Reply To: Chris (access until November 15, 2014)

[Alana McGee]

Hi Chris

You guys are doing Great!

On the first vid she does a great job of going back and re-alerting without you even cuing her to do so. Fabulous.

Great job after you pick it up and put it in your hand of her targeting it and clicking and rewarding for that. Your timing is great with clicker.

In the second video, its okay to ask for the lying down, but I wouldn?t stress too much on it right now. Which you don’t, you realize I assume, based on your actions to just let it come. She is staying at source really well as is. You do the right thing by rewarding the alerts she does offer.

At the 0:27 (second vid) great when she hits your hand trying to get reward again. That?s great. Not precise perse, but we like that she is orienting herself and getting pushy about rewards in that scenario.

Another thing you could try doing. After you have picked it up and she has alerted on it in your hand, ?drop it?, and see if you can get her to re-alert.

Sometimes in the field handlers drop truffles when putting everything away and managing the dog. It is much easier to have Daisy help you re-find it than combing the dirt for the lost truffle.

A few things we would suggest:

In the next lesson you are outdoors I believe, or you begin that process. While we know you have been practicing on walks a bit, try to make sure when you are outside you work in a relatively small environment, as distraction free as possible.

As for inside, continue to build confidence and reward histories and keep up what you are doing. Start to enlarge the space Daisy checks even more if you can, so you can start building in some endurance training. The other thing, and I believe Lesson 4 covers this is multiple hides at once. So instead of just one target, you would hide say 3 hot targets in the same environment. After Daisy finds one, you don?t reset, you just continue on to find the next. Let her decide which ones she finds first. If she walks past one, she may come back to it later. Don?t freak out if that happens, she is likely just following a scent column.

Try it in your gravel area in that general room and see how it goes. Eventually the goal is to build to many finds like this- like 5 to 8 in a row. It can be fatiguing for the dogs, so just go slow, and adapt to her. You guys are doing really well.

Increase the amount of hides gradually don?t jump to five right away. We would say do two or three for a while and get her used to that. Again, that would be indoors. You can at the same time be practicing simple hides outside to get her used to distractions. Being a wee pup still, that will likely pose more of a challenge. So just stick with one target outside.

Make sure when you are doing multiple hides that you have a target on you you can offer Daisy as an easy success if she seems to be struggling. You don?t have to find ALL of the targets in that scenario when you start doing multiple hides. The general rule is quit while you are ahead. If she is struggling finding the 3rd one in a series of 3, offer her a success and then you can be done with the session and always try again later!

Make sure with multiple hides you give them at least 5-10 minutes to ?cook?. Another thing to practice would be to start to increase the amount of time targets get to cook as that will change how much odor is in the environment and how Daisy moves through it. Again don?t jump to cooking targets for an hour right away but slowly build. 5 minutes, 15 minutes 25 minutes, etc.

You guys are doing well. It is really nice to see her stay at source. Outdoors it will be interesting to see if this remains in the same fashion when there is much more stimulating distraction.