21/01/2024
Been on 3 walks with Thunder and he’s making me change my game plan! He is hyper-vigilant outside and orients to any new sights and sounds. He will eat while out but getting his attention is quite the challenge!
Last week I had some success with looking for him to “soften” his body posture and then click/reinforcing this “state”. Took the whole walk but, by then end, he was responding to the click in this softened state about 90% of the time. Not too shabby Thunder!
I’m using freeze-dried liver/chicken as reinforcers and I think I’ll hold off on giving him some higher value stuff until I have a longer reinforcement history.
Yesterday, I used the same strategy but, when I waited him out just a bit when he was in that softened state, he started looking back at me…click/reinforce! He caught on to this pretty quickly and this became my new criteria for reinforcement.
I love having these training steps established as I can fall back on them when we start introducing him to more challenging situations/distractions. Dogs like Thunder may only give you small openings or opportunities to reinforce and, when they do, you kinda have to jump on it and build up from that point:)