Fun with Dogs!

I have a serious love/hate thing going with video.  Every time I tried to convert the .mov file it screwed up the audio so that what I was babbling about did not even remotely match what was happening.  I finally just decided to upload the raw .mov file.  I should really get a flip ultra at the very least since I am using my digital still camera for the videos I do.

I also both love and hate how glaringly obvious it is to me that I am screwing up when I watch videos since on the one hand I absolutely know that watching the retrieve training videos of myself really cleaned up my clicker work but it is just appalling to see how awful it is and never mind the normal girl “oh I look soooo FAT” kind of stuff and my hair is NOT that light ;-)

Next complaint is that after these repetitions the next time we walked into the clinic Jellybean detoured towards the desk area in the hall in front of the other exam rooms where there were two techs working on computers.

Jellybean is afraid of people and I didn’t feel like we were making a ton of progress in the room so I decided to allow her to work in the hallway where we had two people who know about Jellybean’s issues who were being mostly stationary so we could move towards and away from them at our will.

Gee Barrie, couldn’t you have moved the camera into the hallway so we could see it?  I DID!  I even asked the two techs if they minded the camera being on them!  Apparently I turned the camera off in the process and never turned it back on….sigh.

The most glaring fault on my part that I see in the video is that I am not anywhere near dynamic enough with Jellybean.  I’m just standing there and babbling incessantly.  That has to be just meaningless noise to Jellybean which, it would stand to reason, makes her less likely to actually listen to me when I have something important to say to her.

I am also still really struggling with determining criteria for BAT with Jellybean.  Remember that my ultimate goal is using BAT to help Jellybean make the decision to allow someone other than me to touch her.

My idea for our next session is to do the hallway again but have one of the girls bend as though she is going to pet Jellybean (Jellybean remained calm all while the girls were walking around us so I looking to up the ante a bit) and then immediately we will walk (I won’t even pretend we’re running since if you watch the video you can see how sloooooowly I am moving in all of this…sigh) back out of the clinic for a treat.

You might also notice that I don’t touch Jellybean a lot in the video.  Jellybean is often itchy and I think that makes being petted somewhat unpleasant to her.  She will decide she wants a cuddle and rub all over me or climb into my lap sometimes but if she doesn’t solicit it, I pat rather than rub.

So the things I see that I am doing wrong are:

1. being way way too static
2. babbling incessantly
3. not having clear enough criteria for when we will leave
4. having a difficult time keeping up with the dog’s body language on the criteria I do have: I clearly see in the video Jellybean’s tail tucked when I am saying that her tail is not tucked.

To me, it seems easier and makes more sense to do BAT in a more natural way like we got with the workmen putting in the back door at my house.  I’m not loving the completely artificial set ups.  It is funny because my twitterpal, Deborah Flick, is complaining that she can’t manage more artificial settings with her girl, Sadie, when that is what she thinks would do the trick.

I am sure the BAT list will have more things I am doing incorrectly and hopefully some more suggestions for us for our next session.