Back up! Cha-cha-cha~

So we didn’t really do very well with the Back up trick in the last post. But we’re slightly better at it this week.

But before I get started on that, I have to say that I recently read on a blog somewhere that groomers, vets, etc have every opportunity to make the grooming, vet experience less scary for the dog but this doesn’t seem to happen that much. Not in action and not in the posters, etc that these establishments have on the wall.

But as people with blogs, we have every opportunity to do that. So yah, here’s a picture of me treating Donna for stepping backwards ;) because rewarding is part of making the training a positive and fun experience for the dog! :D

That’s bits of cooked chicken she is taken from my hand.

I admit, I didn’t really have photos of me treating her for the previous training posts. In fact, Kyla demanded to see the treat to make sure that Donna is not cheated of it! LOL

We’re still not very good with backing up. And unfortunately, I am right-handed, and that means I favour working with Donna on my  right side. The result, of course, is that she is responding to walking backwards on my right side, and has some difficulty doing the same on the left. My fault. But that’s ok, we’ll just continue to work on the left side.

In any case, nowadays we seem to be doing some sort of cha-cha to get her to walk backwards. Observe:

While she no longer sits as much, she hasn’t really grasped that “Back” = take step(s) backwards. So if I were stationary and then walk back, she may try to turn around and sit and stare at me. So I keep having to step front and step back and somehow she follows my motion. I guess, I’m hoping that when we do that enough times, she’ll start associating “Back” with stepping back and not step forward and step back. Haha. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve stopped luring her with a treat, unless she doesn’t respond since I don’t really want her to take steps backwards with her nose following the treat. This makes her either turn to the side towards the treat and making a U-turn rather than walking backwards, or walking backwards awkwardly with her nose pointing to the floor. Either way, I’m not sure how she could build the association to the action if she was so overly fixated on the treat all the time. So once, she starts to respond to visual cues, I faded the lure and only show her the treat when she does the action correctly instead. Does that make sense?

So now, we’re basically trying to correct the following:

• dog walking backwards on the left too
• dog walking backwards in a straight line and not having the butt curving in and tripping the human
• dog walking backwards from being stationary, rather than no response
• maybe dog dancing to cha-cha music, haha! 

So we started on this next trick to build her rear end awareness – Stepping up and Pivoting. Stepping up is not a problem for Donna, she easily got this in one session. But the pivoting is quite impossible at the moment so I guess this dog has absolutely no rear-end awareness, huh? So I’ll just have to keep trying to lure her to pivot. Hah!