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Barkley’s bag of tricks!
Hi everyone!
Thought I would share a random update about Barkley. He is still having mixed emotions of days however, there has been some improvement while on meds. This is allowing us to have some “that’s better!” and “he would have normally done that, but he did THIS!” instead moments, which are good and, we are thankful for. There is still a lot of work ahead of us, though.
I captured some video of us working on “over”. I started teaching him simply to go “over” a case of water bottles a week and half ago. He caught on fairly quickly after setting him up to be successful by putting the case up against one wall and me standing on the other side. If he wanted the hotdogs, he had to go over! (no stress signals were seen, if so, I would have changed the environment). We then generalized to the stool (which he knows “2 fronts”, where he simply puts both front paws on the top step). Well, Barkley created his own behavior chain by not only jumping over, but continuing to place his front paws on the top step as in “2 fronts”! I can not take credit for creating the chain but happy to see him use his brain and training to do it on his own.
It also shows how powerful positive reinforcement and associations can be!!
Here are 2 short videos of our “real-life training” training session.
Thanks for watching!
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8 Replies
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Sense of humor. ☑
Great training. ☑
Happy dog. ☑
Thank you for sharing this update, @jenz this is great to hear, and the training videos just made my afternoon. Barkley creating his own finish to the requested behavior is so cool. I’m guessing this is because you’ve rewarded him for that last behavior in the past (I remember that photo of him smiling on the ladder!) -
@jenz These videos are so cute!! What a happy pup! Thanks for sharing!
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THIS IS AWESOME!! He is SO PROUD of himself!! I love that he thought of this chain. What a good boy. And great training!
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Any fun tricks you can recommend? He already knows the list of party tricks, and he doesn’t like retrieving. I would love to hear more tricks suggestions, and I love to train them!
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@Shadow
What kind of tricks are you looking for? There are a lot of things you can teach your pup! I am not quite sure what you mean by “party tricks”.
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He knows how to do all the standard: roll over, play dead and the release word resurrect, jump on command, crawl, speak and variations on that, stuff like that. He doesn’t like to retrieve but i want to keep teaching him new and cool things. I’ve just run out of ideas.
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Wow! I am tired just thinking of all the trick they know already!
How about things like spin, and in both directions, bow, standing on rear legs, walking backwards, high five?
One of my dogs know “ashamed”, it is when he is laying on his side and places his paw over his face to cover his eye/face.
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Perfect! Good point! How would you start teaching a dog to go backwards? Yes he knows spin but not both directions. Do you mean does he know how to stand and hold on his back legs? I think he could be too big for that. He’s a yellow lab. What do you think? He could have the beginnings of that trick because he knows sit pretty.
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