I worked in the front yard today; it's warm (about 65 degrees) and overcast, although it was sunny most of the morning. There's also a lovely breeze. As the temperatures have warmed, I can see Basil's enthusiasm for training starting to wane. He does this every spring and summer, and I always have to lighten (or quit) training. He's so sensitive to heat.
I didn't get any training done yesterday because I spent all day working in the garden. I kept telling myself that I couldn't wait to get some training done, but by the time I got finished after seven hours weeding and planting seedlings, I had nothing left for dog training.
The brilliance of our last training session disappeared and we had problems all over the place today. We're up to eight articles in the pile now and Basil retrieved the wrong article on his first send to the pile. After that he seemed to be fine, so I don't know what the deal was. Signals were, unsurprisingly, not so great. I had to give him a verbal on one down and a verbal on a couple sits, which was so disappointing. I swear, some days it seems like we will never get over the hump. And then I have to remind myself that we're working on really, really complicated behaviors and I have to be patient. I started at ten steps (about 15-20 feet) and progressed to 12 steps away on signals, and after he did a couple correct sequences of down-sit-come we ended.
After signals, we worked on the glove. He actually did very well at this, although there was some running around and veering all over the place on a couple of his sends. We worked in the grass, something we haven't done with gloves before, and I think the white glove in the green grass was a helpful contrast.
Go-outs were also icky. I tried sending him to ring gating without a stanchion in the middle, and he ran around the guides to bop the stanchion. I'm not sure why he's doing that since he's never been trained to target the stanchion, only what's directly in front of him between the chute. I also started using jump bars instead of the broad jump and that had him very confused, so we had to start all over from the beginning, standing just at the edge of the chute like we did when we started working on this behavior in, oh, January. ARGH!
Teagan had a decent session. She's up to a 2.5 minute out-of-sight sit, and about a 3-minute out-of-sight down. We did two sits today, and I put Basil out there with her to see if that would help...I also thought it couldn't hurt to keep his out-of-sight stays in shape in case we ever decide to play in Open again.
We did some work on the high jump and the DOR, and also the broad jump. She's making nice progress.
