You’ll have to stick with me, as I figure out the new camera and video editing software, but here are a couple clips of our do-over initial scent work, where I’m simply rewarding Lilly (click/treat) for paying any attention to the single container with the beer scent inside. BUT, I’m still not sure she is using her nose for real.
Gigi (our trainer) suggested using cocktail napkins, and KB is going to try putting the beer scent inside a Kong since her labs are want desperately to retrieve. Maybe she’ll have videos or photos to share too.
I guess I need to decide if I want her to alert to the scent as she is naturally here, to find it and bring it back, or maybe poke it with her paw or something. I have NOT been very skilled at training footwork other than SHAKE and HIGH FIVE.
If nothing else, I’m thrilled for all of you to see Lilly’s happy face. I see this relaxed, ready-to-learn face a lot at home, but I’m afraid those of you who have seen her in public or at class know that it can be a very different story. I’m never convinced that still photos show her true sweetness, but I love the way she watches me (outside of the frame for help, info, instruction).
For what it’s worth, I probably shouldn’t be asking her to FIND IT. Right?
We, as always, are a work in progress.
I love how happy Lilly looks as she waits to see what you want. The comments are also very helpful to me. As a trainer I have not worked with scent or object naming yet and the feedback is extremely helpful. Great blog!
Thanks for the kind comment on my post about my sister, Carol.
Your videos of Lilly are so much fun! Thanks for sharing them.
Lilly’s behavior looks a lot like K’s when we started playing ‘object naming’ games. Specifically, I’ve tried to teach her the names of several objects. The end goal is that she can pick out a particular object, and bring it to me, from several objects. I started by putting just one thing on the ground, saying it’s name ‘thing’, and she rapidly learned that she’d get a treat for bringing the object to me. At that point, I was sure that she was simply performing a retrieve. It wasn’t until I placed a second object (which I didn’t give a name for a long time – it was just a decoy) along with the ‘thing’ that she was forced to learn what the game was really about.
I think that the same is true for Lilly in your video. She’s learned to knock over the yogurt container but has no idea that she’s knocking it over because of its scent. When you add a second container with no scent, then she’ll start to make the connections.
With K, she loses confidence super fast if she’s not successful a high percentage of the time. So, if I were doing this with her, I’d place the scented object closer to her than the unscented object at first, and gradually make it so that the two objects are in equally distant positions.
I have to be so careful with K – she doesn’t do a full-on shutdown when she loses confidence – but she just starts randomly guessing in a hyper way. I have to avoid getting to this point. Gigi has suggested throwing in easy tricks during the training to keep K’s confidence high (e.g., touch my hand. I don’t know Lilly’s stress behavior in this type of training but I thought that I’d share my experience.