I've started Shirley Chong's retrieve tonight. We did it with his evening meal of raw mince. I fed him a teaspoon of mince for each treat. I had been wondering how to get round clicker training and him beig BARF fed. This seemed to work really nicely. He was being really careful with his taking of the meat. Another nice touch is that it hasn't been a freebie meal. Each bit of that 445g of meat was hand fed and he was really into doing the training too as it's a high level food.
He quickly moved on from looking, nose bumping to teeth touching and then by the end or taking the bit of his blue chew toy in his mouth. He never chews that toy anyway, so might as well get some use out of it! I don't have a dumbell for him yet, but the chewtoy I'm using is kind of dumbell shaped.
I want to teach him the formal retrieve as he's a little monkey when we're outside and never brings objects back. He claims ownership and runs around with them. I've been advised to stop this and so now have moved on to teaching a formal retrieve. Plan is to do another session late tonight or perhaps in the morning with me holding it in my hand again before hopefully moving on to placing the object on the floor.
The retrieve is also recommended by Jean Donaldson in her excellent book on resource guarding, Mine! I'm going to do more little structured sessions at home now the nights have drawn in. We've moved on to one big walk late morning/lunchtime. Then home for snoozing. So I reckon a nice session in the early morning will fit nicely with this. Seems like not enough hours in the day to fit everything in with walking, snoozing, playing and eating!
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