Too hot, let's swim!

I took Grey down to the river today in the marshes. It was hot and I thought he'd love a swim. After a bit of nervousness initially, he got the hang of having to jump into deep water.  It's amazing to think he couldn't swim until last summer. Very quickly he was jumping in with a big splash and would have kept going and going. He had a mad charge about when the train went by in the distance. It would be great if I could work out a way to stop him doing that. He goes full pelt along a path out of sight and has a look of madness for a few minutes.

Here's a video of hairy boy doing water retrieves.

 

Our terrible retrieve

Ho ho ho, here's Grey and me showing how not to do a retrieve and how much he loves to run away with his prize! Was a lovely day though.

Training / retrieve

We've done a couple of indoor sessions on training a retrieve from Helen Phillips' Clicker Gundog book. The object is placed in a basket at my feet. He's CT for increasing contact with the object, in this case his Orbee bone. By the end of session one he was making contact with his teeth. And by session two he'd got to lifting the bone up and back down into the basket. Now starting to shape his paws out of the basket and will move towards having the object on the outside of the basket for it to be replaced into it to get paid.

Training / The Retrieve / Session 1

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!