I worked with Basil today and it was a mostly good training session. We did go-outs to ring gating in the driveway, the first time for that, and he only bobbled on the first one (what else is new?). We did 8 articles at about 22-24 feet, and he was perfect; I did 3 of each, and no problems finding and retrieving. He did start standing at front instead of sitting, but I'm okay with that. I just reminded him to sit. I expect things like that to fall apart as the criteria get more difficult.
We did some glove work, and that didn't go very well. We got a couple good retrieves, but then Basil started looking at my mark hand, and then he started lying down, thinking I was giving him a down signal. ARGH. I got frustrated and just stopped with gloves.
The big problems is signals. *#$!@@ signals. I am SO tired of being frustrated when we work on them. We did take a week off from training because I was too busy with school and work to tackle much of anything, and yesterday, his signals were a bit sketchy but they were okay. I had to use a verbal once or twice, something I haven't had to do in ages, but he seemed to pick up where we left off. I was doing a full signals sequence yesterday afternoon at about 26 feet, the longest distance we've done yet. We ended on a good note with some lovely signals recalls.
Fast forward to today. Absolutely NO response when I cue him to down from about 20 feet. Nothing. I have a feeling that because this followed the bad gloves portion of the session, he got all weirded out. When I give him a verbal to down, he just stood there. I admit I then yelled at him to down. Yes, I know, clicker trainers are never supposed to be human and are supposed to be positive and cheerful and sweet 100% of the time, but I am so frustrated. I didn't do it TO him, more just a reaction to my own frustration that slipped. This, of course, made him freeze and shut down, which I completely deserved. Then I cursed to myself for doing this, and that only made him worse. Let's just say it was downhill from there. I finally gave up and took him in the house, and worked with Teagan instead (her training session was phenomenal). I tried Basil again 15 minutes later, and the response was exactly the same. Freeze, stand there, look blank. Tell him to down five or six times and get nothing. End session again.
We have gone through this cycle so many times that I want to scream. We make great progress on signals, and then they fall apart completely as if he's never seen or heard the cue in his entire life. We don't seem to have this problem with the other exercises. Yes, we have the standard flubs and that sort of thing, but I tinker or adjust the criteria and then we move along. But with signals, I continue to need to back way up: I close up the distance, make it ridiculously easy, and begin all over again. I am a very cautious and conservative trainer, so I know that I'm not asking too much. I even have a tendency to break down behaviors into such small pieces that I don't move along as quickly as I should. But I am SO TIRED of this behavior falling apart. I know that dogs don't generalize well, and that this is not an easy exercise, but good Lord, we've been working on it for 6 straight months! And we're STILL not up to competitive distance!! BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
