Jake's Progress

I was just looking through the little training notebook (Muji, stationery geeks) I keep for Jake. It's not very structured. Pages of little pencil sketches of things to practise from agility classes or shows. A list of things I want to try. A note when I start training something, which I then forget about as I have far more fun drawing our little agility practise routines. It would be oh-so-useful if I was the sort of organised person who maintains fulsome records of how many repetitions we did and what particular thing we shaped on a particular day, but it's all much more random (spontaneous!) than that. So I can see that a few months back I started teaching Jake a few new little things. And since then we've practised them when I'm at home, not particularly frequently, in odd moments here or there.

This week we had a Eureka moment - Jake looked for and then brought me both slippers on command. (This is an essential skill for the slipper-mislaying household that we are.) But all I have by way of records is that we started playing "where's slipper" in September, and that my plan was to back-chain a hunt-the-slipper game with his existing "bring it" routine. Then I say no more about it (though I see many pages of weave/jump layouts) but I know we've worked on various aspects of fetching slippers. Jake thinks it's one of the best games ever - he loves sniffing round the flat for stinky slippers. And we reward him for his troubles! Sometimes twice!

This is a very traditional dog-skill. I don't think I'll be following up by teaching him to carry the newspaper home from the shop for me. It would end in papier-mâché. The next training goal is to teach Jake another word for Rod's slippers and repeat, repeat, repeat.

Labels: Training