Reply To: Curt Leitz & Mo

[Alana McGee]

Thank you Curt for your concise analysis and answers to the homework assignment. Well done, and very clear. Your plan of action as described looks quite strong and well thought out and includes appropriate steps to take with Mo.

Nice use of barriers to build excitement/ allow you freedom to set up hides

We don’t think it will manifest based on what we have seen so far but if Mo starts to exceed threshold of excitement and become anxious due to the barrier placed between him & you while you set up hides we’ll come up with an alternative plan.

Another level of complexity (perhaps you can only do one short session a day like this however) is to allow the target(s) to cook in that blocked off room. If you can help it right now, don’t make it too small of a room with many hot targets in it as that is actually a very complicated odor ‘flooding’ exercise and we want to avoid overloading him at this stage.

Video:

Your enthusiasm right off he bat is great Curt. You allow a nice space and it great to see Mo developing more confident searching patterns at distance from you with independence.

0:26— What we like about this was his angle of approach. He located the target a second earlier but realized access to it in order to offer an alert would be difficult. It shows persistence that he readjusted to try to reach the target from an alternative angle before seeking reward/ confirmation from you.

Also notice where the odor from that hide had pooled 0:19 and how he worked to source. Well done Mo! 0:24 almost looks like a truncated “foot tap” alert (notice the shift in weight on to the front right foot heavily) except he can’t actually access the target that way. Clever Pup.

0:32 GREAT! You really do have such a nice bond.

This is a big space and definitely more of a challenge for Mo, but it looks great. Nice quick (but not startling too fast) approach for reward at 1:03. You and Mo have a nice balance to one another here.

1:52 nice reaction on your part (voluntary, conscious, or reactionary) to pull back for a moment on your physical touch to Mo in response to his retreating from it. Again, we think Mo responds nicely to you and enjoys physical touch but if you look at that sequence again you can see him pull back a bit. It is interesting and Again, something to note is all. That reactionary pull back may lessen with time and experience as he learns to generalize more that hands coming at him in this manner when your body posture is like this mean happy things and soft pets. You see how once he interprets which behavior coming, he solicits more of it after he realizes what it is (in the very next second when he approaches you).

2:23 he’s working really hard here! 2:29 great impulse to open the rolled blanket up to attempt to solicit and aid in a re-alert. When he did come back to it and nose touch that is a perfect moment to take an opportunity to have a jackpot there and spend a little more time in that moment (before you remove the target from that location by touching it).

These are great Curt. We don’t have a lot of constructive comments to additionally add here. You guys are progressing really nicely and this is definitely more challenging for Mo, he’s searching larger areas and building confidence. It looks good. That last hide under the laundry basket is a a hard one, which he handles gracefully.

We wouldn’t suggest that for all teams as the source is hard to access and even nigh impossible to access without assistance, but Mo does a great job of indicating he found the target.

well done!