Day 14 is about targeting.
It’s funny because I didn’t know this would be in the course, but it’s exactly what we’ve been working on lately. I have signed up for a competition in scent detection and therefore I have been focusing on that for a bit. I’m a lot of days behind on the course, but I’m working on it in my pace.
Anyway, this was interesting, because the small detail of the reward delivery made quite a big difference in the duration of the indication. I’m very happy about this since I’ve been struggling for a while. Just the fact of taking away the marker signal and making sure of the reward placement being at the right place, I made quite some progress. She has managed to get to 10 sec before, but just randomly. Now it felt like we could move a bit forward and indicate on smaller pieces (that’s a quite big step for us since she’s always loved taking it in her mouth).
However, I noticed yesterday when I was training detection work that she can indicate in the wrong place, and that has not happened before. So I believe I have to be more careful with her always sniffing before indication to get a reward.
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Pros
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Cons
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My job in this session
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Lower difficulty
When I noticed that she did wrong twice in a row I stopped the session and went back to the step before (indicating a bigger piece of kong), and it seems to have worked since she did better in the session after.
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Keeping to criteria
I only rewarded when she kept to criteria of focusing. Ignored when she looked at me, but then caught the return pretty fast. I hope she understood.
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Reward placement
Sometimes I'm really bad at throwing. Need practice.
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Cues
As usual I can't keep my cues right. "Kom" means come to me, while "Häråt" means "come around here" but they we're used in the wrong way in this session.