Chuck has a hold!
Last time I had posted I wanted to start teaching Chuck a nice solid hold of objects. While I am teaching him to target my hand to shove objects into, I also want him to be able to simply pause for a few seconds for his future client to get ready, and eventually learn to drop objects directly onto my lap. Well I have to admit that I wasn't very excited to begin this hold training as it is always such a big pain in the butt. Lance took forever, Vito used to levitate, and all the dogs at work just chomp constantly.
But as it turns out, Chuck made it so extremely easy that we had a 5 second hold in two days! TWO DAYS, and Chuck would even hold a dumbbell solidly in his mouth while I lowered his bowl of food to the floor. I can't take any credit for his awesome hold, he just understood. The method I used was simply withholding the click for a 1/2 second and quickly increasing duration. I also held up my little pointy finger which means "wait." Usually I have to do a huge combination of every method I have ever read about and it takes months to get one without any mouthing. And really at work I pretty much just throw my hands in the air, say screw it, and just work accuracy of retrieving to hand, lap, and to other surfaces.
Ironically when I went to take this picture right now, baby Chuck had apparently just lost a tooth! So he was grabbing the dumbbell eagerly but his jaw was shaking and blood was all over the dumbbell.
I also took Chuck to the Mall of America yesterday and was really proud of how focused and confident he was. I sadly have not been taking Chuck out in public as often as I would like and most of his outings so far have been to dog shows of various types. But thankfully Chuck had no issues with anything from the growling "alligator" to the crazy rollercoasters.
Wow!! I'm jealous of Chuck, I've never even been to Mall of America lol.
Congratulations on teaching him such a great hold! That's amazing that he learned so quickly. Smart puppy!
Don't worry about not doing the 7 list thing for the blog award - I don't always do it either. I just wanted to let you guys know how awesome I think your blog is!
I tried playing around with Windows Movie Maker, but it's giving me problems. I'll try figuring it out. Thanks for telling me the program :)
What the heck? Did my comment get eaten? OK, well I said lots of stuff about stupid PeeWee learning to pick up things while I still don't get it, but I said something even more important.
Which is. You need to tell you mom to quit with the peemail to my mom. Like totally I just went to go outside and she would not even open the door until I had NO feet on the door mat. She said the door mat is the new dividing line. Dividing me from happy fun times seems like.
Slobbers,
Mango
Awesome work. Such a relief that he's picked it up so quick, it is a pain to train if they don't "get it" at the start. Totally jealous that you get to take him to fun places. Must be super cool having a wee dog to tag along everywhere
Sweet! Lok was also extremely difficult to teach a hold and still doesn't have it down well at all. I got lucky with Jun. She was easy.
Of course he can holds objects. He's a labrador!!! :P