Two sessions today, both with the tea bag. Tomorrow I'll get what I need for a scent wheel, but today we continued cementing the behaviour and building enthusiasm with the hunting game.
I started by screwing up, but realized what I'd done pretty quickly. I thought I'd just do a couple of reps with the tea bag in my hand and nothing in the other hand, getting her to pick which hand. So, she picked the tea bag hand, I said Yes, and reached over to the table with the other hand to give her a kibble. Then I asked her again. Oops. She immediately went back to picking the kibble-scent.
I've had dogs that could, in a 5.5-second race lap, do 2 standing starts, 96 feet over 8 jumps, pickup and retrieve, and choose the article that I had touched from three others, then do a single retrieve for somebody else and then choose their article in the next race WHEN MINE WAS AVAILABLE TO BE PICKED - but clearly they had a lot more experience in scenting than Syn has had!
Then, as Lynn suggested, I forgot about the down indicator. We'll go back to the nose-plant when I get the scent wheel made and above the floor, but for today I just let her retrieve the tea bag (which quickly added its own liquid enhancement to the strength of the scent).
I put Syn in the bathroom to hide her eyes and hid the tea bag somewhere in the next room. Then I sat down in the room and invited her in with Okay, Which One? and she'd come galloping in and start hunting immediately. She found the bag in some pretty tough places and it was a lot of fun for me to watch her following the scent trail from the middle of the room to the hidden tea bag. She's very eager to play this game, is building some nice duration of the search behaviour, and didn't fail once, even when I took the tea bag into another room (with people and other dogs, TV and dog dishes) and hid it. She knew immediately what the game was, and found the tea bag - probably more quickly than she had in the regular room since there was no contamination from previous hides.
Syn, at this point, in my house, truly understands that she needs to find the tea bag scent - at least as long as I don't offer her a choice of tea bag scent vs kibble.
Because the real goal right now is testing the voracity of the sample in different forms, etc. we won't need to worry about generalizing in different locations, etc. This is a switch from other training I had done in this respect. And what it has done for Lily, at least, is strengthen the foundation behavior - her ability to distinguish the target scent.
ReplyDeleteSo when you say that Syn can do something in your living room at this time, that's GOOD! She doesn't have to do it anywhere else. Not unless you decide at some time in the future, to train her to use her newly acquired scenting talents in some other venue.
If you wanted to follow the project and train her to be a Seizure Alert dog, then eventually you would train an alert behavior and ultimately chain it all together, remembering that she would be alerting to that scent ON YOUR BODY.