Today I enrolled Jackie in basic dog obedience with Robin Barber at Cowtown Dog Sports to begin preparing Jackie for agility foundations. The class begins in a couple weeks from now, and will be held once weekly for a series of six weeks.
In preparing for the upcoming classes, we’re working on sit, down, recall, and stay. Today for the first time I began teaching Jackie to send out to a ceramic target from a sit-stay, touch the target with her nose, and recall back to me. It’s a fun game to practice and reinforce all the behaviors of sit, stay, send to a target, and recall.
I first learned this as a college student as the “paper plate recall” game with my beloved Australian shepherd Roo, who loved this game so much she went on to become the recall race champion in my class. The dog starts in a sit next to you in heel position, then stays as they watch you walk about twenty feet out and place a cookie down on a paper plate. Then the handler returns to the dog in heel position, releases the dog with “okay, target!” The dog runs out to the plate, eats the cookie, then the handler recalls the dog back to their front to land in a sit for another reinforcer cookie.
Since Jackie is only just learning the target recall race game, we started indoors with no distractions, and it is going well. We need to increase speed but she is learning the basics in an error-free environment.
Here is the Recall Race Champion plaque Roo earned. In 1999, I was very proud of this achievement (still am, truth be told), and it hangs in my study today:
In 1999 I was being introduced to R+ training, with grateful thanks to my Australian shepherd Roo, who went on to become a Delta Pet Society Therapy Dog, which allowed us to visit nursing homes and rehabilitation hospitals together. Here she is with her faithful sidekick Scarlett; I’ve had a Cocker spaniel my entire life, from in the womb through currently:
