I dusted off my video camera a couple of days ago to film my efforts with Belle on working turn and forward, turn and reverse through my legs and reverse weaves. The edited video is below. Ilona Wright, who is conducting this month's workshop on backing, pointed out that at that at :45 seconds I bring out the lure after Belle has failed several times to respond to my touch command. Somehow in my readings, I managed to miss the instruction to never, ever do this since you are basically rewarding a behavior you don't want. (You are also confusing your dog as to what the verbal actually means.)
Ilona's advice is to break off what you're working on for 10 seconds or so, and then work on the behavior that your dog is not performing. In this case, I was trying to get Belle to walk backwards between my legs and remain lined up with my knees, but she was backing up faster than I could. I wanted her touch my hand and back up, but that didn't work too well, so I put a cookie in my hand to keep her in place. That probably would have been fine if I had done it as a first step, but I didn't. I tried to use a cue that Belle doesn't respond to all that well (despite the fact that it is one of the very first ones I ever taught her) and after that didn't work, I hauled out the lure.
We are working on complicated behaviors. It is my job to break them down into pieces that Belle can learn. She is the final arbiter of whether or not I have done my job well. I she doesn't execute my command, either I have failed to motivate her or I have failed to teach her what the command means. Since Belle is a very motivated dog, it is normally the latter.
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