It's Clicked!

Tonight, Bran and I went to the first of our clicker training classes with Jacob and Casey, Sophie and Moss.

Although I'm a bit more experienced with clicker training, you all know what I've been going through with Bran so thought it couldn't hurt to take him along. Plus I've been promising to teach the kids and this seemed like an easy way to shift the responsibility of that on to somebody else ;o) I have given them a few brief lessons and the puppies have been introduced to clickers and done a little training with them so there were no big surprises tonight.

I was expecting great things of Casey because she is a little firecracker when it comes to training and picks everything up almost as you're showing her what to do. I did wonder if the distractions of being in a strange place with strange people and other dogs would distract her, but no - she was incredibly fast and it was lovely to see the strong bond she has with Jacob at work. The pair of them had to get up and do a demonstration at one point and they were just brill :o)

Sophie, like me, has to work a little harder to get a good response from her dog and she has to repeat things several times with Moss to get a solid response, but he was very good tonight too :o)

Firstly, Jo brought in her two dogs to give us a demonstration whilst our dogs waited in the car. Unfortunately, her dobermann youngster boy was somewhat more interested in the new people who smelled of yummy treats than what his mum was telling him, so Jo's little terrier cross boy came out but her dobe was far too excited in what was going on and bulldozed through the session. It was actually quite lovely and refreshing to see a trainer's dogs misbehave a little just through being young and excited :oD

We were then separated out to prime our clickers, which we've already done, so was quite a fast process, although it was good to be getting faster response times from the dogs.

We then had to practise timing by clicking for commands that the dogs already knew but through using hand signals rather than verbal commands. I was really surprised to see how much faster Bran responded when he knew that I had the clicker compared to doing the silent training at last week's class. Finally, I may have found the way to get faster downs and more solid stands out of him!

We then had to start shaping the dogs to touch our hands with their noses. I did take a deep breath as this was explained because it was exactly this behaviour that I was trying to train Bran with the clicker when I had my Facebook meltdown and prompted Morag to call to talk through the options.

Before we got the chance to try it for ourselves, Jo took Bran up as demonstration dog. He did it brilliantly and with a big waggy tail, pricked ears and alert face!! The complete opposite to the dropped shoulders, flat ears, dull face and total avoidance of physical contact that I'd got last time around with this behaviour! What a long way he's come in such a short space of time :o)

We then did the hand targetting ourselves and he was fab, although did get a bit bored after being stuffed full of liver cake towards the end so I had to get up and move him to a different place and throw in a few other commands to regain his attention.

Our homework is to continue the hand targetting and to introduce something else for them to target. I did think about being sneaky and using his mat, but have decided to be good and find something small and easily portable for him to target.

All in all, I am mightily proud of my little pack tonight :oD