Another reason to love New Rattitude

Another reason why I love fostering for New Rattitude is the support that is offered to foster parents. 

New Rattitude provides an annual training subsidy to help cover the cost of training classes for foster parents enrolling their dogs (either foster or personal dogs) in training classes using positive methods to modify behavior, develop manners, increases responsiveness and/or build confidence.

Why chose positive/reward based training? Here's a great link “Get to” or “Have to”?

So, guess what Seven and I are taking advantage of?   

Seven and I started a great class titled "Real World Manners".  Here are just a few new skills we will be learning: down, leave it, recall and over all impulse control with a number of distractors.  A perfect class for both of us.   While I can teach some of these skills, going to class is going to really assist both of us as we get a set of expert eyes on us.  

I chose this class for two specific reasons:  

1) The trainer is Ruth LaRocque, CTC, CPDT-KA, CBCC-KA  Ruth was involved in our behavioral consult for past foster dog Royal and she provided an in-home training consult for one of New Rattitude's other foster dogs as well.  Ruth's consultation was beyond helpful with both dogs & foster parents.  She's wonderful because she's clear, direct, easy to follow, all positive based and knows learning theory inside and out.  I would recommend her to anyone and everyone!

2)  The class maxes out at 6 dogs.  So, lots of attention and with so few dogs in a larger area, we have plenty of room to give distance between dogs while we work on our new skills.  This is perfect for Seven since he quickly amps up when he sees other dogs.

 I have to give props to Seven as he did rat-tastic given the new environment and a good deal of stimulations with dogs and people.  When we arrived he was amped up with seeing the other dogs (whining, posturing and had a fixated stare).  So, we moved further back to give distance which quickly helped us focus.

We brought our mat and quickly started working.  My goal for this first class was for Seven to give me eye contact hoping to make the food I brought more reinforcing than the other dogs in the class.

Watching the dogs

It took about 2-3 minutes of moving around in our corner for Seven to begin to give me eye contact.  And every time he did, he was clicked and rewarded.  

After a bit he was able to sit and watch the dogs - he got a good amount of food reinforcement for this excellent behavior.

And look at this sweet boy sitting and giving me eye contact!!

As the class moved on he was able to really focus on me and we started working on "sit". I was thrilled that he was able to think & focus.  Good boy Seven!

He loves the high reinforcing food I brought along!

He was able to settle on his mat - of course keeping both eyes on what was going on.  This was a-ok and he was given more food reinforcement for this behavior.

And we worked on "look".  As you can see he not only rocked that skill but, continued to stay settled on his mat.

We are looking forward to week two!

And stay tuned for a coming post about reinforcers.