Tessa Studying Weave Poles

[Root Beer]

And I do mean studying!! I love this dog. She is, by far, the most interesting dog I have had the privilege of working with!

 

 

 

This has been a long work in progress (8 Weeks). In our foundation class, weaves are typically introduced with wires. Tessa was afraid of the wires. No way was she going into that channel of wires. So, we started with a 2 X 2 and shaped her interaction with it. Then I shaped the entry and the basic weave motion off of both sides. Once she had that down, we used two 2 X 2's and repeated the process, moving her from one 2 X 2 to the other.

 

From there, she quickly moved to a set of six unwired poles. That was where she absolutely fell in love with the process of learning weaves!! I continued to shape, using a clicker and placing the treat on the ground.

 

Once she could weave six without a reward in between, I started teaching her wires. She will have to weave on poles with wires because sometimes in class we have wires on the poles. If I had to, I could ask to have them removed every time, but Tessa is perfectly capable of learning to deal with things like this, so I taught her.

 

I put a single wire on a set of six poles at the entry and reshaped the first weave. She quickly saw that whether the wire was there or not, she was to do the same thing. From there she just got it. In class that week there was a set of 6 poles with wires and she had no issue. This week there were 12, and this video is where we are right now.

 

She is still in the process of thinking her way through this exercise. She is starting to understand that she is to weave continuously. Once she gets that idea, we will start to work up some speed.

 

Part of what I love most about Tessa is going through training processes like this. I have to think outside the box to make it work for her. Once I make it do-able, she's completely on board. And she's ready to move on when she's darn good and ready. But she always reaches the point where she is ready - usually much sooner than I would have thought!!

 

She is graduating from Foundation to a Beginner class. At this rate, she will be going to her first CPE trials this coming spring. No need to wait on weaves or teeter. She will be starting in Level 3!!!

[gcv-border]

Heck, I am afraid of the wires too. I don't blame Tessa for her attitude towards the wires. I am glad she is progressing. It looks like she is really trying hard. What a good girl.

 

Is Tessa a dog that lacks confidence? Sorry, but I can not remember from your previous posts.

 

Jovi

[Root Beer]

Heck, I am afraid of the wires too. I don't blame Tessa for her attitude towards the wires. I am glad she is progressing. It looks like she is really trying hard. What a good girl.

 

Is Tessa a dog that lacks confidence? Sorry, but I can not remember from your previous posts.

 

Jovi

 

Tessa was a completely shut down stray, who had alluded Animal Control for 3 months, but was eventually caught and ended up in a shelter. I was her foster home for Glen Highland Farm, but after a few weeks we decided to adopt her. We needed a fifth dog like we needed hole in the head, but it was clear she was meant for us. She didn't trust us at all when we decided to adopt her, but she liked our dogs and found our house to be a safe place. That was it.

 

She was afraid of anything and everything at first. Except the other dogs. She was never afraid of them and loved them from the start. They helped her find her first shreds of confidence.

 

I've never seen a dog as afraid as she was. On her first day here, if I moved even an inch, she startled! Thankfully no fear aggression - her fear made her shrink down into herself. In her early pictures she looks smaller. She's a compact girl, but she looks even smaller than she really was because she was making herself "small".

 

Her greatest fear was of enclosed places. No crates for her. She would run if she even heard the metal rattle a little. No way was she going into the bathroom. At first doors into and out of the house were a problem, but she quickly learned to merge herself into the group of dogs to get through them. She was OK in a room as long as it was a regular sized room.

 

She had one goal in life back then - survival. She was like a wild animal in a lot of ways. She would freeze when she was afraid, and then spring away when she felt she needed to. It was very interesting.

 

Gradually, gradually, gradually, she came to trust me. Her first training session consisted of me giving her a treat and her taking it, and running out of the room!! To say she has come far from that day is an understatement!!

 

The first time I introduced her to a jump, I had no bar on it, and my goal was just to get her to cross through the uprights. At first I dropped treats near it. She ate them, ran out, and came back. Soon I dropped treats near the uprights. She ate them, ran out, and came back. Then I placed a treat so she had to put her head through the uprights to get it. She did it, ran out a few times, but soon was to the point where she was through, all but her back legs, and she would streeeeeeetch forward to get the treat.

 

No matter how many times she ran out, she always came back. That's when I was hooked!!

 

Her temperament is what I've always wanted. She has learned a lot of fear, but as she overcomes it, she really gets past it. She is very much unlike Dean and Speedy in that way. They have real phobias and a dog doesn't just get over those. Tessa just has to learn that something is safe and she finds confidence in a big way. She is super smart, eager to learn and work, and rock solid once she understands something.

 

She started training classes last January and has made tons of progress. She loves to go to training and she has learned so much. She had to learn to learn before she could really get into learning behaviors. She had to learn to follow a lure, what a reinforcer meant, what the click meant (we had to go from tongue click to iClick to regular clicker for that, all over the course of months), and that it was OK to be separated from the other dogs to go to class. But now she is past all of that and she is starting to learn Agility, and Freestyle, and Rally moves.

 

So, the weave wires presented a challenge because they formed an enclosed channel. She has come very far with her fear of small places. She actually goes into a portable crate with an open top now and she loves to relax in there during class. She is getting better with tunnels. And doesn't it figure - she adores the chute!! She is intrigued by the fact that it "disappears" after she runs through it!

 

So, once she understood the channel formed by the weave wires, she started to enjoy the weaves with the wires!!

 

Does she lack confidence? Compared to a year ago, no! Her confidence has skyrocketed. Compared to most dogs, yes. She's getting there, though. A lot of CU, slow, slow, slow training, and a lot of fun life experiences have taken her a long, long way from the dog she was when I met her. She still has a little of the wild animal in her, but for the most part she has transformed nicely back to a well cared for pet.

 

Her one year anniversaries are coming up soon and I'm working on putting together some video of her from the year.

 

I've posted a few photos of her and I've talked about her a little, but I really haven't said a lot about Tessa. Like Tessa, I've been taking this experience in and living it and processing it as we go. It has been like nothing else I've ever done. It's only now that we are doing video-able things like weave poles. It feels good to be at this point.

[rushdoggie]

Awesome.

 

My 2x2 weave training is not going well, and I am sure its all handler error, but I don't have anyone handy to help me who uses 2x2.

 

She sure is a cutie.

[Root Beer]

Awesome.

 

My 2x2 weave training is not going well, and I am sure its all handler error, but I don't have anyone handy to help me who uses 2x2.

 

She sure is a cutie.

 

I definitely didn't follow Susan's protocol for 2 X 2's with Tessa. She isn't toy motivated at all, she is only now just getting to the point where I can start to rev her up a little with verbal "revving", and I used a clicker. I just shaped her forward movement through the 2 poles with a clicker. I stayed still, but near it, after the first couple of reps. I did toss the treat on the floor out in front of her. Once she was doing that willingly, I started to move off. I used the placement of my feet to indicate the angle that I wanted her to move and she picked up on that quickly and was soon doing an "entry" off of both sides.

 

Even though I stared with a 2 X 2, I'd say I more shaped the six poles than used a 2 X 2 training process. I know that's a shaping process, too, but this focused a lot less on her motion and more on her just understanding where she was going.

 

This worked well with her. I don't think the way that Susan does it in her DVD would have worked with Tessa at all. It would have made her nervous and she needs more time to think and process what she is doing.

 

Thanks.

[rushdoggie]

Argos is very toy motivated, so that not the issue. I somehow shaped him to take the first pole on his right instead of his left and no matter how much time I spend going back to the "around the clock" with only 2 poles he will offer the 1st pole on the right 15 times for every 1st pole on the left, and so he shuts down (he is very soft) because he doesn't understand why he is not getting c/t for going through the poles.

 

So I put up a barrier so I could help him succeed and he could get a bunch right, and first he kept running into it and knocking it down rather than go the other way and then once I lured him to not run into it, he went the right way but as soon as I removed it he went back to first pole on the right behavior.

 

Whats funny, is I take a lesson every 2 weeks and he has run the set of chicken wire cage poles and LOVED them, in fact when he is insecure or stressed he will go over and do the weave pole cage on his own. I think he will LOVE weaving once he figures it out.

 

But then at class we tried to progress to the wired set and he freaked out and could not figure them out at all.

[gcv-border]

Thanks for Tessa's story. She HAS come a really long way.

 

Just as a point of interest: I heard Silvia Trkman explain how she trains her dogs for weaves - using channel weaves. She likes this method because she feels it doesn't slow them down like some other training techniques (in her opinion. I don't know enough to be able to compare.) AND she thinks it really helps the dogs with low confidence levels to speed up and enjoy. It is based on a toy/ball-motivated dog so it might not work with Tessa. Will she chase after a bait bag?

 

 

Jovi

[Root Beer]

Just as a point of interest: I heard Silvia Trkman explain how she trains her dogs for weaves - using channel weaves. She likes this method because she feels it doesn't slow them down like some other training techniques (in her opinion. I don't know enough to be able to compare.) AND she thinks it really helps the dogs with low confidence levels to speed up and enjoy. It is based on a toy/ball-motivated dog so it might not work with Tessa. Will she chase after a bait bag?

 

She won't chase a bait bag. It doesn't make sense to her. She will chase a thrown treat. That's how she learned to spring over the jump and it's really pretty.

[Root Beer]

Argos is very toy motivated, so that not the issue. I somehow shaped him to take the first pole on his right instead of his left and no matter how much time I spend going back to the "around the clock" with only 2 poles he will offer the 1st pole on the right 15 times for every 1st pole on the left, and so he shuts down (he is very soft) because he doesn't understand why he is not getting c/t for going through the poles.

 

So I put up a barrier so I could help him succeed and he could get a bunch right, and first he kept running into it and knocking it down rather than go the other way and then once I lured him to not run into it, he went the right way but as soon as I removed it he went back to first pole on the right behavior.

 

Whats funny, is I take a lesson every 2 weeks and he has run the set of chicken wire cage poles and LOVED them, in fact when he is insecure or stressed he will go over and do the weave pole cage on his own. I think he will LOVE weaving once he figures it out.

 

But then at class we tried to progress to the wired set and he freaked out and could not figure them out at all.

 

This may sound silly, but have you ever tried to reshape the behavior using something other than weave poles? Like two cones or chairs? Maybe you could do that, starting with the two objects directly in front, and slowly go through the process again. Then, once you have the "weave" with that, transfer that back to the weave poles, using a cue? Before the 2 X 2 DVD came out, Susan Garrett had an article, maybe in Clean Run, where she used a slightly different progression for teaching the 2 X 2's. At one point she would teach a "dummy" word like "noodle" to mean "weave just these two poles". She would fade that out later when the dog was weaving the whole set.

 

I'm thinking that if your dog learned something like "noodle" with two cones (or whatever), which is a correct weave entry, maybe when you transfer back to poles, you could say your "noodle" word to get the right entry. He might be able to learn, like a good Freestyle dog (LOL!!), that sometimes the weaves are entered one way (the wrong way) and sometimes the other (the right way). Of course, you would never ask for, or reward, the wrong way, so hopefully it would extinguish eventually.

 

Just a thought. That is probably what I would try in the same situation.

 

Also, if he's food motivated, I would use food instead of a toy when retraining. I'm not sold on training 2 x 2's with a toy, although I know Susan Garrett does it well. I did that with Dean and I ended up teaching him to barrel through the poles. He always misses poles and he has no clue that he has missed poles. His mind is on the toy. He weaves some of them. To him, he's done it.

 

I'm actually starting to retrain him using the way I worked with Tessa, but without wires. So far it's going well. He doesn't get why he actually has to think when he's in the poles, but he likes to think, so he will catch on!! I know that done right, the 2 X 2's will teach the dog to think in the poles, but it didn't turn out that way with Dean.