Training the Target Sick

I have a dowel with a blue cap on one end and a white one on the other. The idea is, “blue means touch this; white means back away.”

So we started with some sits, which he’s pretty good at. Almost too good, because once his butt is planted, he doesn’t seem to understand that he needs to move out of the sit to get clicked for another one. Especially with little miss smarty-pants Emmy doing all she can to get in his way. So it was ‘Sit!’ Click, treat and move away from him, call him to me (click/treat) and then get a quick ‘Sit!’ in before he did it on his own.

Then introduce the target stick. Again tricky because Emmy knows what that is and time and again would jump up and touch it before Parker got a chance. There’s a lot to be said for training with only one dog around at a time.

Parker showed interest in the stick from the get go, which is clickable behavior, and eventually got down to the business of touching it. I figure a few more days of this and then it’s time to move to a different room in the house and start all over again.

Parker’s already very good at loose leash walking, which is something that the target stick can cement. Because Mike is out of town for a few days and won’t be here for Parker’s early morning stroll, and because the other two dogs just can’t make it up the hill from the house (hell, I can barely make it myself), we should get some alone time for that.