This is Zebu, a half German Shepherd half Belgian Malinois playing the obedience food game with me. I recently switched him to french commands to keep his sport commands pure and separated from casual obedience so you still see the abbreviated luring gestures to get him to position quickly and clearly.
I am sacrificing some accuracy for energy. I am trying to be as accurate as I can but the focus in this case is making things quick and fun to keep the dog focused on the task at hand for a fairly long amount of time for a puppy. As a result I marked hovers sometimes because it looked down from my angle, so it's always good to tape these kinds of things from another angle to catch it. I don't typically work in circles quite so much but I wanted to keep it in frame and keep him stable on the rug, so depending on which hand I load up with and feed with I trade off which direction we make the circles in to keep him balanced and not favoring one particular side.
This kind of thing is the kind of training you would see from trainers like Michael Ellis. Instead of boring slow paced drills that make the dog want to check out it gets turned into a game that focuses on engagement first and foremost, and then the other behaviors second. He is so excited to play when he knows it is coming he gets a little malinuts at the start.
Really nice session. You have good timing and mechanics. Not dropping food all over the floor takes some practice when loading your hands up. Nice looking dog too. Thanks for posting!
Other than the hovers (which are really hard to see from the handler perspective), all I see to work on is being careful of your reward hand on the recall. Sometimes it is out and in motion before you mark. I always catch little things when I video myself.
Great energized training/play session. He seems like lot of dog but he's very focussed and clearly enjoying himself. I found it instructional. Thanks for sharing.
When he's off screen he's going for a thrown piece of kibble.
Since then he's moved on to toy so we don't play that game anymore. He is now almost a year old. I'll go for an MR1 on him but i don't know if he has the drive to move past that. He is missing an edginess and explosiveness to his bite work that will make going beyond that difficult. Its a bit of a shame as he is super easy to train. He learned contact heeling with distraction in 2 weeks training 1 session a day. I continue to focus on him but I've already started searching for "the one."
The idea behind it is to make training like a fun game instead of a drill. In boring repetitive drills young dogs have a tendency to "check out". This happens for a variety of reasons such as too much of a time gap between cues markers and rewards or the dog isn't super into your reward or something in the environment is more entertaining at that moment.
So to combat that everything happens quickly. The instant the dog performs a behavior (and sometimes before as some of you have noticed *oops*) the reward marker is given and the food comes out in random amounts and in a way where the dog has to chase it down to obtain it like if we were playing with a toy. The dog stays focused because rewards come quickly and with an event.
Being focused on you for longer time periods conditions a younger dog to focus on the handler. Eventually when the dog is older you can just punish a lapse in attention to the task at hand when the dog knows he is supposed to be in work mode.
No. My mentor/buddy/boss did. To go through all those classes at the time was 20k or more of an investment so sadly it isn't one of those things that is open to everyone. I was pointed his way by Cindy Rhodes from leerburg. The world of mondioring is a small one.
Ive gotten fairly lucky in getting quality education on the cheap. When you train pets all day to make the mondio happen you're basically in the lab all day learning new things each dog has to teach you.
Have you started fading him off rewards for obedience work? If so how is it going? Awesome video.
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