TEAM 4 Baseline

I decided to seize today's nice weather and Daddy napping with the toddler to actually train my dog!  Win for me!

I decided to look at the TEAM 4 test behaviors to train some new things and yet still have a ton of carryover for our AKC Open prep work.

We haven't officially put anything together yet for this test but I was confident that she had the foundations necessary for it.  Indeed looking over the test items today it was more so the putting together of the various chains that were new for us, not the skills themselves.

So I decided to take a baseline.  Run through the test and see where she was at:


1. Send to target with distractions, position changes, recall.
Send to target between distractions went well!  I know Zumi can struggle with this and we've done quite a bit of work on it in the past.  3 position changes on a single cue, check.  We've been working those cue discriminations for open and it paid off here. I just have to remember to pause longer!

Recall on a hand signal only- oops.  Zumi "knows" this but apparently not well enough to do it out of context.  Recall signal after a go out and with her toys out just wasn't there.

2. Big figure 8 around distractions.
This one surprised me!  Zumi left the distractions alone fairly nicely.  Well I guess she did almost try to steal one after the exercise finished from the previous exercise!  But the big problem here was stopping as we heeled!

In her defense, we have been practicing our moving sits, moving stands, and moving downs recently!

3. Retrieve and pivoting away.
This one is just so hard for Zumi!  She squealed, but did ultimately turn with me both times.
And then spat out the dumbbell, likely due to all the snow in her mouth!

4. Moving stand, drop, return to heel.
Good girl on the actual exercise. But a lot of auto marking ahead before we started!  We'll  have to work on doing heeling starting out towars the go out area!

Here we took quite a big break.  I'm not sure what grabbed Zumi's attention but she clearly wasn't ready to work.   I thought it might have been the 2nd retrieve item the way she was searching but I'm just not sure!  Either way, I tried to be patient as I told her to take a break, and then yet another break when she wasn't really ready again.

5. Backup-position change- broad jump
This was the exercise I was the least certain about.  I'm sure I've backed her up in front of a jump but not enough to have her think!  I was actually surprised that she did catch my cue eventually and back up vs just jumping!
Didn't sit on the first cue though!

6. Articles.
Good girl!  I've actually practiced articles a small handful of times the last few months which is much more than usual for me!  She had no problem in the snow.


I was pretty pleased!  Big takeaways to work on are:
- recall signal with distractions out and after a send away.
- pivoting away from a thrown item with more confidence, less conflict.
- actually heeling, not stopping!
- backup cue when in front of a jump.
- heeling starting from the go out spot.