I think it is safe to say our puppies aren't easily startled, I dish out toys like this most of the time so that they're used to things just appearing from no where. The Dog Photographer has also posted a sneak peek of the photos from this weekend, puppy in the picture is Beige. Take a look here
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So we have covered manding before in another post, a quick recap is that it is essentially teaching the puppies that they can ask for something (attention or food for these guys) and helping teach them to be polite. Today Claire came over and we did some work on impulse control, manding is a form of impulse control too, around food and mugging us for treats. Being tiny puppies you can't expect them to just understand that they can't just take a treat out of your hand, jump all over you or bite you until you give in however you can teach this to them. We took a handful of treats and held them in a closed hand, the puppies then tried to break in by licking, pawing, biting etc the second they backed off we took a treat from the closed hand and fed them from the other hand a short way away from the body to teach them they can be rewarded away from our bodies as well as up close which will come in handy when they're a bit older. As we went along we asked for more and more from the puppies, going from a momentary movement away to the puppies stepping away, making eye contact with us, sitting and walking away. We also managed to get to the point with some of them that we could keep the hand open with the treats in clear view, something that is quite complex and many adult dogs are not capable of. Unfortunately we didn't get any of this on video however this shows exactly what we did. Claire was really impressed with how bright these puppies are and how quickly they picked up on this. She also managed to get a video of the puppies manding, something I've not managed to do! I brought the ball pool over today for the puppies and they absolutely loved it! The balls went absolutely everywhere and even triggered a mini zoomie from Green who was nuts about this. I could watch them playing all day, they're so funny. I hope you all enjoy the video! As promised here is some video from the puppy party, there isn't much as we were quite busy! Enjoy Del, The Dog Photographer, came out to the house today to take photos of the puppies. He'll upload the photos to his website in a week or two but here's a behind the scenes sneak peak of this afternoon.
Hi Guys! We have been so busy these past couple of weeks, it's been so difficult to find the time to sit down and write a post. The puppy culture programme is keeping us busy, that and all the cleaning and feeding! I've been meaning to write a post about fear periods, something that we have experienced this week however this post is more exciting so I'll write about that at a later date. This weekend we had a puppy party, it was great fun if not a bit damp. The puppy party covers three aspects, socialisation with people, new experiences and getting used to having people around but not having people interact with them. We invited a few friends over to help us out and they adored the puppies. We put out 3 stations, initially these were a tunnel, a wobble board and a mini dog walk but as the puppies are used to the tunnel we ended up switching that out and putting the fitbone in. I set the timer and the puppies had 2 mins on each bit of equipment before going off and having a rest in a crate (which the sables did not appreciate!). (Click on photos to enlarge) We then went and had some lunch before repeating this again, then we went out in the garden for a play. It had been tipping it down so the puppies borrowed some of Dottys coats, we gave up eventually as they were a bit big. They needed drying off after their adventures and Orange fell asleep in Nathans arms. They were all exhausted. They also met Sasha today, Sasha is a big German Shepherd teddy that has confused many dogs. The puppies had no such worries as you can see! What did confuse Black though was Claire's baby bump. I hope you enjoyed the pictures as much as we enjoyed the party. There are some videos floating around which I'll add to a different post soon :)
I realised today that despite living there the puppies have never actually been outside into Caroles garden! So I did the right thing and let them out for some playtime, they were totally exhausted as you can imagine. It was really lovely to see Kumi being able to play properly with the puppies, they played bitey face and Kumi also played Keep Away which was so funny. We had the tunnel out as well, not quite sure Purple has got the hang of it! I also bought a old carpet inner tube with me to use as a barrier, as you can see they had no issues with it! We had another clicker session today which went really well, all the puppies are clearly understanding it but Orange and Beige showed the most understanding. Both of them twigged that they controlled this food and mimicked the same movement 3 or 4 times in a row, for Orange this was moving his head down and slightly to his left and for Beige it was nose poking the box in exactly the same place. It sounds very simple but this is a great leap in their learning process. On Thursday we will probably start manding with them, watch this space!
Today we moved on from just introducing the clicker and we have begun the "Box Game". The aim of this is to teach the puppies that they can do something to trigger the clicker, it makes them realise that they have an amount of control over a situation, some trainers use this in older dogs to allow them to "opt in/out" of a difficult or stressful situation but thats for a later post. With the puppies we want them to realise that their behaviour has a consequence, at this moment in time it's all positive. We place a box on the ground and click for any interaction the puppy makes, this can be looking towards the box, walking towards it, touching it, sitting in it etc etc. It is slightly different from the box game that we play with adults dogs, with them we aim to shape the behaviour and get the dog to step in side the box and stay there. Once they have fully understood this concept we will use it to teach something called "Manding". Manding is essentially giving the puppies a voice and allowing them to ask for something. Want a fuss? Sit nicely in front of me and I'll give you one. When your puppy comes home you can expand this to other things such as going outside (sit nicely at the door and you can go out) or meal times (sit while I get your food ready). Many people know this concept as Nothing In Life Is Free (NILIF) or Learn to Earn and it is something Carole and I both follow, to us it is good manners, impulse control and means we have control over situations that can be over exciting, if a dog is over excited before it even steps foot out of the door how can we expect them to be calm and listen when they get outside. It's also something you will hear us recommend once you reach that barky teenage stage, in this case the dog can't go out/get out of the car/have its dinner until it is quiet. I've included some links so you can have a read and learn a bit more. The only behaviour we do NOT recommend is tethering the dog to you at all times http://k9deb.com/nilif.htm http://drsophiayin.com/blog/entry/the-learn-to-earn-program http://drsophiayin.com/blog/entry/the-learn-to-earn-program-implementing-the-program http://www.brooklinelabrescue.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/LearnToEarn.pdf I think I have posted previously about giving the puppies challenges, today I decided to use cardboard boxes to sort of make a channel, put the puppy bump out (that white pvc tube) and another box for them to work out how to get around, safe to say they mastered it! You'll also hear me calling "Puppy puppy puppy" which is the start of their recall training. Every time we feed them we use this call and they have begun to associate it with something good. This is the basis for any recall and it will come in handy for you in the future! Enjoy the video, tomorrow I think I'll put a tunnel out for them to go through which I'll try to record again :) It's been a while since we did a weigh in, I thought you'd like to see how much the puppies weigh now at 5 weeks old in comparison to their birth weights.
In birth order Purple Birth - 320g 5 weeks old - 2kg 970g Green Birth - 300g 5 weeks old - 3kg 345g Black Birth -258g 5 weeks old - 2kg 880g Orange Birth - 333g 5 weeks old - 3kg 740g Beige Birth - 265g 5 weeks old - 3kg 775g Orange and Beige put on over 1kg in the last week and as you can see Beige has gone from the second smallest puppy to the biggest puppy! What a chunky monster! Part of Puppy Culture is getting the puppies to think and learn how to problem solve. Simple challenges such as putting a small hump or box between the puppies and their dinner and letting them work out how to get over it, or as I tried today placing a puppy pen between the puppy and their dinner and letting them work out that they have to go around it not through it to get to the food. Some of the pups found this challenging and some of them found it really simple however watching back the videos it seems that the ones that struggled were also having to deal with the other puppies being quite noisy, they have such limited attention spans at this point that they struggled with this distraction. It's hard to find a space in Caroles house that has a wipe clean floor but is out of ear shot from the other puppies so we will try this again at some point at my house and work on other things at Caroles house. Below are the videos from today, I've cut out most of the bits where they go wandering off otherwise the videos would be quite long! You'll notice that you don't actually see Beige finish this challenge, about a minute in to him working on this Orange decided to throw a strop about the fact that he couldn't get out of the outhouse and when Orange throws a strop he screams and screams. It freaked Beige out a bit so we stopped and had a break but my camera ran out of battery before Beige succeeded. Rest assured he did it, it just took a while :) Watch for Black pouncing at 1.50min, utterly adorable! |
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