@Coralyn - Venus and Mars K9 haha it’s A LOT. I’m practicing front sits (no verbals) on the side. Will do A new thread with some videos for that and the heel stuff over the next few days.
@Lauren & Luna Perfect! Honestly I don't think you need to practice anymore wrap for awhile. Just work on fronts and heel, and then we'll plug it all back together later.
Let me know how this looks, I think the leash threw her a little. I’m trying to mark and reward when her head is up and eyes are forward from what I can tell.
This is good! This looks more like your regular heel practice, but your leash is just there, which is perfect.
Look at that very first step you did. Minus the tiny head twitch of excitement, this is exactly what I want to see. She's locked in and thinking about perfect heel position the whole time.
Another thing you can play with is high, squeaky praise during that first step forward, to encourage sticking with you. That's something I also use to buy me a little bit more time before the cookie.
After you give the treat, instead of walking forward right away, wait until she connects with you/lifts her head again completely before you step off. If she autosits, that's fine. But I think pausing will help with the glance-chew-glance-chew thing that is happening. You are successfully bringing her to a slow halt with your cookie, so that should all work out smoothly.
You are squeezing her against the couch pretty aggressively for this session, I will say. 😂
Ok, let's talk about that reset though. What I see is that you have this nice heel against the barrier, and then you go to restart on the other side, and Luna thinks she's maybe still heeling, but maybe not, who knows, so she hangs out just approximately near your left leg. At some points she might even be doing a decent right turn heel. But there's no structure to this, and you want a clean reset. Make sure your reset looks really different from heel. You can toss treats within the range of your leash. You can walk backwards. You can have her do nose touches back around. Anything that doesn't look like heel. :-) Otherwise, you've got a recipe for making transitioning off the barrier a huge pain the butt.
@Coralyn - Venus and Mars K9 this is super helpful feedback! I’ll do some more runs with her leash and play with resetting and not being so tight on her against the couch. I don’t think I was thinking through the reset pieces but that’s very helpful!
Ok, I want to wait to put all of this together, though, since we lost some of our pretty heeling here.
Practice this first:
Straight line heel against a barrier.
Leash in your RIGHT hand, draped in front of your body.
Reward from left hand as she is used to.
Some people definitely do hold the leash in their right hand, but I think that that changes the picture a whole lot. And why deal with that?
Then the next step before we bring her off the barrier for heeling is going to be adding left turns off the target, which is coming up in the next level (I’m pretty sure). :-)
More wrap stuff non heel!!
Let me know how this looks, I think the leash threw her a little. I’m trying to mark and reward when her head is up and eyes are forward from what I can tell.
Mini practice runs!