Well this morning Sage and I had a private lesson with Stacy. It was awesome as usual! Stacy was very pleased with Sage's progress with the MP by itself and when we put it at the end of the dogwalk and a-frame. She said now we need to start progressing onto the next stage...
1. I need to pair the MP with the contact obstacle. In other words, Sage does not receive reinforcement from just downing on the MP, she must perform the obstacle followed by the down on the MP to receive the reward. In the session, I was bringing Sage around to the side of the down ramp of the DW and she bypassed the DW and just ran to the MP and laid down. Stacy said that does NOT get rewarded anymore.
2. Now I need to add a release and make it very black and white for Sage. I decided to stick with the same word I use for her startline and table release. I thought of changing it to something different but Stacy said using the same release cue would be fine.
3. I need to start asking for speed over the contacts now and adding a tunnel or a few jumps before the contact obstacle.
4. I need to start fading the MP. We are committed through the weekend of Nov. 22nd (CASA) but I have pulled her from Latigo after that so that I can work on fading the MP. Once I start to fade the MP, I can no longer allow her to run through the contacts at a trial. However, I'll have plenty of fun matches to generalize her new contact behavior before January.
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