I will no longer be updating Iron Guide (see below). Instead, I am now writing at my new, personal blog. Though that will be about some of the newer things I'm doing in life, if you want to see updates about Louie, Lester, and now Dusky, add me on Facebook -- there's enough ridiculously cute pictures to go around.

Lester knows sit pretty well. A couple days ago, he even started sitting up on command (i.e. from laying down on the floor).

We've been working on come, that's enough, down, stay, and OK for the past few weeks. Every day in the morning and after I get home from work, we play and work on these basic obedience commands. I started out doing the training separately with Louie, but it just got too boring. It's easy enough -- and not much of a stretch at all -- to do it during play-time.

Say Lester is playing with his favorite chew toy. One command that all puppies need to learn is "that's enough," which just means to stop what they're doing. It's not intended to be a bad thing. For example, if you're playing tug with your dog and see blood all over, you'd say "that's enough". The dog didn't do anything wrong, you just want him to stop because you're worried about him. How do you teach him to stop without making it a negative thing?

Well, you randomly stop and re-start play. Because you don't correct the puppy, he has no reason to believe he did anything wrong; because you re-start play, he figures out that it just means to stop for right now. How do you re-start play? "OK!" Said in a high enough and encouraging enough voice, this isn't exactly rocket science for Lester. And, really, he's more than happy to listen in this case. =P

To make it a little tougher, you can add "stay" into the mix. After "that's enough", you can take away their toy and put them into a sit-stay. Or, initially at least, you try to put them into a sit-stay. You keep their leash and walk a few steps back or to the side, and try to keep him in the same spot with gentle leash corrections or just simple man-handling. Having said "stay" and repositioned them enough times, they get the picture pretty quickly. To make it even more challenging, you can roll around their toys in front of them or make funny noises or something. Eventually, we actually put them into a sit-stay and walk across the room, but Lester is nowhere near that yet.

What about "come?" Well, first, it's more like "Lester, COME!" instead of "come." And it's kind of fancy.

We do something called food-induced recall training, which is really just a glorified, ten-step process of food rewards to hard-wire "COME!" into our puppies' little heads. Initially, when they're tiny babies with tiny attention spans, we actually walk backwards holding a single piece of kibble right in front of their noses to get them to follow us. (They get the piece of kibble each time. We're not that cruel. =P) As they grow older and associate "COME!" with food, we still walk backwards but without the explicit lure and just give them a reward at the end. Eventually, they only get the reward some randomly chosen times and, later still, only in really tough cases. After all is said and done, the training produces dogs that very enthusiastically and immediately respond to the come command. And, if you're blind and need your dog, that is exactly what you want.

With Lester, this is best done at work where we have lots of long hallways. He's progressed now to step three, which means I can put him in a sit-stay and then have him come to me for a food reward on an extended leash. He still gets the food every time and is pretty good about enthusiastically coming each time, so the next steps are going to involve more distracting locations and random rewards. If you see me walking backwards in PacMed and Lester bounding towards me, that's why.

I've been slacking on down, which is why he doesn't know the command yet. Oddly enough, however, he's figured out he needs to lay down and stay down during car rides. So, all I really need to do now is just get him to make the connection between the word "down" and the action of laying down.

All in all, Lester is progressing pretty well. He knows most of his commands at this point. That's not to say that he'll actually execute on a command, however. =P That depends on all sorts of other things. It's complicated. At this point, on average, there's probably a 30% chance he'll listen to a random handler and a 60% chance he'll listen to me. We're working on it.

Labels: Lester, Louie

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