Hello,
I promised I would keep you up to date about Bradley's training. I am almost a week late getting this post out since his first training session was on June 16th and the 2nd one is tomorrow. I wasn't sure whether to post or not because of the Hive Witness be down. The number of emails in ListNerds dropped dramatically during that period and I did not know why. That is all over so let me catch up.
Our trainer's name is Justine. He is the one that trained Sarge so we knew we liked him and he was good. Like a lot of first visits the first 15-20 minutes of the 1 hour lesson was taken up with paperwork while Bradley sniffed around the training facility. He found his ideal place to mark his territory. Once everything was cleaned up training started.
Sit and come are the first two things Bradley will learn. He was pretty good at sit before we started training but there is two parts to sit. The obvious part is the physical sitting which is taught with an upward hand motion as you will see in the short video. The second part is staying. With the sit and down commands, stay is implied until released with the "break". command.
Bradley had the sit part down but not the stay part. It did not take Justin long to have Bradley staying when he was told to sit. Then he moved on to having him stay with distractions like bouncing a ball in front of him, walking all around him, and shaking the leash. It only took a couple of times for Bradley to figure out what he was suppose to do.
Next, Justine worked with Bradley sitting with an open door. Only took once for Bradley to understand that. Not Bad. Then Justine told him to sit and left the room. Bradley sat right there and didn't move until he heard "Break". To me, this is especially amazing since my wife was sitting about 15 feet away and Bradley is definitely my wife's dog.
Then it was my wife's turn. She worked with Bradley for about 10 minutes. She did good getting him to sit and stay. Next, we all went outside and my wife worked with Bradley for anther 5 minutes.
At this point Bradley had had it. He was exhausted mentally and wouldn't do anything. So we called it a day. Bradley slept all the way home and most of the day,
Two short video clips from the training.
I am sure you can figure out that Justine is training us as much, if not more, as Bradley. We are suppose to work with Bradley about an hour every day. This week we are suppose to get him used to what "break" means.
I will do better at getting the 2nd session out in a timely manner.
See You At The Bank,
Bob Caine
