I have long admired Emily Larlham for her excellent training advice and the multitude of free videos that she produced for her YouTube channel kikopup. A few weeks ago a friend told me she is producing a set of DVDs with Tawzer Dog and needs videos of hunting breeds recalling from prey. Ruby and Java to the rescue! Well, only Java since Ruby is not allowed to run.
I emailed Emily and it turned out there is a variety of tasks she needs filmed and has already got more than 50 offers to help from people around the world. Still, she was excited to feature a whippet and so our filming begun.
I don’t think that Java is ready for recalling from live prey yet. I’m sure she would recall from birds, but since I’m teaching her to ignore birds I don’t want to deliberately put her in a situation where she would go after them. Instead, we filmed recall from a furry toy, which is part of the training for recall from prey. Java was fantastic, she turned back to me in a heartbeat. Some day we’ll have to repeat this with a piece of dried tripe dragging on the ground. We’ll see how that goes 😉
We also filmed walking on loose leash toward a bowl full of treats. We had only one problem: Java was too good and didn’t pull much. How do you demonstrate a loose leash walking exercise if the dog doesn’t pull? She wanted those treats and was trying sooooo hard to be a good girl so she would get them.
Ruby got to demonstrate how to close a closet door with his nose. This took quite a bit of training because he was previously taught to close the door with paws and he had to “forget” that first. He was very happy to have a real job again 🙂
Yesterday I filmed both dogs doing cue discrimination. I was saying a mix of Left, Right, Sit and Down without hand signals to see how well they know their verbal cues. I expected Ruby to be 100% successful, but Java has never discriminated among so many cues before. We did Left/Right which she understands very well and Sit/Down which she gets correctly 80-90% of the time (because I find Sit/Down discrimination boring), but putting it together makes the challenge a lot harder. She was a star! It looks like Emily will use this clip on one of her DVDs. I’m so excited 🙂