Making the most of a very bright puppy

Just keep training fun for him, & resist the temptation to push him too hard, too fast.

Dogs like Erik are so fun to work with because, training wise, there is no limit to what you can teach them. 

Have fun with it!

 Canine freestyle????

Hi

I would do what i do with my very bright dogs, enjoy them very much and do as much as i can with them. 

 With Luci i am doing TSD tracking. (Tracking and search dog ), UD obedience , AD,JD level agility and am thinking how to do freestyle and DWD with her. She is a hoot.

Right now is the time to teach the basics of some of the more advanced excercises. It is way easier now.

 Don't let the drearies get to you.

Just as in human terms some people are really happy doing just one thing and trying hard to get that right, well some dogs do like doing that,but many dont.

  The drearies will say 

Train just one thing at a time ( i often train three or four things but with clear end of excercise signals)

They wont like obedince after you have done tracking/agility oh dear....... I have done all three with just a few minutes break between them...

With Sam, well we are dong obedience and tracking and  agility . we do several excercises and keep it happy and fast.

Dont be a heeling bore to your dogs. Develop it along with all the other stuff. 

To be really honest, I would avoid most Aussie dog clubs like the plague. They are fine for socialisation but are often the last bastion of the often (very) mediocre.  There are some good ones but they are few and far between.

 Learn how to proof and how to play and have fun...

He's definitely not into working on just one thing at a time. He likes to learn tricks. He's happy to work on basic stuff like focus and stays and downs, but he brightens considerably when we do something a little more involved. So I'm just doing short sessions on the boring stuff and using the fun stuff as a break or to finish up a training session.

He's so much fun!

I've been thinking of taking him to a club, pO, but certainly not the local one. I feel like he could do with the socialisation, especially without my other dog. I think I would be driving for an hour to find a semi-decent one, though.

From my experience, I would say, encourage him to be as "operant" and "proactive" as possible, as long as possible!  SO MUCH EASIER to train a proactive dog!!

Sometimes I take a break from the intense Schutzund training and just do silly stuff with Nikon.  A few weeks ago I taught him to play dead (I say "BANG" and make my hand like a gun and he flops on his side).  Last weekend I taught him to spin repeatedly in tight circles until he falls over dizzy. 

 Sometimes I will just sit with one of my dogs (by themselves) and let them determine the direction of training. Dogs that love clicker training will throw out tons of behaviors. The challenge can be by selecting the tiniest behavior then just going with it to see what comes next.

 For example, I taught Neiko to stick his tongue out just by clicking whenever he did a tongue flick during a free shaping lesson. It took him a while to catch on to that one because he was used to be clicking for more obvious movements. So he'd throw his "back up" behavior, but at the same time he'd flick his tongue because he was trying to figure out what would get him the reward (kind of like a human scratching their head..hmm). So, he had to figure out it was the tongue lick and not any other movement that actually got him the reward. That was a lot of fun to train and I felt really great that we worked out such a hard trick together!

With Abbie, we just free shaped "head down" and "shake your head no" just watching what behaviors she throws and selecting one to develop. 

The sky is the limit with dogs like this. I love training this way. It's soooooo much more fun than traditional methods.

I love to do hunt and seek with my pits. I own about 10 kongs...various shapes, sizes, and such...and love to put a little schmear of peanut butter in each one of them and hide them around our back yard.  We don't have a huge yard, but I'll even put them in a crook of a tree, or things like that.  I never put them in the same place if I can avoid it for a week or so.  They just LOVE hunting.  I say "go hunt"  "go bring it to mommy" and they love to search and find them all over.  It's a good cheap thing to do...a friend of mine uses plastic water bottles with a little treat in it to hide around the yard. Especially this time of year under leaf piles and such is a lot of fun.  You might like that.  And also doing any of his tricks in places like Petsmart or Petco, or at the dogpark with distractions is GREAT!