Treibball Training Session #3

Today was our third Treibball training session. We started some directionals for learning to go around and behind the balls. I used 4 small cones on the ground in a square to give the dogs something about ball height (for now, it's a short ball) to work on going around. Both had a little difficulty with this. Penny was so excited to start that she wasn't focusing very well. She kept jumping up and nose bumping my treat pouch. She soon settled down a bit and with some guidance of VERY broad body and hand gestures she started to learn how to go around the cones from both the left and the right. Malcolm had a lot more trouble in the beginning. He kept wanting to pick up and retrieve the cones. Being that he's a service dog and one of his primary tasks is to retrieve, I couldn't really fault him. But we worked through it and he ended up doing a few decent go arounds in each direction. With both dogs we quit on a good note.

Then we went to working with nose nudging the ball. Again, had some tricky spots there today too. Clicker training is a wonderful thing. But when you have smart dogs it can actually be difficult if you aren't crystal clear on your criteria. I realized I'd been rewarding Penny for moving in front of the ball after she nose nudged it. This made it difficult to try to move to the next level of multiple nose nudges for each click. So we had some cleaning up to do on that. I worked on tossing her reward treat behind her for a bit and then only rewarding when she stayed behind the ball. She really started to get it towards the end, so we stopped while we were ahead.

With Malcolm, I realized that I had been rewarding him for nose nudges that were off to the side of the ball, rather than in the center. He was doing some good hard pushes, but they were sending the ball flying off to the side, rather than directly towards me. So we had to back up a bit and work on nose nudge placement. We lost the hard nudges and are back to softer ones, but we can get the hard ones back eventually. We ended on a decent note. I was starting to get fatigued and I could feel my heart rate was way up, though I forgot to wear my new FitBit during the session so I don't know how high it got. The barometric pressure is down a bit and that leads to flares of my chronic health issues. I'm probably gonna flare after this session, though hopefully not too badly.

Not a bad session, but not a great one either. We'll just keep plugging along and trying different techniques as the dogs and I learn this together. :-) I'm going to look for some more videos on YouTube to see if I can learn some better techniques.

Did you have any difficult spots in training this week? Please feel free to share in the comments below.