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Category Archives: Dogs

Day off

12 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by elbygodwin in Dog training, Dogs

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dog sports, dog training, dogs, malinois, Metropolitan K9, protection dog, protection sports, protection sports association, ring sports

Every year, Washington, D.C., hosts the National Cherry Blossom Festival.  The festival includes a parade, some road races, and a lot of photography at all times of day.  Areas around the Tidal Basin, the Washington Monument, and other parks are full of the Cherry Blossom trees blooming at right around the same time.  Thursday of this week was supposedly the peak day of the blooming, so yesterday morning two of us played tourist and walked down to the Washington Monument.  Even on a weekday morning, there were a lot of people down that way.  However, I also got the added benefit of a good bit of exercise for King.

IMG_0458

Training continues as well- on Thursday, we worked on heeling finishes (the dog coming into heel position) for obedience and targeting of the bicep for bitework.  Except for “leg dogs” (dogs trained to target the legs of an assailant/decoy), dogs in PSA competition are required to target the bicep area of the decoy.  It’s not too tricky, but does require a transition as much of the initial bitework is forearm targeted since it is done in the dog’s prey drive, and therefore the dog is chasing the decoy. The level at which we are first going to compete does also offer a sleeve division, but in order to move on to higher levels the bicep targeting on the bite jacket is required, and so we are going to keep working at bicep targeting (among other things) and look to compete later in the year.

We’ve also started working on “outs” off of the decoy- the dog outing on command- and he’s getting better but it is a very different and new action for him, so it will be a couple more weeks before those really improve. As of now, we’re set to go back to training tomorrow, and will hopefully see further improvement.

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Dog vs. TV

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by elbygodwin in Dog training, Dogs

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dog sports, dog training, dogs, malinois, protection sports

No physical altercation took place between my dog and my television (the latter is well up off the ground…thankfully).

However, it now looks like King recognizes the music from one commercial in particular, and the fact that the commercial has a dog in it, which obviously he doesn’t care for.

The commercial in question:

I usually watch CNBC in the mornings, and they air this commercial fairly regularly. When the music comes on, King has taken off from his post by the door looking out on the street and come running back into the tv room, and it was not to see me. Since this has now happened more than once, I think I’m onto something. Yesterday, I pulled up the commercial on youtube from upstairs, and he came running upstairs as well.

On a side note, we have not done any tracking training. If we were training in Schutzhund, that would be a large component of our training. King was in training to be a detection dog before I got him, so he knows a search command. However, I don’t think he’d be quite as adept at hard surface tracking like the dog in the commercial (plus if you believe everything on tv you’d have to buy a new car, too).

Obviously he doesn’t like other dogs, in person or on tv. Other animals that have now aroused his ire on television- deer, elk, bears, horses, tigers, and bison (thanks to a new commercial for Las Vegas), to name a few. Good to know, though I wouldn’t like his chances against a few of those.

Today’s training

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by elbygodwin in Dog training, Dogs

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dog sports, dog training, dogs, malinois, Metropolitan K9, protection sports

With some warm weather here for a split second, I wanted to get some training in today. Obedience consisted of starting our figure 8 pattern, which is the beginning of the PSA obedience routine. With tight, multiple turns, it can sometimes get tricky to have it all go perfectly, as I quickly learned. Overall it went pretty well, but there is room for improvement. Despite being easier overall, our right turns were the main sticking point today since they lend themselves to the dog lagging behind as you turn away from him/her.

On bitework, we continued with the carjacking scenario. I’m including a short clip below- this part shows the continued advancement in putting some pressure on the dog for a moment, and eventually the dog “winning” at the end of the scenario.

This will probably be all we get to work on until Thursday, at which point we’ll probably continue working on our heeling turns.

Weekend re-cap

10 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by elbygodwin in Dog training, Dogs

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dog sports, dog training, dogs, malinois, Metropolitan K9, protection sports

For some reason, the weather got warm over the weekend. Well, Saturday. I spent most of the day re-organizing and cleaning out a storage area, and part of cleaning that area out meant putting some scrap wood to use. King Man loves it back there because he sees squirrels every day running around there. They’re usually at least at the fence line or higher, so he has yet to actually taste one of them, but that doesn’t diminish his love of keeping look-out. Since I figured the weather would eventually stay warmer (it was back in the 40s by Sunday) it would be nice to have something that he could sit on off of the ground and even get a little shade at the same time. Hence, this hut/shack/lean-to. It’s a still work in progress- I don’t know whether I will enclose any of it, how I want to treat the roof, etc., and he’s not sitting out there much when the weather is bad anyway, so this project was just as much a way to get rid of some wood that was taking up valuable inner-city storage space.

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Sunday was another training day. While it was back to sweatshirt weather, I think I got a combination of wind/sunburn (it doesn’t take much on the latter). Anyway, we did a full mock obedience routine much as you would see for the Protection Dog Certificate (PDC) level of PSA, and we added a decoy onto the field as there would be in the next level of competition (PSA 1). In total, there were 3 other people on the field as we worked our heeling pattern, plus a vocal distraction, plus a physical distraction of some car keys thrown on the ground near him. Somehow, King Man nailed it, and really the biggest issue was done by me when I didn’t put my leash away for our off-leash heeling pattern. With that in mind, our competition schedule may be accelerated some for this year. Here’s a quick clip (this took place further away from the camera than planned since all our snow is melting and parts of our training field are now mud pits):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9iG7kdpMU0&feature=youtu.be

For bitework, we practiced what’s called “defense of handler,” where the decoy came around from the side of the vehicle instead of being visible the entire time. One of the times we practiced it, the decoy also did more motion toward the dog instead of away from the dog. What this does is start to engage the dog’s civil drive as opposed to its prey drive. Prey drive is pretty straightforward- animals chase their prey (see: dog + squirrel). Dogs with high prey drives can sometimes get more satisfaction out of the chase itself than actually catching the item, be it a tennis ball, a squirrel, etc.  Not every dog has a suitable civil drive to engage something coming toward them, and it is something that must  be carefully and properly developed; hence, the value of working with a good decoy. The first time around, King Man was barking and wasn’t backing away, but I don’t think he realized I’d dropped the leash and he was free to go. Either way, he got it the next time around, and we did a couple more similar repetitions and then he was done.

All in all, a productive, sunny afternoon that now has me looking at when our first competition trial may actually take place…

elby & king 005

Gear review- jute frisbee

06 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by elbygodwin in Dog training, Dogs

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dog sports, dog training, dogs, malinois, protection sports

I recently had an order of dog training supplies come in that included a jute frisbee. A few places carry these, but since I was already ordering a few things from the company, this frisbee came from Elite K-9.

Although we haven’t done a whole lot of frisbee work, King Man figured this one out immediately, loves chasing it, and the ability to also use it as a tug make it very versatile. Every once in a while, when the work is going well, I’ll toss the tug for him, and most of the time he’s good at bringing it right back (sometimes at full speed- which doesn’t always feel good). On the occasion when he thinks he’d like to run off with it, a quick verbal command usually changes his direction and we get back to tugging.

Most of the items I have made of jute have held up to a lot of biting and tugging, as jute is supposed to do. I expect this frisbee to hold up as well, though it is thinner since it is a frisbee and theoretically should be able to achieve lift. The straight edge may make it easier to pick up off the ground as well. A regular frisbee is hard for a dog to pick up if it is flat on the ground. If it lands upside down, the dog can then pick it up, but sometimes, the frisbee will flip up over his eyes, and then the dog runs into a tree…(seriously I know a dog that did this pretty recently)

The other nice thing about this frisbee is that it folds up and could tuck into a waistband or pocket pretty easily. This is good just for portability if you’re walking it down to the park, but will also come in handy for stashing it away if we’re working on heeling.

If your dog likes to chase things and/or tug with you, I’d recommend picking one up.

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Capitol K9 Training

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