Einstein has been adopted!

Great news--

The Clark family from Manhattan Beach has adopted Einstein and he's been with them for several days now. After the first full day they called to say how well he is doing. He is warming up to them much more quickly than any of us had even hoped.

The Clarks have three children, aged 23, 13 and 5. We were worried about the fit with the 5 year old, but she has been wonderful. We explained Einstein's previous negative experience with a child her age, and she took it as her personal mission to show him that not all kids are going to scare him. With patience and some cheddar cheese, she won him over quickly.

We have MANY Shelties who need rescuing, so if you are interested in considering adopting a Sheltie, please click on the link over on the right side of the page. I recently learned that the Sheltie Rescue group often matches up a new dog with a prospective owner waiting in the applicant file and the dog may not even go up on the website. This group places over 300 Shelties a year. It's shocking that so many dogs end up needing to be rescued out of shelters or rehomed. There is nothing wrong with this breed, and in Northern California we didn't have this kind of volume. I think there are some "backyard breeders" producing a lot of dogs in this warmer climate down here. Anyway, we would love to work with you to help match you up with a wonderful Sheltie.

We also need foster homes. If you would consider being a rescue foster home, we would love to hear from you.

Thank you!

More bell work and great progress

We moved back to the door leading outside and worked with the bells the same way we've been doing so for the last day... first on the floor, then hanging from my hand. We're not putting them back on the door, YET. Baby steps. Baby steps.

Target dot goes near the jingle bells

We moved the target dot yet again, this time to the door where the jingle bells are. We're going to start slowly moving it behind the bells, to get him to bump the bells.

You'll notice that we "back up" in terms of our criteria-- once again, because we're in a new location, the game feels different to him so we C/T for merely looking at the dot, and it progresses quickly from there. We got our first "bell touch" in this sequence. I chopped it up a bit to make it shorter for you-- the entire session was 15 minutes long. The dot is inched up behind the bells over the course of this session.

Target dot goes onto the wall

Here is Einstein about 40 minutes after the previous post, working the same target dot which has now been moved onto the wall. The environment was very distracting, my dogs were barking, the window shade was flapping and making noise, a car was pulling up out front, and my snoozing husband got irritated with my other barking dog and started to scold him, which I interrupted since that would derail Einstein. So in the midst of all that, here's how he did learning for the first time how to touch the target dot while taped onto a wall.

By the way, dogs have to learn how to generalize, and it doesn't come naturally to them. So just because he knows how to touch the dot on the floor doesn't mean he instantly knows how to do it when it's on the wall. That feels really different to him. With the immediate feedback from my clicker (my tongue click) he quickly gets the idea and this also strengthens his "generalization" muscle a bit.

By the way, he really dislikes the tripod and I'm standing right by it. I'm going to leave the tripod out in the living room and other places so he gets used to it and stops being suspicious of it.

Here we go:

Target training in the hallway

I just figured out how to use my camera to do videos. Here's Einstein clicker-training with the target dot (which is the lid from a coffee can). The idea is to start moving the target dot around, and eventually put it on the wall, and then behind the jingle bells, so I can train him ultimately to ring the jingle bells when he needs to go outside.

If you're new to clicker training, here is a really quick video on the basic concepts.


It's a slow but very effective process. We're still in the early stages. But here you can see E working on this for the first time in a hallway. He has never had a training session in this hallway, so it's a bit weird for him, and in addition there's a large tripod holding my camera, and my camera makes a very high-pitched sound when it starts and stops, and he dislikes that. So he is not himself here, and look how willing he still is to work for me. What a love.

God bless YouTube. This file is big and would eat up so much of my hard disk that if it were not for YouTube, you'd never see videos of E. By the way, I'm usually grabbing opportunities for training in the margins of my busy life, and I try to stay out of the film because I've often just gotten out of the shower and have on sweats with dripping wet hair, etc. That's certainly the case in this one. So forgive me for not showing you more of what I'm doing as a trainer. I'll do that once I have more time to clean up a bit for the camera!

The different elements of a behavior

It's helpful to think of any behavior as having the following elements:

Distraction in the environment (birds chirping, traffic noise) or in the dog (stress)
Distance (how far away from you can he be and still obey the command? How far can he carry the tennis ball?)
Duration (how many seconds or minutes can he do it?)
Intensity (how hard does he have to push the jingle bells to get them to ring?)
Speed (how quickly does he perform the behavior?)

When we talk about "raising the bar" on a behavior, the truth is that we've got 5 bars, each with their own range of difficulty. So we have to be careful to only raise the criterion of one bar at a time, and when we do, we temporarily relax our requirements for the other ones. Once the new criterion is solidly established, we then work on getting those other elements back where they were. Generally, we want to shape the element of speed last. We want to get the other stuff right before we ask the dog to speed things up.

These concepts apply to all learning situations, by the way, this is not just about dog training. So if you want to improve your golf swing, work on one aspect of it and give yourself a break on the other elements of it while you're learning the new part.

Studying this stuff is fun, it's fascinating, and its immensely applicable in life.

Day 6: evening- Progress!!!

Wow, what a day. I went outside and created an enclosed training space with 2 ex-pens. We worked on "sit" which took him awhile to get (it's a behavior he usually only offers when he's not sure what you want and he's sort of sitting in submission). I saw the lightbulb go on! Soon we were doing it again and again and again. Hooray! So I moved to a new location, which distracted him a bit but he caught back up again. So we moved to another location, and did it some more. Each time you move to a new location you raise the bar a bit. All locations were in the back yard, all only slightly distracting (distractions included a breeze causing the sun umbrellas to rustle and move, background noises, etc).

So I sensed we were on a roll. At the same time, I didn't want to overwhelm him! It's a big training mistake to go too fast. I wanted to try him on my bike with the K9 Cruiser. I clipped him to the short light tether, and slowly walked the bike around the back yard, encouraging him. He was fine! We went out front, and I tried riding slowly. He was fine! We went around a bit in front of the house, and he was doing great (he goes fast!). On my bike I have a rear-mirror positioned to let me know if the dog is happily going as fast as the bike, or if he's falling back in position a bit. This alerts me before he falls into a position where he'd be pulled at all by the bike. He loved it. We went all the way around the block, with cars passing us and everything. The only hiccup came when a neighbor wanted to say hi to him and even though the man was 12 feet away, he started to pull back and panic. He asked to be held, and I held him and he was fine (but we did not move any closer to the man, I didn't want to undo all our progress to date by overwhelming him). We said goodbye and I clipped him back up and we went on our way. He really impressed me with his progress, and frankly he showed a lot resilience in the presence of huge SUVs passing us. Good boy!