Zumi- Bird Love
Still continuing our gun dog training adventures. The biggest struggle remains the use of actual bird wings, attached to a bumper. We successfully mastered taking treats in exchange for the bumpers int the house. Yay!
Outside we are understandably back a step. Bird outranks other motivators, by a lot. Because she is a good girl and has a solid foundation, Zumi is still willing to do a nice take and hold outside. Some minor mouthing is happening when learning how to move with it (just to her platform) and sometimes when releasing it to me. I just calmly interrupt her and try again. But as Zumi will only pretend, half heartedly at that, to play with her toy she is left with praise and getting to have the wing in her mouth again as a reward.
This was yesterday's session outside, her very first one:
Today we made slight progress in that she seemingly understands by "playing" with the toy she gets the bird again. It is completely fake playing with the wussiest mouths and retrieves ever. But I'll take it. Eventually she really will need to play for real, both so I have an actual reward and because of the WC test for Tollers requires "tolling" aka repetitive fetching along the shoreline before each of the water marks.
