House Cleaning with Mr. Hippo

Ron November 15, 2011

Here’s Apryl Lea and Mr. Hippo doing some house cleaning.

Mr. Hippo is an assistance dog candidate for Animal Farm Foundation’s Assistance Dog program. He was rescued in Michigan and brought to NY via our network of super awesome dog people (Thanks Lindsay!). He’s a really nice, mushy kind of dog. You can see here that he’s a little apprehensive about the vacuum cleaner. He does show a bit of nervousness with new, and strange things, but as you can see he recovers quite well. We’re pretty sure that Hippo didn’t have a lot of life experience before coming here so most of what he encounters is pretty new to him. He’s right around 1 year old and is really starting to show some great work ethic and social skills.

In this video, Apryl Lea using Choose to Heel as a target behavior to both desensitize Hippo to the vacuum and to give him a skill to perform to help center and ground him. This is also nice for distraction work on an important assistance dog skill. You can also see some of Hippo’s perchwork shining through as he pulls his rear end towards Apryl’s left side.

This video is our day 10 submission to #VloMo11.

Music by Ignorant Mob.

Categories: Dog Training

Tags: desensitization

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Patron’s Choice : Shaping a Leaping Catch | Leaping Functions

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Ron February 3, 2020

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16 Comments

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Most players have a go-to Set Up Move, or 3, but it is important to have a variety of entries into the positions that start sequences to keep things interesting and to display and enhance flow.
In this epic video there are 13 different set up moves, some are fairly standard, and some are pretty clever. Below we’ll name and define them and talk about usage and pros and cons.

Ron May 3, 2020

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