Training Stuff
Today was a pretty good day from Faith's point of view. I only had one class this morning, and after coming home and having an extravagant and bizarre lunch with Kristen to celebrate our first day of school, we took Faith and Joey to the barn for a little exercise. The heat didn't faze Faith too much, but Joey didn't feel much like playing after the initial mad dashes. I played Frisbee with Faith until we got too hot, although Joey kept stealing the Frisbee and refusing to give it back.
After that it was nearly time for Kristen's afternoon classes. Faith and I went with her to campus to show her where her building was. It was good experience for Faith because our walk was very crowded with students. She behaved politely, though. Maybe it's because she knows she's a Good Citizen now. Probably it was because it was too hot to jump on people.
We walked around campus a bit after Kristen's class started, and then we escaped to my nice air-conditioned car. Then it was training time! We've started working on scent discrimination! Maybe one day in the far-off future we'll have some competitive obedience experience and Faith will actually need to be able to identify and retrieve an item with the most human scent. In the meantime, it's a fun game and training exercise for her. I'm not entirely sure how to go about training this, but so far I've been using napkins as scent articles. I put a couple of drops of vanilla on one of the napkins. Then I let Faith sniff the vanilla one and arranged the two napkins on the floor. At first she got treats when she nosed the scented one. I also tried to incorporate picking the scented one up, but I've decided that I'm pushing too much with that. Anyway, I think she's really starting to get the idea that she has to find the smelly napkin! I also used Worcestershire sauce for scent.
We also practiced some flyball with Joey tied next to the box. He refused to be very interesting, though, so Faith didn't have that much of a distraction to ignore.
After that it was nearly time for Kristen's afternoon classes. Faith and I went with her to campus to show her where her building was. It was good experience for Faith because our walk was very crowded with students. She behaved politely, though. Maybe it's because she knows she's a Good Citizen now. Probably it was because it was too hot to jump on people.
We walked around campus a bit after Kristen's class started, and then we escaped to my nice air-conditioned car. Then it was training time! We've started working on scent discrimination! Maybe one day in the far-off future we'll have some competitive obedience experience and Faith will actually need to be able to identify and retrieve an item with the most human scent. In the meantime, it's a fun game and training exercise for her. I'm not entirely sure how to go about training this, but so far I've been using napkins as scent articles. I put a couple of drops of vanilla on one of the napkins. Then I let Faith sniff the vanilla one and arranged the two napkins on the floor. At first she got treats when she nosed the scented one. I also tried to incorporate picking the scented one up, but I've decided that I'm pushing too much with that. Anyway, I think she's really starting to get the idea that she has to find the smelly napkin! I also used Worcestershire sauce for scent.
We also practiced some flyball with Joey tied next to the box. He refused to be very interesting, though, so Faith didn't have that much of a distraction to ignore.