Liesje
Posted : 3/9/2011 8:34:23 PM
Maxs Mom
I am new to obedience for the show ring, I recently attended a Bridget Carlsen seminar. She says never correct the dog in heel position. I realize you are talking about reinforcement not correction, but her insight I thought was interesting. She said heeling is boring, and you do not want to discourage anything in the heel position. She suggested if your dog is lagging or whatever you feel you need to correct, you break heel position (she would get in front of her dog) correct it for the bad behavior then set the dog into a behavior to encourage proper heeling, (spinning or whatever) then the dog would move into a proper heel, do 3-4 steps, release and reward for GOOD behavior. I found her method very encouraging to the dogs. She is all about motivation, which especially for Teddi is IMPORTANT.
This is sort of how I work it with Nikon. What most people would think of as a physical correction doesn't really compute, it's just nagging to him. If I want to correct him, I have to let him make a real mistake (like I make a turn and he's not paying attention) and give him a correction, not just a nag. Constant nagging when the dog is only slightly flat, slightly lagging, etc does not seem productive at all. But, this is for competition heeling, not working with shelter dogs. With the shelter dogs, we used the "be a tree" method and that's about it, couldn't really use treats and corrections of any kind weren't appropriate since we didn't know what kind of dog we were dealing with.
We also do perch work like in Anne's video. What the girl demonstrates in the video is standard for how I train it. My dogs need to understand heel/fuss as the position, not the movement. They learn to find heel from anywhere. It is really important for the pivots and side-steps in Rally.
With a puppy like Pan, I'm doing the perch work, training the dog to find heel, and doing the movement (where I'm walking around with the dog heeling). For the last part, I am feeding the dog as I go. My goal here is not necessarily for this method to train the heeling, but for the dog to develop the physical conditioning and "muscle memory" for the correct position for a prancy heel with a lot of collecting in the rear. This style is not at all natural to any dog especially a German shepherd. Once the puppy is proficient with the perch work and finding heel from anywhere, we start adding the movement/walking in heel position and by then the puppy has done enough luring in that position to move how I want. About the time the dog is ready for that transition, I'm changing from food reward to a toy reward for heeling sequences. Pan is 6 months and still getting all food rewards.