer his behavior.  This is something we'll be talking a lot more about as I continue to update and add new lessons to the academy.

We've been working really hard on this over the last month, so what I noticed this week is that his stimulus control has improved immensely when I'm standing.  When I'm sitting it's a different story.

Alert:  Because Drake's stimulus control while I'm standing is good, we began transferring his alert cue from the verbal "alert" to me scratching my arms.  You can see the academy lesson on this (which includes his video from this week) here.

 Goals for next week

Drake:

• Continue transferring Drake's alert cue to an environmental cue.
• Continue working on stimulus control with a focus on while I'm seated.
• One long outing into public (more than an hour)

Me:

• Consistency with reinforcement delivery:  Over the last few weeks I have noticed that I have become pretty inconsistent with how and where I reinforce the dogs.  Next week I'll give video examples of this and why it's important for me to clean it up.
• Waiting for attention to handler before giving a cue: Don't get me wrong, if  I need some thing from my dog and he's not looking at me, I'll still give a cue.  That's what the cues are for.  However, during training sessions I have noticed that I often give cues when the dog isn't even looking at me, which means that he's not really ready for the cue.  It leads to sloppy loops and sloppy stimulus control.  I'll give video examples and more details on this next week too.