The snow melted and the sun was shining for a short while and we decided to take full advantage of it. And besides, I wanted to make sure Sia was well exercised before our outing today. If she is not contending with excessive energy when we are out and about or in a training session, she has more opportunities for success. If she has more opportunities for success she will learn more quickly. Imagine if I was only able to reward her once or twice for success during a session as opposed to twenty to thirty times? It would take me much longer to train her.
She was happy to see her old friend Kravitz. They get along really well!
And she met a new friend, Mitch, who was her for a short time until a volunteer came by to get him.
A lot of times she stayed on the outside of their play groups. Labs tend to have a somewhat unique way of playing that other dogs don't always understand. But she was happy to sit by and watch and periodically join in.
Funny girl, she seemed to be going against traffic at times but she sure had a good time!
On our outing I spent some time right outside the car just working on attention work and response to easy commands like sit. There are a lot of new sights, people and animals around so it takes her a minute to get acclimated. I want to make sure she is well tuned into me before we go into the store. Again, I want as many successes as I can get in this session. This also helps her want to learn (no one likes to do something if they always get it wrong).
When we first got into the store, there were other people and, more importantly, other dogs inside. We spent some time right inside the door far away from the distractions working on attention. When she was clearly more interested in me than everything else, we moved in a little closer. We did this several times until we were 10 feet away from other dogs and she was still being attentive to me.
Sometimes we get caught off guard by a distraction like when we left the store. Outside was a small dog tied up on the sidewalk. We had to walk past her to get to the car but I don't want Sia to pull or get ahead of me. First off, when she got ahead of me when she first saw the dog, I stopped. Ideally I would have seen the dog first and started to get her attention on me before she got distracted. But life doesn't always happen that way. So now that I had stopped, she knew the only way to get me to move forward was to return to me. I know at this point, there are a couple of things I need to do in order to get past this distraction successfully. I am going to move Sia to my left side so she is farther away from the distraction. I'm also going to walk as far away from the distraction as I can. Before we get to the distraction, I increase my rate of reinforcement and give rewards for proper positioning and attention more frequently. If she starts to get ahead of me, I can turn around and start walking until she has caught up with me and then try it again. I ended up only doing this once before we successfully walked past the little dog. Yea! Big party (lots of praise) for that!!
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