Lightning’s pile work has steadily improved in each session. Today we worked at 50y and ran a dozen retrieves (half N-to-S and half S-to-N), and I only fired the gun five times, enough to discourage shopping. We had four retrieves with a single whistle Sit, and one with two whistle Sits en route.

Lightning’s work is not yet perfect. For example, he loops out to the right on his sits, and sometimes he  plays around during his return rather than coming straight back.

In addition, he’s lost some of the quality in his coming to heel with the bumper. We’ll work on each of those problems; this post addresses that last one.

Here’s the game I used to work on Lightning’s Heel response. As he and I walked back to the van, Lightning world run around with a bumper. After a few seconds, I’d call Heel, or sometimes Here and then Heel. Using an open palm to guide him, I’d swing him around to heel position on either side, he’d sit (often uncued), and I’d take the bumper. Then, without delay, I’d step back a couple of feet with Lightning still in a sit and eyes locked on me, then toss the bumper in an arc for him to leap up and grab. He’d run around some more and we’d do it again, gradually moving closer to the vehicle.

A bonus of the game is that I’d toss the bumper so Lightning would catch it in the middle, giving him practice carrying it correctly in the context of excited play. 

Lightning found this game great fun and his responses to Heel rapidly improved. We’ll continue playing it in coming days, possibly even on occasional retrieve deliveries. I expect to see that same improvement carry over into Lightning’s pile work and field work, eventually helping provide reliable, high quality deliveries in competition.

About a year ago, Laddie and I attended our first workshop with a pro. I felt we got so much out of it that we attended two more last year, and then another earlier this spring, in a variety of locations but all with the same, outstanding pro.

Then, starting Monday of this week, Laddie and I have been attending our second workshop this year, again with the same pro (he’s addictive). But this time I’ve also enrolled Lightning in the workshop. 

The first day the group ran a land quad and land blind. The second day we ran what’s called a Chinese drill, consisting of six water blinds and three land blinds mixed together and in increasing difficulty. The third day, today, we ran a water quad with a flyer, and then a water blind. Each day also included video sessions; the pro has recording equipment that lets him record us while we’re working and then show the work to the group immediately so that we can hear his comments and ask questions.

Like all the workshops, this has been invaluable for Laddie and me. But as you know if you’ve been following this journal, much of that work was over Lightning’s head. So the pro has helped Lightning in a couple of different ways to make the workshop worthwhile for him as well.

First, of course, he’s come up with modifications to the marking setups that would provide useful training for Lightning. For example, for today’s water quad, when it was Lightning’s turn, we ran it as follows:

1. We moved up to a position where Lightning was as unlikely as possible to run banks, and ran a water double where both gun stations were wingers throwing ducks, with diamond-shaped stickmen at the wingers, and a fairly long swim for the memory bird.
2. We backed up to the original start line and ran the original flyer water mark, with its long land entry, as a single.
3. We moved to another of the ponds and the pro threw a duck as a bridge mark (that is, from land across water to land on the other side) requiring a long swim but with relatively low chance of running the bank.

I won’t go into detail on this work but I felt Lightning did reasonably well given his level, learned a lot, and had a blast.

In addition to Lightning having the opportunity to run marks with the big dogs, and because Lightning isn’t ready to run blinds, the pro has also been observing and giving me guidance on Lightning’s two yard work sessions per day, which we’ve been doing before and after the regular part of the day.

The yard work sessions are enabling Lightning to make incremental progress on his pile work skills. I think it would be worthwhile to describe where we are in that work at this time, so here was this afternoon’s session:

1. I brought out six 2” ropeless white bumpers and tossed five of them into a pile, keeping one with me. I also loaded my blank pistol with six shells.
2. I brought out Lightning, set up on a line to the pile but further from the pile than I can throw, brought Lightning to heel and threw the bumper I had with me, then sent him. He ran to it, and as he grabbed it, I fired the pistol, which brought him excitedly back to me so I could take the bumper and throw it for him again without requiring him to sit first. The gunshot and fun bumper are hugely reinforcing for Lightning, with the effect of improving the quality of his pickups from the pile.
3. I brought Lightning to heel five more times, randomly alternating sides. Each time, I lined him up facing in the direction of the pile, though the bumpers lying in the grass were not visible from that distance, and sent him with a Back cue. In most cases, the instant he picked up a bumper, I fired the pistol and then threw a fun bumper for him as soon as he brought the bumper back.
4. The exception occurred on the fourth pickup, because that time, I blew the whistle and he didn’t stop. I called out No but he still picked up the bumper, so I met him halfway back from the pile, took the bumper, cued Leave it, and tossed it back to the pile. Then we walked together back to the start line.  I felt he wouldn’t like that very much and would be more likely to stop next time.
5. Indeed, the next time I sent him, I again blew the whistle, and this time he stopped. So I cued Back and he raced to the pile, again receiving a gunshot and happy bumper for his pickup.
6. After one more send without stopping him, we ended the session with one last send that included a whistle, and again this time he stopped. So that ended the session on a high note for me, while the resulting Back, gunshot, and happy bumper ended the session on a high note for Lightning.

Six retrieves in a pile work session seems about right for Lightning at this point. I’ve tried more, but his performance deteriorates markedly. The pro explained to me that it’s valuable for the handler and dog to work thru adversity, and we’ve done that some of the sessions. But my clicker training background makes me more comfortable ending while the dog is still at peak motivation and hungry for more work, so this afternoon’s session of six retrieve (seven if you count the one where he didn’t stop on the whistle) seemed just about right to me.

We’ll do another pile work session tomorrow morning, probably similar to this afternoon’s, and one last one after tomorrow’s work with the big dogs. Then we’ll continue such sessions at home. As Lightning begins to show some fluency, I’ll increase the distance and begin to fade out firing the pistol so often, and hopefully, soon I’ll have a puppy who loves to stop on the whistle and make excellent pickups and returns. At that point, but not before, we’ll be ready to go onto our next step of training.

Update: On the fourth and last day of the workshop, Lightning had another yard session on the morning. When group training began, he then he ran a version of the land double the other dogs were running, with one gunner and one winger. Finally, since both marks of the  group water double were cheat-y and not suitable for Lightning’s level (though Laddie nailed them), the pro arranged for Lightning to run three gunner-thrown water marks across one of the other ponds, each on a different line. The birds were thrown near the far shore but not on land to reduce the likelihood Lightning would cheat around the oval shoreline, and in fact, although he squared the far shore part of the swim to the marks a couple of times, he didn’t do that on any of his returns and never got up onto land on any of the retrieves, which was good. Also, even though I backed away from the shoreline so that Lightning would have to carry the bird on land some distance when he got out of the water, he didn’t drop any of the birds and delivered them nicely at heel.

By contrast, during the land double, Lightning dropped the first bird at the line and had difficulty responding to my Fetch cues. He needs to become more reliable in his deliveries, but in his defense, the weather was hot and dogs can’t perspire but rather need to pant with their tongues hanging out to cool off. Lightning couldn’t do that with the bird in his mouth. He just needs to learn to wait a little longer and deliver the bird first. Apparently overheating wasn’t a problem with the water marks later in the day.

The traditional solution to shopping during pile work is using a long line, as mentioned in Mike Lardy’s video and in an earlier post in this journal. But Lightning has been developing a different, though possibly related, behavior: overrunning the pile, then picking up a bumper on the way back toward the handler, sometimes with a little shopping.

Besides being a bit annoying, I could see this hurting in competition if two dogs ran straight to the mark during their turns, and one picked it up cleanly while the other first overran it. Unfortunately, it seemed to be self-reinforcing: Lightning was doing more and more.

I have various theories about why he was doing it, but that’s not the behaviorist way. I just wanted to change the behavior.

A long line might have worked, but stopping the dog on a dime felt a little risky to the dog’s well-being. Besides, it wasn’t just that I wanted Lightning not to overrun the pile; I wanted him to mentally select an article as he approached and then grab it the instant he arrived.

The solution I decided on was pure positive reinforcement and closely akin to clicker training: I would reinforce the desired response with a marker for which Lightning had a positive association, then follow-up with a primary reinforcer. But I would withhold reinforcement for an incorrect response, so that those responses would eventually extinguish. Clicker trainers use a clicker as the marker, also known as a bridge or secondary reinforcer. I would use a gunshot from a blank pistol.

Here was the actual training plan:

1. With Lightning at heel, toss a bumper a few feet in front of him and cue Fetch. He already has a correct trained response to Fetch, so he picks the bumper up as soon as he can. But rather than me just taking it from him, I fire the pistol, then take the bumper and chuck it away for him to excitedly chase.
2. Repeat, but cue Back instead.
3. Continue to repeat, but begin adding more and more distance. Every time Lightning picks the bumper as he reaches it, I fire the pistol simultaneously with the pickup, then call Here and grab the bumper to throw it for him as quickly as I can. But whenever Lightning overruns the bumper, I instantly call out No, Here (our no-reward marker), calling him back to me without a bumper. If he picks up a bumper anyway, I meet him half-way, gently take the bumper, and toss it back to the pile.
4. Once Lightning is solid with a single bumper, I start back at a short distance and repeat the same sequence, but this time with a pile of three bumpers (near one another but not touching).

The idea that the moment Lightning grabs a bumper, a gun goes off and an instant later he gets to chase a thrown bumper, but none of that happens if he runs past the bumper, provides the kind of clarity that makes positive reinforcement so powerful. Lightning was retrieving cleanly from a pile of three bumpers at 20y in a single session. In the next session or two, we’ll extend the work out to 50y, and then resume our pile work training sequence, hopefully with this problem put to bed.

Lightning was able to perform Step 2 of pile work, sit to pile, the first time we tried it, and again the second time several retrieves later in the same session. But when we tried Step 3, sit from pile, in the next session, he was unable to perform it in several tries, so we used the next few sessions to shape the behavior a little at a time.

The sessions were as follows:

1. In the first session, place Lightning in a Sit, walk some distance away, and call him to me. As he runs toward me, whistle Sit and, if necessary, immediately also say Sit. As soon as he sits, fire a blank pistol and throw a bumper for him to chase. The gunshot and chase turns this into an exciting drill for Lightning, creating high reinforcement history for the remote sit on cue. Repeat two or three times per session and repeat as many sessions as needed till fluent.
2. In next session, place Lightning in a Sit, give him a 2” white bumper with no rope to hold in his mouth, and continue as in the previous step. After firing the pistol, run to him, take the bumper, and quickly as possible throw it for him to chase.
3. With Lightning sitting at heel, walk away, place the bumper on the ground, walk back, and cue Back. When Lightning picks up the bumper, proceed as in previous step.
4. With Lightning sitting at heel, throw the bumper, then cue Back. Proceed as in previous step.
5. With Lightning sitting at heel, walk away, throw the bumper even further in the direction you were walking, walk back, cue Back, and proceed as in previous step.
6. Now we’re ready to run sit from pile as Mike Lardy illustrates in the TRT video.

For Lightning, sit from pile took more sessions than I expected after watching Mike demonstrate it in the TRT video. But breaking it down and shaping it a little at a time, Lightning made good progress and soon accomplished the objective.

Along the way, Lightning received high value reinforcement many times for sitting on the whistle, converting it from a difficult cue when we began this work to a cue he was eager and quick to respond to. Hopefully that reinforcement will carry forward, blending with other kinds of reinforcement he experiences, as he is asked to sit on whistle countless more times in training and competition in the coming years. 

The remainder of the field progression material for the Basics stage in Mike Lardy’s Total Retriever Marking program contains a wealth of diverse information. However, it’s difficult to incorporate into PRT as individual steps because it’s not completely in sync with his Total Retriever Training video or flow chart. For example, TRM shows training of a delayed indent land triple after training doubles, something not mentioned in TRT or the flow chart. Also, some of the water training in TRM corresponds to work I did with Lightning months ago, and would have done even sooner if the weather had allowed it.

In addition to the training demonstrations, the discussion segment at the end of TRM disc 1 covers many interesting and important topics, though some only pertinent to particular dogs, and some more pertinent to a new dog owner than one who has been training his/her dog for months.

I’d recommend PRT trainers view all of the TRM Basics material, most of which is just as applicable to a positive-trained dog as one being trained with traditional methods.

Meanwhile, as I continue to work with Lightning thru the PRT Stage 2 yard progression, which correspond to the TRT Basics yard progression, I’ll expand our field progression to include the items shown on the TRT flow chart and in the TRM material.

Here’s the list of things I’ll be looking for opportunities to work on with Lightning whenever possible during our Stage 2 field work:

• Land singles, preferably of multiple guns
• Land doubles
• Occasional retired guns
• Delayed land triples, for example in the indent configuration demonstrated on the TRM video
• LWL water singles
• LWLW and LWLWL water singles (that is, re-entries)
• Water doubles
• Water marks with long water segments
• Occasional gentle de-cheating with a long line

I’ll also use a mix of marks that Lightning can nail without a hunt, with occasional marks thrown into cover and requiring a hunt. Mike explains on the TRM video that dogs are naturally inclined to use their noses and need to learn to mark visually, but can become too dependent on their eyes, so that needs to be balanced with throws intro cover that require the dog to use scent for the hunt. I think hunting strategies, like quartering and staying in the area of the fall, can also be developed by judicious use of marks that require some hunting, and calling on the gunner for help when the dog does go too far astray.

For me, the key to all of this work is training with groups as often as possible. I try to do both yard work and field work with Lightning every day, alternating Lightning and Laddie setups when we go out. Since I don’t have many opportunities to train with other trainers, I usually rely on paid assistants. But I’m always looking for opportunies to train with a group, and taking them whenever possible.

Yesterday, for example, we trained with a group of four other trainers, some with one dog, some with two, all far more advanced than Lightning and a couple also more advanced than Laddie. Our leader designed a double blind, a triple, and a double, all containing both land and water segments. Some of the retrieves were quite difficult even for the advanced dogs, and only one was suitable for Lightning without modification.

But with the group leader’s help, I was able to run Lightning on:

• A single thrown on an angle back over a narrow channel not visible till the dog was close. Lightning took a good line and leapt into the channel as soon as he got to it, swam across and picked up the bird with a small hunt.
• A long land single thru varied terrain including hills, trees, and woods behind the fall. Lightning took a good line, quickly checked out the woods, and then found the bird with s small hunt.
• A double consisting of an LWL mark made up of fairly long land segments and a fairly wide channel, thrown into the edge of a strip of high cover, as the memory bird, and a land mark requiring Lightning to run thru areas of high cover but with the bird thrown onto a patch of short cover, as the go-bird.

Lightning’s performance on all of the work was good. He came to the start line with reasonable line manners despite his enthusiasm, and made no attempt to break on any but one of the marks and of course was unable to break because I was holding his tab on the one mark, the go-bird of the double, where he would have broken without the tab. He ran good lines on every mark, and though he didn’t pin any of them, he only had one long hunt, again the go -bird of the double. He didn’t need help from the gunner on any of them. All of the marks were ducks, and he picked all of them up, came straight back to me on the run, came to heel on the side I indicated as he approached, sat down at heel, and held each bird till I took it without a drop and without sticking or freezing.

These are all fairly typical behaviors in a trained field retriever. It was good to see them in Lightning’s performance training with a group of big dogs, and demonstrated how yard work gradually merges with field work during PRT Stage 2, corresponding to TRT Basics.

Today Lightning turned nine months old, and I thought I’d get a couple of videos of his work in Stage 2 of our PRT program, both the yard progression and the field progression.

For the yard progression, we’ve  completed pile work step 1, Back from heel, and are just beginning to work on step 2, sit to pile. But I managed to bring Lightning out for the yard work session withou my whistle, so I went ahead and ran a step 1 session. Here’s the video:

For the field progression, we’re mostly working on singles offf multiple guns on both land and water, with occasional land doubles and occasional retired land singles. For the video I wanted to record a double, but I only had two assistants and needed one of them to take the video. So we ran a somewhat artificial double with a poorman mark as the memory bird. Here’s that video:

I could provide a blow-by-blow narrative for each of the videos, but I think I’d be doing mostly two things: I’d be repeating information from previous posts, such as addressing the dropped bumper in the first video by picking it up and tossing it away. That was Lightning’s only bumper dropped at the line today. Or I’d be trying to explain flaws in the work, such as having to cue Sit so many times during the second video’s memory mark because we haven’t practiced poorman marks in a few weeks.

Instead, I think I’ll let the videos stand as fairly representative examples of Lightning’s current level of performance within the PRT program. While not perfect, I think they show a high level of enthusiasm and a developing proficiency..

Sometimes Lightning drops a bumper a few feet in front of me on his return during pile work, instead of holding it as he comes around to heel and awaits me taking it from him.

I can use a Fetch cue to get him to pick it up, and that’s what I better do in a competition, since we’ll be disqualified if I touch the bird on the ground.

But since our Fetch cue is trained with positive reinforcement rather than an ear pinch or collar nick, Lightning has no reason to avoid it, so i guess that’s the reason the dropping behavior doesn’t diminish once it starts happening in a session.

A similar thing happens with some dogs on water retrieves, where they drop the article and shake off just as they come out of the water. For some reason Lightning doesn’t do that, but both of my Goldens tended to when they were learning water retrieves, possibly because of their longer, heavier coats.

Years ago I found a counterintuitive yet effective solution to drops coming out of the water: pick the bumper up and toss it back in the water. Instinctively I would have thought that would actually reinforce dropping the article, since my dogs love open water retrieves, but for some reason they don’t like having to turn around and jump back in the water if they haven’t finished the previous retrieve.

It turns out the same approach works with Lightning on pile work. If he drops the bumper in front of me, I quickly pick it up and use a low, unexciting throw to toss it back in the direction he came from. Lightning always delivers it correctly the second time, and the drops quickly diminished when I started doing that.

You might remember that when Lightning completes his delivery, I often fire a shot from my blank pistol and throw the bumper in a new direction to add excitement to the pile work drill. Lightning seems to really looks forward to those gunfire retrieves, so he quickly learned to eliminate the delay that occurs when he drops the bumper coming back from the pile and I toss it back out. I’m not sure why the delay didn’t cause the drops to diminish when I used a Fetch cue, but for some reason it didn’t.

Picking up and tossing a dropped article runs so counter to how I’d expect it to work, on land ot water returns, that I thought I’d devote a post to just to that topic.

As I’ve mentioned, training recall using positive methods such as Walking Recall is a long-term project, but Lightning’s recall is coming along.

Besides Walking Recall, one of the scenarios we’ve used a long line for is calling Lightning away from one of his dog or human friends even in the middle of an initial greeting, when Lightning typically goes crazy, acting as though the dog or person is some long-lost companion he feared he’d never see again. For that scenario and others we’ve trained, I no longer need Lightning on a long line to call him to me. 

For example, in a video I took today, Lightning is released from my side to visit his friend and my training assistant Peter, who has just parked his car in the driveway. In the middle of Lightning’s enthusiastic greeting, I call him back to me. He responds instantly and comes to heel, a nice performance that I reinforce by releasing him back to visit Peter again. Here’s the video:

In an earlier post, I described the difficulty our holistic vet had trimming Lightning’s nails a couple visits ago and the approach I subsequently took to counter-conditioning his fear of the Dremel. That has since evolved into a daily routine, probably more about bonding than nail trimming since I don’t take much off each nail. But at our last visit to the vet, she had no trouble getting the nails down to the proper length.

Here’s a video of the way Lightning and I conduct his daily nail trimming nowadays:

The narrator for Mike Lardy’s TRT video describes some problems that might come up when training pile work, and Mike illustrates some of the solutions. I ran into some other issues with Lightning, and I suspect other positive trainers, and even traditional trainers, might encounter the same ones or others.

But since as a positive trainer I’m not going to use an ear pinch or other physical aversives to address the problems, I thought I’d mention some of the problems I ran into and the solutions, among other possible solutions, I happened to choose:

• Problem: Hot weather. Lightning’s motivation to run even a few retrieves from pile was especially limited when daytime temps were climbing into the 70s, 80s, and even 90s. Solution: Get up before dawn and take Laddie and Lightning to the field where we’ll be working so that we can get started at first light, before it gets too hot.
• Problem: Declining interest. I’ve had difficulty arranging for an assistant to run marks lately so the dogs and I have done mostly yard work the last few days. In Lightning’s case that meant pile work. Lightning has great enthusiasm for being sent to the pile on Back, but his performance on the pickups and returns has tended to decline as he comes up with various avoidance behaviors. Solution: As soon as Lightning returns and delivers at heel, I take out a blank pistol, fire a shot, and throw the bumper he just brought me in some random direction as far as I can for him to chase and retrieve. I don’t do it every time but often enough that it’s creating high reinforcement history for the less interesting part of pile work, the return and delivery.
• Problem: Carrying bumpers by the rope. I’ve been hoping that Lightning would stop doing this on his own, and he probably would eventually, but I’m tired of it. Solution: Today I took out my picket knife and cut the ropes off several of our 2” white bumpers. We’ll do pile work with those for a while, and I’ll get some more ropes for them in the future. Note : If you haven’t decided on a favorite Every Day Carry (EDC), may I suggest the Kershaw Scallion? Wonderful knife, available in many colors and a variety of handle and blade materials.  :0)

I’m looking forward to moving on to the double T with Lightning, when we’ll really be doing some handling. But now is the time to polish up Lightning’s performance on the pure retrieve pattern of pile work, as well as training steps 2 and 3 of pile work, sit to pile and come-in from pile. Meanwhile, when we’re able to get in some field work, I feel we can never do too many singles off multiple guns, throwing in occasional retired singles and occasional doubles.