Originally Posted by
Annette47
Spent the past two days at a Bridget Carlsen seminar and really, really, enjoyed it. Would have liked a bit more floor time, but from what I can tell (this was my first seminar of any type) it was pretty typical that way.
The seminar was technically a “Problem-Solving” seminar and assumed that you were already familiar with some of her basic principles and philosophy of training (which I was since my trainer has been following her methods for a few years now). If you’ve never done any of her techniques, a more introductory one might be better.
I took pages and pages of notes, LOL. When it was my turn to work, we talked about Chloe’s occasional habit of standing on go-outs when she should be sitting, and she suggested that in training I always have her do a sit-back before sending her over the jump, because the standing is caused by a lapse of concentration and thinking about jumping too soon. If she thinks there might be something else to do in between, that might lessen that. Plus she gave me a game to do to increase her response to “sit” even when she is in motion and distracted, as a way to maintenance the issue outside of the context of go-outs. Drilling too much of it as part of the go-outs might cause her to start to dislike those, which we don’t want. The other thing we talked about was her lack of effort to get perfect fronts, so I now know how to correct an “almost” front, and how to make the practice harder so the ones in the ring are easy. It’s more effort before reward (Bridget’s mantra) and something I need to incorporate more with Chloe.
With Sassy (I could only work 2 dogs so chose her because she has more issues than Cookie, LOL), my main issue was butt-out heeling, which has been driving me nuts for a year now. Bridget had it fixed within 5 minutes simply by having me change the way I hold my hand for touches, which was such a simple thing but made a huge difference. We also worked on her finishes and transitions between exercises.
It’s funny, because while I’ve been hearing some of this effort before reward stuff for a while now, I didn’t really get how a) to really do the games etc. between the exercises or b) see how it really carries over until this weekend. I’m now fired up and motivated to train and to ask more of my dogs, while rewarding more at the same time (which was the piece I was missing. Yes, they have to do a ton more things to get rewarded, but we are also offering a ton more opportunities to earn rewards).
The other big take-away for me, was that my ratio of “motivational” to “trial picture” has been way off. I do far too many “trial picture” exercises and not enough “motivational ones”. For example on a retrieve exercise, trial picture would be have them come front, while a motivational one would be to release them to a loaded target as they are running back, which increases speed on the return.
Labradorks - in terms of whether you would like it, I don’t know. She does use corrections, mainly verbal markers, but yes, some physical ones (mostly collar pops, some body positioning like nudging Chloe’s butt with my foot on a crooked front) - mostly for lack of effort. Many of the people there (who have all been training with her for a while) were using e-collars. She didn’t particularly seem to advocate for the use of them, but at the same time was clearly okay with it and had no problem working with both types of trainers. I know she does field trials with her goldens, so I’m sure she’s pretty familiar with e-collars. Corrections weren’t a huge part of the process, but definitely have her place in her program, which I know you are not all that comfortable with. You could probably adapt much of what she is doing and not the correction pieces, but you would have to be okay with watching the working teams use corrections. None of the dogs were at all upset about any of the corrections I saw, and she did explain what the correction would be for a tough-minded dog vs. what she would do if working with a truly soft dog.