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Today morning I approached the exercise similarly to yesterday, however:
– I used only dry food, it is very fine and easily “lost” in the grass, so the dog has to struggle a bit before it finds it (it was all its morning portion)
– Instead of scattering treats in front of the dogs, I prepared the morning portion and went out alone in the garden to a different place than yesterday
– Before scattering the food I trampled well with my shoes the place where I was going to scatter it
– After scattering the food, I walked back to the house by exactly the same route (there was some snow tonight, so it was easy for me to follow my footsteps back)
– I went back for the dog, walked exactly on my tracks along with him (the dog was running without a leash) and before reaching a spot about 3 steps before that spot I said “KJ, search” and pointed my finger at the trail in front of me. She managed to walk those 3 steps forward “on my trail” (I think) and found some food right away for which she was praised with a marker.
– She was doing quite well, again the exercise lasted about 10 minutes, a couple of times she moved away from the spot stomped by my shoes, then I again said the command “KJ, serach” and pointed my finger to the ground. She needed about 3 repetitions of “encouragement” to continue investigating. In between, I praised her a few times with a marker for searching the area.
– Once she was completely bored with searching the area and my prompting had no effect I let Koka outside. Then both of them went to the place where the food was scattered and Koka found a few more small crunches, during which time KJ watched her and also sniff, but in a significant part outside the trampled area.
Looking for your advise what to do next 🙂 KJ is a 9 week old puppy, golden retriever, female, show line.
Plus, she’s still so small and clumsy that she doesn’t always see me throwing her something. Today we also started to introduce fetch, I had a plush little soft teddy bear and a tennis ball but a little smaller. When playing drag with the wash cloth or teddy bear, she was rather reluctant to come back to return them when I threw them, so just to avoid spoiling the fetch I gave myself a moment to play with just dragging. Today I tried it with a ball and “exchanging” the ball for a teddy bear and vice versa and it went very well. I threw her a total of maybe 5 times and each time she came back with the toy in her mouth, gave it back to my hand and then I threw the other toy. In order not to spoil it, I ended up playing teddy bear drag because I didn’t have any treats on hand.
