Category: Crossing Over ¤
  Author: Shirley Chong ¤
   Title: Retraining a Behavior ¤

	About a year ago I wrote an article for the Clicker Journal about
the difficulty of teaching my crossover fox terrier to accept a new way of
heeling.  A friend of mine told me I was being a little far fetched and
far too sensitive to what Dash, not a sensitive dog, might have been
feeling and thinking.
	And yet.  I went to a run through.  I'm not as calm and
philosophical as JC and somehow it shook me up to be standing in front of
very friendly people who just happened to be calling themselves judges tat
day.  I said in a rather forbidding tone, "Dash, HEEL."
	I started walking.  Dash did something I finally
understood--stress sniffing.  Dash is a very purposeful dog.  That's his
strength and his weakness.  But this wasn't his normal Oh! OH! good stuff
over here! tail quivering sniffiness.  This was aimless.  He was basically
doing anything OTHER than heeling beside me.  He paused, he looked around,
he looked out the window, he watched me and even sauntered behind me,
perhaps to indicate good will.
	When you are reteaching something, first of all scrap the cue you
were using.  Iti's the word that tells your dog what to expect and if your
dog expects bad or even nervous-making stuff that's how he'll feel no
matter what his body is capable of doing.  In fact, as with people, its
more mental than physical.  ANy dog can heel.  A lot of dogs don't enjoy
it.
	As you're retraining, work very hard to make everything BEFORE and
just AFTER the next cue as pleasureable as possible.  Enjoy yourself.
Start with a game or turn it into a game.  Bring in the tennis balls, the
frisbee, the squeaky toys.  Spend as long as it takes until you say your
new cue and your dog lights up with delight.  WHEE.  Go to new places and
be very very very patient so that as Dani did to Ruby you're letting your
dog DECIDE to participate and then having thebest possible time you could
possibly give it.
	Keep reminding yourself tht YOU need to be having a good time.  I
can sometimes get rather solemn and impatient, if you can believe that,
when I have a goal in mind.  One day, 3 days before an agility trial I'd
entered us in after a long hiatus, I noticed Dash drooping.  
	(Has anyone else seen this?  I'm understanding it as a pre-stage
to fluency.  When he didn't give a wingding about being "right", he took
an agility course like he thought it was a survivalist course, and really
flung himself this way and that over the obstacles.  My mistake in
training.  When we went back and learned each obstacle anew, he suddenly
became very slow and deliberative and I really think it was his desire to
do the right thing and his need to slow down and think his way over each
obstacle instead of just throwing himself at what was in front of him.
Really.  Twice I left courses and people asked "Is he bleeding?"  He did a
backflip off the dogwalk, literally flew over the judge's head coming off
an A-frame and once clambered ONTO a crawl obstacle.  In each case, I
thought he was "ready for a trial." )
	Anyway, there was Dash drooping and I thought, oh the heck with
everything.  I filled my pockets with squeaky toys and paper lunch bags
and we headed out to a practice course.  I literaly bounced toys off his
head, I puffed air into lunch bags and had him puncture them while in the
contact zones,  he did a really nice job and when we reached the trial he
earned a leg the first trial, making several turns I'd have bet the house
he'd run through, smacked his paw down on every contact zone and only
errered because he fell off the pause box.  In the second trial, he had a
clean run but he got silly at the very start and rolled on his back in the
grass for 28 seconds..dunno, I had him by the collar, that's "bad dog"
body language around here and it made him goofy.  ANyway, me deciding whta
the heck, I want to make him laugh made all the difference.  I was happier
too.
	I think the first thing about retraining a crossover dog is to
force YOURSELF to have a good time and forget about schedules, mistakes,
the future.  Just concentrate very hard on those beautiful eyes that trust
you and make them shine with pleasure.  Then make new sounds that mean joy
vs. stress and again force yourself to fulfill that promise.  It isn't the
physical difficulty of heeling--and I know I'm repeating myself--it's how
the dog feels about what is going to happen next when he hears/sees/senses
the same signals that in the past upset/stymied him.
	I don't think iti's that hard to make a clean sweep if you remind
yourself that if the dog didn't like the behavior in the past, he's going
to belive you're doing that old awful thing if you look and sound like
you're dong that old awful thing.
	Victoria Farrington