Clean Run - February 2018 - 20

back legs came underneath them. Collection is part of the reason I wait for
maturity before starting any training
on equipment, forcing a dog to collect through use of cavaletti or tightly
spaced jumps is damaging for a young
body that lacks core strength.
I have been told many times that a nose
touch enables a weight shift to the rear,
but in fact, it does the opposite; your
dog's head is the heaviest part of his
body and when his head is forward, his
center of gravity is forward too.

Targeting Three Ways
For back-foot targeting I initially used a
PVC pipe box with a mat in the middle.
He didn't much like the box although it
did help him with awareness of his feet.
Shady's mat is made of the non-slip
stuff you put under rugs and on shelves
to prevent slipping. It's cheap, easily available, soft to touch, and can be
cut easily to any size. I deconstructed
the box fairly quickly until we were left
with just the mat. I don't like big obvi-

ous targets that are hard to fade; a mat
is much more discreet than a PVC box.
We started the month walking towards
Shady's back-foot target, the mat, rewarding in place and then rewarding
the release.
We moved on to throwing the toy forward whilst Shady was approaching the
target and then releasing him from the
mat out to the toy. From there I went to
a quick release and then started to reward a moving hit. If he stopped when
he hit it the mat, I reset him to try again.
We worked both a full sendaway and a
recall to the mat, and we worked the
approach at a run. He was very successful and very happy about it. Like most
people, Shady loves rehearsing skills
he fully understands. My feeling is that
he needed to finish growing to make
the connection with his back feet solid.
The work we'd done up until this point
helped, but the maturity was the overriding factor in achieving success.
I then added the target to a short training plank and Shady gave me that look.

So I took it indoors (because it's raining!) and worked it up from the beginning again. He was suspicious at first,
but soon got the idea and happily went
out to slap his huge hairy back feet on
the end of the plank. I'm going to leave
the plank where it is until I'm sure he's
happy with it, then I'll move the plank
to different locations indoors (because
it's still raining) to make sure it's not the
location that he's associating with the
behavior. There is no rush here. I'm not
at all interested in being able to make
youngest dog claims, I'm looking at motivation. Shady needs to love doing this
behavior, as it's not easy at speed, especially for a dog of his size.
His reward is a toy, at the moment it's
either in my hand or thrown, but as we
progress it will be placed out. I did try
him with the Treat & Train, but he didn't
like it at all. It's important to remember
that the idea of reward is to build behavior, as long as the behavior is building it doesn't much matter how you accomplish it.

A: Shady walks back and puts his feet on the mat which is wrapped around a short training plank. B: Shady target back right
C: Shady habitually uses his back left foot to target with so I go to a lot of trouble to make sure he can also use his back right
foot. To get the behavior, I put him in a stand next to the board (board on his right) and then cue him to hit it.

Once I'm sure that Shady knows he's
supposed to put his back feet on the
target, I started sending him around a
chair and along the short plank so that
he moving forward to his target rather
than from the side or backing into it.

Clean Run | February 18

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