Dog Trainer's Log

Image by Ninja M. via Flickr

Madison and I have been working on her play skills – every day, a couple encouraged and praised tosses and retrieves of her favorite toy, the ginormous Nylaknot left in the toybox by the gordon setters. I’m still focused on trying to reward the right behavior (and not commit CRAP training – constantly rewarding ‘almost’ perfect.) While it’s important to reinforce approximate performances in the very beginning of shaping a skill, the trap lies in staying at ‘almost’ and ‘close enough.’

When shaping, if you never raise criteria or ask for more, then you’ll produce a performance that is ‘almost perfect’ but not quite there – or CRAP training (constantly rewarding almost perfect.) It’s a mistake I made early on when M. showed signs of interest in Reu and Bard’s old chew toys. I was so anxious to spot any display of play/toy interest AT ALL in my little no-toys princess that I clicked sniffing the toys and touching the toys a few times too many, and never withheld a click to ask for more. I rewarded ‘almost,’ and therefore got M. and myself stuck on the not-quite-a-game plateau. Somehow, on her own M. put two and two together – because I clearly wasn’t giving her the constructive feedback she needed to get to the next stage.

While I’ve spent the last week or so focusing on training (rather than writing about it), I’ve also added a New York State dog events calendar to the site under the CNYDogs tab at the top of the page. This is the Google calendar I created so that I’d never forget another closing date, cleaned up a bit to share. It does focus mainly on dog events here in NY state, but my favorites in neighboring states may be added as they come up. I hope the calendar is useful to others. If you are running or know about a NY dog event that should be on the calendar, please drop me a line at gaelen2 AT yahoo DOT com with the who-what-where-when-why-how much. I’ll put as many events into the calendar as I can.

I’ve also started a column called Syracuse Dog Training at the Syracuse edition of Examiner.com. I know – it’s a lot, and there’s nothing quite like burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. But writing for Examiner.com will (hopefully) keep my website fees and blog expenses in the black, and maybe even earn enough to cover the occasional latte. Time will tell. Meanwhile, if you’d like Syracuse dog training news delivered to you, drop on over to my page and take a look.

Now, off to bed – so that I’m sharp for M. and my next play session tomorrow morning.