Canis Clickercamp – Day 2

And this was particularly evident with the team's aussie when she ran a retrieve session yesterday. Searching without a retrieve command is great fun, but when she had to deliver with the dummy, she looked as though someone had hit her over the head with something hard.

She simply became really "flat". Technically, we know that her retrieve is absolutely fine. But when she entered this "flat" state, everything fell apart. Another way to put it is that she had a serious case of Pavlov on her shoulder.

Today, therefore, the only goal of the training was to get her to find retrieving fun again. We didn't really need to "teach" her anything, but we had to somehow get her into a different state where effective training was possible again.

So what we did was straightforward—do something seemingly "non-clicker" like massive excitement building. The decoy tempted her up to the skies with the reward and ran into the woods so she barked and yelped with anticipation. We got her arousal so high that she forgot to be "flat" in connection with the retrieve. And suddenly the retrieve worked smoothly again. For most "normal" dogs, such excitement building would have made retrieving harder, but in this case it was far more important to get her out of the bad state that had become associated with the retrieve beforehand.

The plan now is to build her arousal in the same way for a couple more sessions so we get many successful repetitions of the retrieve at full distance. With each successful repetition, the retrieve becomes more automated (better "flow"), the need to build her arousal will decrease, and the support can therefore be gradually reduced over the course of the week.

This isn't a solution common enough that we wrote about it in Retrieving in Theory and Practice. But then again, aussies aren't always entirely normal, so sometimes you have to be a bit creative in practice.