Friday, August 31, 2012

Detection Trainers Course Australia First Days

The three day Detection Training Seminar ran through yesterday and was well attended by state, federal and military detection trainers from throughout Australia and elsewhere. We also had a number of professional dog trainers and search and rescue dog handlers who attended. Today was then the start of the two week long Detection Trainers School where the students enrolled get more in depth instruction on the training techniques presented during the seminar.

Students learning how to prepare detection substances such as explosives or narcotics for the training session

 
Student learning to evaluate a dog's potential for detection training:
 
 
Possessiveness with the reward objects is usually a good sign
 
 
As is this level of effort to get to it
 
 
 
And this one also gets high marks for being extra cute:
 
 
One of the primary things we look at in assessing dogs is whether they will engage in a game no matter who it is or where they are. It is one of the biggest indicators as to whether they will have the focus and intensity to be the kind of detection dogs we need.
This girl was not 100% sure she liked the game enough to play it with me.
 
 
Teaching one of the students how to handle a dog on the short rack:
 
 
 
And sunset from the training center at the end of the day.
It is late winter/early spring here right now but gets dark about 6pm and the sun seems to set much faster than it does on the other side of the world.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

A brief update from Australia

Finally have a brief moment to blog from Australia. Arrived in Brisbane early on Sunday. Just in time to fly over the ocean into the city at around 6AM. We then spent the rest of the day looking around and trying to stay awake. Made it until about 5:30 PM and then slept until the next morning. I am staying in Ipswich which about a 20 minute drive from Brisbane. Today through Thursday we will be teaching a Detection Trainer's Seminar which has been well attended and received by a variety of military and law enforcement trainers. Following that we still are lodging in Ipswich and will be teaching a two week Detection Trainers Course further outside of the city. The area is beautiful and the people are VERY welcoming. It is early Spring right now; gets to be in the low 70's by afternoon but otherwise cool and sunny.

A few pics so far:




 
 
 
 

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Student or Teacher?

One aspect of dog training that I often try to teach dog handlers, regardless of their training goals, is that it is much more effective for the dog to learn through self discovery. If I cue or give a verbal reminder to the dog for a behavior then the dog is quite likely only to offer that behavior in response to the cue or reminder. For example if you are working with a dog that is particularly sniffy and distracted and you use a verbal cue to get the dog to ignore a particularly interesting smell. What happens when you don't use that cue? Does the dog think that it is not okay to sniff unless instructed not too? I could give many many examples in all types of training - indicating articles on tracks for example. People cue the indication (usually a down) when the dog comes up on an article on the track. However quite often the dog remains dependent on this cue and if the handler does not give it then they are confused or just keep tracking.

So I know how well this works for the dogs but I am starting to realize how effective it is for me as well. It seems like both Steel (maintaining his tracking skills and hoping to get into a Variable Surface Tracking test this fall) and Jill (prepping for her CDX in the obedience ring this fall) are determined to provide me with these self discovery moments. They have left me feeling both impressed with my brilliant powers of observation/problem solving skills and a little chagrined. Just when I think I know something my dogs show me that I can still learn stuff and find new ways to teach "old tricks". I swear in Jill's case (Ms Perfect) she is doing it on purpose too.

In college, at least in the science fields, there is a joke about the progression of obtaining knowledge. When you come in as an undergrad you are in awe at the knowledge of your professors and amazed at all the stuff you have to learn in the text books. You are just a big sponge (hopefully). You soak it all up and then think you KNOW STUFF.  Then you move on to graduate school and discover that all that stuff you learned in the textbooks wasn't really as set in stone as you thought. In fact you find out that a lot of what you learned is outdated and just taught to you as a starting off point. You find out that all those professors often disagree with each other.  You feel very disillusioned because now you don't know as much as you thought. You are also rather annoyed and disillusioned with your professors who don't seem as smart as they once seem. Then you move onto the final stage where you learn that knowledge is constantly evolving and not only do you still have a lot to learn but EVERYONE has a lot to learn. That is pretty much the place where I am in my dog training - I no longer worry about knowing it all because the learning is continuous.  I just concentrate of letting my dogs, and all the others I train, show me what they as individuals understand about the task and find way to help them "discover" the way to do it properly.

Who is the  student and who is the teacher??




Friday, August 17, 2012

Have dogs....will travel...part two

I have spent pretty much the entire summer traveling everywhere from Mississippi to Chicago to Vermont to North Carolina with anywhere from between 4 and 6 dogs. People tend to think of that as sounding much more difficult than it actually seemed to be. However I think the main point that is overlooked was that it was my job, or at least part of it, so it is not like I was doing something else and taking the dogs along. As the long hot summer progressed though I have learned a few things, tips of the trade so to speak....

No matter how cheap the motel, drive up doorways are totally worth it....Should anyone feel the need to point out the safety concerns, I should remind you that I was traveling most of the time with 2 malinois 2 rottweilers and a (noisy) german shepherd. Three of the above dogs were were trained police dogs. Go ahead, try to break into my room....

Take at least a few more crates than you have dogs. I didn't have to crate all the dogs in the room, just a few (I did want to sleep after all). It does make it much easier if you can put the crate in the room and then move the dog from the car to the room.Soft crates work well for crate trained dogs who respect crates. Whether we were in hotels, the car or the motorhome or someones house I think the dogs really appreciate having their own little "space" that is constant.


Take your own pillow. Sure they wash the pillowcase but do you really want to snuggle up to that hotel pillow??  In the case of the Motel 6 in Pinehurst NC a sleeping bag is also a handy item (no way was I sleeping in that bed.)


Traveling dogs get the occasional bout of diarrhea. Don't ask my why. It comes on suddenly and goes away just as fast. Canned pumpkin every few days seems to prevent this. It is cheap, the dogs like it and in this case a pinch of prevention (i.e. pumpkin) is certainly worth a pound of cure (i.e. fill in the blank).



Eat properly. Hotels are surrounded by some of the scariest places to eat. Did you know that the Cracker Barrel Restaurant refuses to provide nutritional information?? I wonder why that is... If it weren't for these two places I would have starved to death.



Along with healthy eating, exercising is also a good idea. The iphone apps from bluefin kept me on a training program AND eliminated the need for me to calculate distances (or keep track of where I was running for that matter). The iphone just plays your music and the app tells you when to start and stop running and keeps a GPS log of your run. It also expects you to progress through the program over 6-8 weeks so you don't want too big a gap between runs or you will regret it. The fear of future suffering is apparently a real good motivator...


You have to be a little adventurous though when your running "trail" turns into this though.

And also try not to annoy the locals....

A scenic view always helps the run go by faster though...


And finally, it also helps to travel with VERY good dogs who go with the flow and adapt to just about anywhere they happen to be spending the night with very little fuss. 




Friday, August 10, 2012

Is timing really all that important??

I am in the Chicago area helping teach a three day seminar for people doing nosework with their dogs. This is a relatively new sport where people train and trial with their pet dog to locate various (legal) odors. It is getting very popular and I particularly like that it is an outlet for dogs who would otherwise not do well in other sports.  It is probably what I would be doing with Calix if he were not a police dog.  During today's lecture I was contemplating something that has been running through my head lately.  What can I say, when I drive my mind tends to wander, unless I am driving through Chicago and then it is desperately wishing that it was someplace else....).

A common mantra in dog training is that timing is everything. Good dogs trainers have good timing etc. However IS timing really the critical element. I would propose that placement is everything. I have talked about this subject before but the more I train the more I see the extreme importance of the reward placement. Is good timing just good reward placement? I guess you could say that sometimes you have to have good timing to get the reward placed properly. However sometimes you don't. My primary goal in tracking is to let the track dog the teaching. Same with detection work. In tracking I plan my rewards (articles along the track) so that they occur in critical places along the track. I like to place them in locations where the dog is going to find them after he solves a difficult section of the track. I focus on placement a lot when training for competition obedience - I want to heavily reinforce two placement: the heel position and the front position. These are the two places that I want the dog to have a history of proper reward placement. The more I think about it the more I think that reward placement is an overlooked aspect of training and deserves as much credit and importance as good timing.

What are these people doing??
Students from the last Trainer's Course practicing their reward placement.



And jill demonstrating how she is able to take up a teeny tiny part of the hotel bed:

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Driving and thinking about drive.....

All of this travel has not made updating the blog very convenient. In spite of my best intentions I always end up out of energy at the end of the day. The dogs, even all the "extra" ones that I seem to acquire, are pretty adaptable. However it still takes times to get all of them fed water walked and exercised each day. To say nothing of trying to accomplish their training goals while we are on the road. Take the past week for example - we have spent nights in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky. We are currently en route to the Chicago area for a detection seminar. Steel was the only one who benefited from training today - he got a quick un-aged hard surface track in an empty parking lot while we were headed out of town.

It was an extremely boring drive from Virginia to the Kentucky-Ohio border today. The only interesting part of it was drooling over the horse properties along the interstate while going through Lexington KY. I did get to play good Samaritan for a lady who rolled into the rest stop while I was walking dogs - she didnt just have a flat, her tire was totally shredded. Like my friend Ann point out "once a police officer always a police officer....." Ford btw does a much better job of making their tire changing equipment accessible than does Toyota...

Fortunately for me, I do my best dog training thinking while driving.  This is also helped by friends who call and chat while I am driving. I am still on the fence about (hands free) talking and driving.  It sure does help pass the time - I just try to confine it to long stretches of interstate driving when traffic is low. One of the things that I was mulling about following today's conversations is how the dogs drive state is often overlooked when we are training. Different venues and tasks require different levels of drive. Competition obedience can be done in a lower drive state that a searching for explosives. And within a venue people also have different preferences for how much drive they want.  Lower levels of a sport or activity can often be done in a lower drive state but at higher levels or for more complex tasks the dog needs to be in a higher drive state. The problem is that people often start out teaching early tasks in lower drive and then have to invest time and effort bringing up drive in addition to making the tasks more complex. One of the problems with a lower drive is that although the dog might be able to perform the work, he can be distracted by his environment and this in turn reduces the intensity of the dog's focus on his task. I think it also allows the dog to become bored with the task - especially when it is an inherently slow or methodical task.

Teaching the dog a task in a low level of drive can lead to complications. It is not necessarily a given that the dog's drive will increase as he learns the task. Oftentimes if the dog learns in a low drive state then he continues to perform at that level - the handler's actions can push the drive up temporarily but it often may ebb back to its original state. My preference is to keep the task simple at first and to lay the foundation for the task with the dog in the drive state I want it to be in for higher level, more complex tasks. This is critically important for working dogs - many things beyond the handler's control will decrease the dog's overall level of focus and drive - fatigue, chaos and distractions, handler focusing on other things etc. If the drive is extremely high to begin with then this decrease is less likely and if it does occur the dog still has enough intensity for the task. As far as sport dogs - it also set them up to retain a focus and intensity for higher levels of work. But regardless of whether it is for sport or work I also think it is more fun for the dog, I know it certainly affects my level of enjoyment of training. I recently read a post on a discussion forum where someone pointed out that he does other activities for "fun" and that training dogs for police work was serious business. I guess I am at a loss to see how my enjoying my work will result in a decrease in my dogs' performances? It seems to me that my enjoyment and enthusiasm for the work can only help lay that foundation of the dog coming out to do the work in a heightened drive state. Maybe I will explain to Steel tomorrow that this is serious business and that he and I should not be having so much fun.