Wednesday 21 May 2008

I'm such a rubbish trainer!!! Grrr!!

Even more frustrated now... I'm sure people have areas they find easier to train in than others. I find teaching heelwork easy... and teaching scent to a dog with no brains... about as hard as you can get!! I just CAN'T get her to understand what she's meant to be doing!

We have gone back to not putting the right cloth down until she's sniffed all the cloths, as in the ring she tends to sniff 6 or 7 then make a snapshot decision that the decoy (if she hasn't yet gone over the right cloth) will do. She will ignore the decoy 1st time round, but if she hasn't found the right one on the 2nd time round she'll just grab the decoy. You could have 3 decoys, and she'd ignore them all the first time round, but the next time it could be any of the three. So I don't quite know how to progress with her?? She is quite hard to teach in that she doesn't grasp anything quickly, and she doesn't 'link' what she's doing with anything else, so I think somehow I've taught her that scent has to be done in under 10 seconds, not that she can take as long as she wants as long as she finds the right one. It's so frustrating as it's the only thing really holding her back now, and the more frustrating thing is I have no idea how to put it right!!

2 comments:

ClaireP said...

Ever thought she's 'matching' the decoys 2nd time round! De-er!! LOL.......

Char said...

Ive been thinking about what u said, she SO isnt! Lol. Well she may match it, but she doesn't want to bring it in, where as when she gets the right one she zooms in... so she picks the decoy up knowing full well its not the right one, she just ain't brave enough to keep looking.

Can Tia have a few of Indy's brain cells pleeeease?