This morning for our training session we worked on teaching the dogs to "range out". Pat wants Annie the puppy to become her antler dog. Basically, this means that Pat will take Annie out hiking and send her out to look for antlers (e.g. by smell or sight). Upon finding an antler, Annie is supposed to bark continuously until she is released. Pat is already working on having Annie bark when she shows her the antler, so that behavior has already started. Today, we brainstormed a shaping plan to get Annie to travel and investigate in the direction of our finger point. We started this off by pointing in a direction and rewarding as soon as she looks that way. The reward does not come from the handler -- we wanted her to be continually focused away from the trainer, so the reward was thrown in the direction of the finger point. Pretty quickly we were getting a couple steps of movement in the indicated direction. Pretty cool stuff - and especially illustrating the importance of the location of the food reward!
We've been working with Dougie on placing his foot in a bucket so we can do warm water baths to clean out his infection. Yesterday, we got him stepping into the bucket pretty consistently, so today we added the water. At first, he would take his foot out as soon as the water got past his hoof, but by the end of the session this afternoon, he was keeping his foot in the bucket until I led him away. Hopefully that means his foot is going to heal sooner and he'll be feeling better!
I've also been working with Lefty and Roaney. Roaney is going to get gelded on Monday, so today I worked on having him walk into a chute (just like he will have to at the mustang clinic) and touching him on the neck where they will give him the IV injection sedative.
Lefty did fantastic today. When I went into the pen to separate Roaney, Lefty was a bit of a basketcase and I was worried today wouldn't go so well. But as soon as I walked in with my treat bag and walked AWAY from him instead of towards him, his demeanor seemed to shift and his body relaxed a bit and he approached instead of continuing to move away from me. I started off by having him do "Easy", which is a calm position of putting his head down with his neck straight. It was good for him to do a behavior where he didn't have to touch me at first but could get food reinforcements for doing the right behavior. Once we did a couple "Easy"s, I had him target his nose, then his jaw. Once I had him target his jaw and did count-down petting on his jaw, he was the Lefty I remembered from yesterday. Pushing into my space, super comfortable being around me, bumping me with his shoulder so I would scratch an itchy spot. At that point, I wanted to work on haltering him, since that was something he knew already but had never done with me before. He was a pro. Right from the beginning he was targeting the halter and then doing "Push" with his nose deep into the halter so that it pushed right over his ears. I was able to completely put it on and take it off him 6 or 7 times before I decided he was great and there was less and less benefit in continuing to do it over and over again. At that point, I realized that he probably had some lateralization issues. He was most comfortable somewhat wrapped around me with his body behind me and head coming around my right shoulder. When I tried to come around to the other side, he would side-step so that only his left side would be facing me at all times. Instead, I stood in front of him and had him target his Right Jaw, then the right side of his neck and did short (5 second) count down petting on his right side. I'll have to keep working to hopefully get him good on both sides.
My main project horse is Hammer, who will be adopted as soon as he is broke to ride -- we're still quite a ways away from that, but he can wear a saddle pad strapped to him while we do "fake" lunging. I have him follow a guider ball since he wasn't responding well to using pressure behind him to get him to move. Hopefully tomorrow we can reintroduce the lunge line, but he's basically free-lunging with me (just with a guider ball to show him where to go!), and we can change directions and occasionally get just the hips to swing around without him stepping closer to me. Today Pat said that I should take him home since he's the perfect size horse for me :) tempting, but he already has a home and there's no way I could keep a horse...
Here's Amigo, who is being adopted by the same people who are taking Hammer. Amigo's further along with his saddle training. Sasha is up on his back walking around the large pen for the first time. They did great!
No comments:
Post a Comment