Back to Basics with Langley

Langley really loves training and when Langley loves something, he REALLY can get excited. For awhile we had a problem because he loved his evening walks with Troy so much that he would start crying and whining a full hour before Troy got home from work. Then by the time it was really time for the walk he was so worked up with excitement that he was dang near manic. Thankfully moving his walk times around to different times so he doesn't know when to expect them has mostly solved this problem.

However, when it comes to getting excited, Langley can fall back into being more impulsive which makes training work kind of tricky. He's so excited to get that reinforcer that even though he knows the cues very well, he tends to try to through out a few different behaviors in lightning speed in hopes that one of them will cause the magic click sound.

He knows a lot of cues for different behaviors: sit, down, stay, wait, bang (play dead), off, spin, reverse, touch, check in, and probably a lot more that I don't remember because I haven't made a cue dictionary for him yet, like I should.

One of the problems I have as a trainer though is that I get so excited at how fast he learns new things that I don't really work on something long enough for it to be really locked in his brain. That makes it even easier for Langley to fall into his habit of throwing me a bunch of behaviors and hoping one of them is correct.

Langley is very, very still when he does his sit and down, but his tail is always a blur

So over the last week I decided to go back and work on the basics. Forget all the cute tricks and focus on sit, down, stay and then when those are super strong to do recall work that I always tell adopters is the most important thing to train and yet am too lazy to really work on with my own dogs.

It's going pretty well so far. I'm still trying to find a way to help him be a little less excited about training work because it doesn't take much for his brain to lock everything out except "I'M GONNA EARN A TREAT!!!!"

Langley practicing a down-stay while I snap photos

And then I don't help thing by starting to laugh when he gets so excited. Sometimes he gets to a point where every cue is preceded by 2 excited leaps nearly 5 feet in the air and then he falls in this epic belly flop into a "down". I don't reinforce his "leaping downs" with clicks, but I do start to giggle which he knows is a good thing.

So we'll get there but considering my beginning clicker training skills and his impulsiveness we certainly aren't going to be getting there very quickly.