Toward the end of Devon's agility class, I was once again sitting in a chair wanting Devon to lay down as the other dog on our side was working. Once again, little miss industrious started foot touching the chair. I decided not to reward, since it wasn't what I wanted and I was starting to get visions of Devon foot touching everything expecting a cookie (really not a bad thing, but...).
Without the reward, Devon decided that I clearly just wanted her to smack the chair harder. So she set to work smacking the legs of the chair so that her toenails were ringing off the metal chair. It was really funny, and since she wasn't looking up at me I was smiling. Then I looked over and another person in our class who was waiting on her team's turn was watching Devon and laughing. I can only imagine what Devon looked like with her head stuck under this metal folding chair as she was smacking the bar across the back legs with all her might. She said, "What is she try to get under that chair?" I laughed and explained what was happening. Devon is not a stupid dog. Finally we had another turn, which ended the abuse of the chair!
We had the AKC Agility Nationals Finals course set up for our class. The advanced and intermediate classes ran the course, but the novice dogs (Devon's class) did not. Because of adjusting for a doorway in the building, the tunnel/dogwalk discrimination wasn't as hard because the jump prior to the dogwalk had to be shifted so it gave a much better entrance to the dogwalk.
Devon had another fantastic evening of practice. She never missed her discrimination and drove through all her sequences. She easily nailed the ending half of the course with the two jumps to the weaves. In fact everything we threw at her with the weave poles she did perfectly and she worked hard all the way through them. I was really proud of her!
2 comments:
COOL!
Two phrases for Devon:
stimulus control
extinction burst
:)
Devon says she doesn't like the word control! It's way over-rated! ;-)
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