Today's Cloud

I think I've made a mistake.

Wow. There's a shocker.

Monster isn't really enjoying the retrieve training so much. He tends to shut down, lie down and look away, or get frustrated and start pawing at me and trying to get me to play. We have trouble with this quite a lot, I believe it's a combination of Monster severely lacking in confidence and me being very bad at structuring training effectively so it's challenging but not too difficult. No doubt, I'm much worse at this when I'm working toward a specific goal. And when I don't reinforce Monster enough he loses even more confidence.

So I'm doing a take-back on the resolution. No more retrieve. Instead, I'm going back to something Monster really seems to enjoy - and something that's really hard even for me to screw up: free shaping. More specifically free shaping with objects. I just pick a thing, any thing, place it in the training area, and reinforce Monster for interacting with it. I find that we can't get shaping to work without an object, presumably because I put too much pressure on Monster (staring at him and waiting for him to do something), since Monster just lies down and basically plays dead. I suppose we could work on that, but I'm not sure it would be a good idea - the point is to make him more confident acting, not being passive. The reason for only doing free shaping is of course so it won't be quite so easy for me to pile on the pressure and raise the criteria too quickly. If I don't know where we're going it's pretty hard for me to hurry to get there.

I may not look like it, but I actually enjoy shaping.

So, new resolution for this week is having three free shaping sessions, with an object, every day. Today Monster has learned to balance on a snow shovel (out in the garden), and put his head inside a cardboard box. There should be a third thing, but the day isn't over yet.

Whuh?