I can't believe it's been almost a month since I posted last. The muse has been absent, I guess. I hope that you all had wonderful winter holidays and the best 2023 ahead.
Christmas was nice and quiet for us, which was a treat after fourteen years of being busy on Christmas Day. I had one client with a morning and evening visit, but that was it. And two out of three of Marley's sons were not here this year for the first time, so we had a nice quiet day. Except that the kittens were sick. They all got a virus of some sort Friday before Christmas, and I spent several days giving sub-q fluids, anti-diarrheal, anti-nausea meds, and force feeding where needed. Micha missed her spay day because of it, but she was ready the following week. Her sister, Maggie, went ahead to their forever home last weekend, and Micha will join her there this weekend. The kittens all recovered after three or four days, and Nova's kittens are awaiting their spay/neuter date in a couple weeks.
My two moms are still around, though Molly has gone to live with another foster for now. She seems not to like other animals - dogs or cats - so she is with a foster who has no pets, and that way she is free to roam the house and not be cooped up by herself in a bedroom all the time. It was making her rather cranky. Nova is spayed (as is Maggie) and hanging with the kittens still, waiting for the right adopter to come along. And because we are having carpets removed in my office and the hall sometime in the next month or so, we are leaving the one foster room free so we have someplace to put all the office furniture during the work on the floors, so we aren't looking at any new cats/kittens until the end of January at the earliest, when I hope Nova and her kittens will get forever homes.
In the meantime, I've been working on some training with Gracie. It has been challenging, to say the least. In part because I need to get clearer about what I'm doing, and up my skills a bit, and also because Gracie finds it tough. We're working our way through it!
The end goal is something called "match to sample." If we figure it all out, she will be able to look at several objects in a row, and when I put out an object identical to one of the ones in front of her, she'll be able to indicate which object that is from her row of possibilities. It is as difficult as it sounds! (And the following may be more than you care to know...feel free to skip to the end!)
We spent a few days trying to get my act together, which Gracie found a bit frustrating. She needs to return to her base camp (her mat) which is known as stationing, between repetitions, and though she knows the cue for "mat" (which is the word she learned as a puppy) she isn't so used to returning to the mat repeatedly between repetitions, so we had to work on that first (and there's still improvement to be made, but we're better!) I discovered after a couple frustrating days that the mat alone didn't work well, as she considered having just a toe on it to be adequate and I want her to be on the mat more fully. So after getting nowhere for awhile I got out one of my dog training platforms and put her mat on that as a more obvious setup with clear boundaries. It worked.
The next thing was to find a treat that wasn't a really good treat. She's so food motivated that she kept trying all sorts of things to get it, turning into a whirling dervish instead of waiting for cues. The high-quality treats went back to their cupboard, and enter Cheerios. Still a treat, but not really worth superdog efforts.
Lastly, I had to figure out what kind of indication I wanted Gracie to use, or really which one she preferred. I started with a nose touch, and then she started doing paw touches more often, and then back to mostly nose touches. So we need to work on what we're doing. Or maybe we will just settle on both being okay. Stay tuned.
Those basics took a couple days to work out, which seems kinda slow to me. But that's what it took. I made the mistake of trying to train in a room other than my office, which is where we usually train and that messed us up too. Changing variables is not helpful until she's got the behavior down cold. With the basics figured out, we were finally able to get moving.
Step one - have Gracie station and then come touch indicated items when asked, and then re-station. That seems really simple, but it isn't always. Gracie can get it right most of the time now, but not always. In the beginning, when I was using two items she would touch both to get the treat (which she didn't get, 'cause she wasn't right!). She would also sometimes come to me but not really touch the item, so we had to work on that, and have a little more to do still. But she's getting better.
Step two - an easier step for both of us - is just to look at the item I take out from behind my back. She gets a treat for looking at it. Pretty simple for her. Eventually we will join these two things and she'll have three items in from of her, with three identical ones behind my back, and when I pull one item out, she will look at it, and indicate the identical one in her line of items. But we're not there yet. Still, she's making progress, and I'm mostly doing better too.
Here's where we are so far:
It's been a lot of work getting this far especially since we need to train in maybe 10 minute increments many times a day. For something new and challenging I need to stop training before she (and I) get frustrated. I try to quit each session when she's doing really well, so we end of a high note.
We'll keep working on it. In the meantime, she polished up about 11 of her favorite tricks for an event over Christmas week. Our pet therapy group was invited to sit with some kids at the local boarding school who weren't going home for Christmas, and they read stories to our dogs. At the end of the event Gracie showed off her tricks. Saying her prayers is always a hit, and they loved her figure eight, and putting her front paws on a box and circling it with her back legs. She loves showing off...we both do! And she got a nice round of applause.
Stay tuned for more, if you've read this far! Hopefully we'll have the full trick to show you in the future. For some extra credit, dear readers, here is the video that we are working from and where we are going, just in case you're really interested!
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