Okay, I'm going to show you a video of a freestyle demo we did Saturday. This was totally improvised, we hadn't worked out any choreography to this song, but I really love the song! We arrive at event, there is no boom box: we're stuck with doing freestyle with something that is on my daughter's Ipod, and she doesn't have any of the songs we've been working on! That's okay, we had a lot of fun, and watching this video gives me lots of ideas of things I want to do with this song!
Notice, the performance area is loosely defined, not fully gated, we are outside in an open field, surrounded with unfamilar people, dogs, tents, trucks. High distraction area. So fine, I tell myself, I will perform like we train, and my only goal for this new situation is just not to lose my dog! All I want really is for her to stay with me, and not go running off after a dog/duck/snake/bird.
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What is really lovely for me to see here is that Tigerlily is almost showing her joyful leaping spirit, and that's something that has generally been expressed only in private.I am shamelessly food reinforcing this performance, and it looks like food is falling out of my bait bag unfortunately, but that's okay, she's having fun! She did bark (outside the ring, not on this tape) at pretty much every dog there! haha, but her tone of voice was really different, much more relaxed sounding, excited, yes, happy, not so fearful and nervous and caffeinated as she used to sound. I know this looks like not much to brag about to the real freestyle pros, but I am SO HAPPY to see my little dog is making this kind of progress!
Now, we're going to spend some time really working on just building duration, joy, focus in heeling to music, because wherever we slow down or make a transition, this is where she starts to lose focus and sniff. I think it's really good to see how self control evolves. I'll videotape another version of this in a year or so, and I'll post that on my www.wholedogcamp.com site (or at www.dropshots.com/yasijenny, which has our entire video journal) so you can see how a dog's behavior [4] evolves with training...It doesn't start out perfect, dogs don't learn in the blink of an eye, but behaviors get more refined with training and maturity