Paw target practice!
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Happy First Birthday Venom!
How are you 12 months old already?!
It's been one hell of a ride so far!
You've killed trainers (the feet kind, not quite managed the human kind...yet...), almost eaten us out of house and home, dragged us out of our comfort zone and into the show world, put 100% effort into everything we've thrown at you - from obedience, to Mantrailing, to tricks and even to agility!
You *almost* slotted straight in with the 3 boys...we guess traumatising them for a few weeks didn't kill them😅
Whilst we love the 3 boys, you added that extra something that we didn't know we needed, and now, we wouldn't be without you!
So, Happy 1st Birthday White Hippo! Here's to many, many, fun filled more!
What a year! Thank you to all our customers, new and old, for making this year what it has been. Without your continued support, we wouldn't be able to do what we do, or offer what we offer (and plan to offer in 2025😉).
So thank you all for your continuing support!
See you in 2025, hope it's a great one!
Hope you've all had a lovely Christmas! Here's to 2025!
#merrychristmas #newyear #bullterrier #bullterrierpuppy #patterdaleterrier #chihuahua #minpin #chipin #collie #firstchristmas #nellandco
Merry Christmas everyone!
#christmas #merrychristmas #bullterrier #patterdaleterrier #collie #chihuahua #chipin #nellandco
Almost here....
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Tricks class spent their last session wrapping Thier Christmas presents 🎁
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Surviving Adolescence Part: Impulse Control - Ginger Grinch Edition.
Shall we let you in on a secret?
Well, it's not so much a secret, because if you ever ask us, we would tell you, but Venom isn't the only dog with a tiny little bit of a decfit in the manners or patience department when it comes to certain things.
For the Ginger Grinch, it's chasing some thing small and fluffy. Now, we can't blame him, small and furry things are fun (have you seen Flint?!) but, the main reason we can't blame him, is because of genetics.
In case you are new to the page, Ginger Grinch is our Patterdale Terrier, Four.
The majority of Terriers are designed to kill small furry things (hence we don't allow chase games with Flint in our house, but that's a topic for another day).
So, what we try to do, is to find ways to replicate some aspects of what GG was designed for, sometimes a little too creatively and sometimes not enough, and spend a vast amount of time training *things* (we like to teach all the dogs random things, they all learn differently, all require things tweaking, it improves our training, tires them out, and bonus, they've learnt a new skill, even if it is "how to die, dramatically").
Back to the creative side of things.
From the moment GG arrived, we spent a lot of time teaching an out/drop, getting some nice solid foindation behaviours, working hard on recall...working on impulse control...
GG started work with a flirt pole quite early on, and rabbit tuggys, but the flirt pole he particularly likes. Combine the two and you have *the* perfect toy for a terrier when training. It's distracting, it's a high value reward, you can play tuggy, you can make it appear alive, you can use it for chase, you can let it die and ALL without as much physical effort from you, but much more for them than a standard tuggy.
So that's what we did, exactly the same way we have been working with Venom.
In this session, we worked on using the pole as a distraction, because we can
In our Thursday Tricks class, Dot and Flint were practicing their Christmas Card delivery!
They were so speedy, Royal Mail could do with employing them!
#trickdog #jackrussell #chihuahia #minpin
Surviving Adolescence Part: Impulse Control, upping our game.
Now we've done a lot of the foundation work with our down, we thought it was time to break out the bombproof flirt pole (*NB it isn't actually bombproof!).
We looked at what we would start with, and what we hoped to achieve, and any problems that might crop up. One thing we didn't think to consider, was that Venom might take us out chasing the toy🤣
This session we were working on releasing onto the toy after trying to tease Venom out of the down. Then we repeat the whole thing a few times.
So, we ask for the down, move the flirt pole around like its something alive and exciting that needs killing, dog doesn't move from the down, release onto the toy on the end of the flirt pole.
Along with our proofed down, we have a pretty decent "out" aka "drop it", because we need that as well to get the toy back to start again.
*It's important to remember that when you up the criteria on one part of training, to lower something else.
So we started with the down, and a little wiggle of the flirt pole, and built our way up to the snippet you see in the video.
If something isn't working in your training, look at what you have, or haven't changed.
Have you brought in something more exciting? Are you asking for something harder?
Once you've worked that out, you need to look at what can you do to make reaching your overall end goal more achievable?
It could be you reduce the duration, it could be you up the reward, it could be a combination of things, but if you can work this out, you can tweak your training and then build things back up.
Next step for us is asking for more duration OR switching to a different behaviour, whilst there is a toy out or a pile of food, and work on proofing that in baby steps.
Now, we might get stuck and have to take things right back to the beginning, we might advance pretty quickly now she has the idea of what it is we are doing. All progress depends entirely on how well and
