Reply To: Lois & Speed (DRTDT)

[Alana McGee]

Here is Speed’s baseline multiple indoor hides. I told Speed about Kristin’s comments about ”

I worked on only saying ‘find it’ instead of ‘show me’. Should I be requeing? Or just see if he keeps working after the 1st one? I figured we’re still very green to multiple hides so re-cueing is okay. Although I assume when the dog looks like he’s going back to work after a find, there’s no reason to re-cue.

On the 3rd hide, he pawed it and it pushed away, in the video it looks like I marked it too early but he had paw touched it. He was very persistent and kept paw touching it so I encouraged and rewarded that persistence.

Overall watching this video, I could be a little more excited with him. Speed loves to rough house and tug, but when there’s food around, he’s all about FOOD. I think we’d be likely to rough house, throw sticks, tug as we walked back to the car.

I also tried to think of things I would say in the field if they alerted to a truffle in a location that seemed different – like the side of a creek bank or something unusual. So I attempted to marvel at finding truffles in pillows etc. Sort of that “we’re a team and your teaching me!”. I need to think more about how I’d actually react.

His tail wags the whole time and he’s always got that expression of “[i]seriously? I get beef heart? Can I Have more? Here’s the truffle? Beef heart for finding a truffle? can I have more? sure I’ll go find another truffle…[/i]”