Claire, can I just ask; do they just go through all the usual routines and then move on to new stuff? And would you click all the usual stuff, or just wait for new things?
I found actually the only "usual" stuff they offered was sits and downs. I didn't click for a straight sit or down, but if they did something else with it (anything really, eg lifting a paw, shuffling backwards, turning their head to one side, giving one woof with it) then they got a click. Tonight I gave a little bit of leeway with Zorro as he's always found it really hard to experiment, so for example part of his session went like this:
walk in a small circle anticlockwise - click
nudge my leg - click
put paws on my leg - click
nudge the wall - click
sit and lift a paw - click
walk in a circle anticlockwise - click
nudge a cardboard box - click
so although he'd done the anticlockwise thing already, because he'd tried different things inbetween I still clicked it (but if he did it twice in a row then he only got a click for the first one).
With Bella, she's always been good at experimenting so I was quite strict, it had to be a different thing each time (quite hard as a handler as well as you have to keep track and be aware of subtle nuances, eg sitting and turning the head to the left is different to just sitting looking at me).
From what I got from the book, it's basically about encouraging them to offer up any behaviour they can think of. I found neither of them offered things like rollover (which they both know) so it's kind of interesting seeing what comes to them easily. Also of course, if they offer something new, you can then start to encourage and shape that. Zorro knows "twirl" which is a clockwise circle, but not "Spin" (anitclockwise - Bella knows both). So tonight he was offering anitclockwise circles so next session I'll probably do a bit of work to capture that.
I really like that it's like a totally freestyle session, you can just sit back and watch them be creative and because it's clickerwork they can't do anything "wrong" so it's just giving them a free reign to do whatever comes to mind
The dolphin that Karen Pryor did this with did some amazingly creative stuff including swimming round the pool to get up speed, turning belly up in the water and then coasting along with his tail out of the water, so all you could see was this tail moving along
A zookeeper also did it with a gorilla who even ended up pulling different faces
I'm trying to pick up clickerwork again properly as I want to start combining it with TTouch - the TTouch getting the animal in a nice, relaxed but focussed state (in tests they actually reach a "state of higher learning" where all 4 brainwaves are firing simultaneously), and then do clickerwork when they're in this spongelike state of learning.
