Back to the stick

Thyme's been doing great accepting my bare hand on her nose, but I thought it was a good idea to go back to the stick target and clicker today so that we can press on. As her familiarity with working increases, I anticipate that her trust and willingness to be touched will also increase. I can wait.

I spent about an hour in the morning hanging out with Tyche and Thyme and Tigerlilly. The weather is lousy and the shed immediately outside their stall doors still has a crater-sized hole in the ground, so they had to stay in their stalls. Ugh. Tyche does get in the way. There is only so much I can do with Thyme with the little attention hog underfoot. :)  A divider wall between the two is coming in the not-too-distant-future.

First Thyme got some review trials about touching the tip of the green target with her nose. The challenge here was to touch the stick, without mouthing it. Her automatic reaction is to mouth. She did make progress, though she is not yet perfect. I didn't distinguish between trials in which she touched the stick and trials in which the stick touched her. She did not seem to mind. Go Thyme. :)

Next I worked on trying to touch her face somewhere other than the tip of her nose. She tolerated (barely) touches to the middle of her blaze, and her cheeks. Well, her right cheek. I couldn't get any good touches on her left cheek. She wouldn't let me. I don't know if this is because the arrangement of the stalls prevented me from being able to easily reach her left side, or if she has a bias that prevented her from exposing her left side. You hear horse people talk about how horses have a bias for work on their left side and get upset with work on their right side, though it's usually discussed in the context of trained horses, which Thyme obviously is not. It is anecdotal also. Don't know how much I believe it. There are hemispheric differences in approach and withdrawal tendencies in humans, so I am inclined to think that may be at play. In general, the left brain hemisphere is biased to approach while the right hemisphere is biased to withdraw. Because of the way the brain is set up, that should mean there's a slight bias to approach objects that are physically on the right and to withdraw from objects that are physically on the left. Or maybe I've got that backwards...ugh again. Should probably look it up. Or forget about it. :)

Regardless of the side biases, Thyme was not excited about me touching any part of her with the target, left or right. After some frustration on both our parts, I decided we needed to build on our successes, so I switched tacts.

Thyme is in a double stall (with Tyche) that runs 20 feet down the aisle. Starting at one end, I had her touch the tip of the target, rewarded her with a click, then moved down 5 feet, repeated and so on, to the end of the stall. This way, I had her practice following me. It worked well. She got to use what she had already learned, by touching the target, but she did it in a newer, more interesting, and more challenging context. We went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Occasionally, she'd get frustrated and move away, but she always came back. Occasionally, I'd mix things up by only going half-way down the length of the stall before turning and going back the other direction. She followed along well. We ended the whole session after 5 or 10 minutes of this. Watching her work this out made me want a videocamera to document her progress on tape. I will look into that. I may be able to find an unused camera at work.

Odds and ends.

(1) Tyche got some good practice having her body touched all over with the target. She definitely needs the practice with her legs, so that was a positive. The challenge here is to avoid training her to turn her back on me. It makes sense -- she is just trying to get the reward by offering her back for touching, but it's a bad habit for obvious reasons.

(2) Tigerlilly got some practice touching the target with her nose and also letting me touch her with the target. She doesn't mind the target/stick, but she is a little put off by the click of the clicker!

(3) Shadow got several good trials touching the target with his nose. Like Thyme his automatic reaction is to mouth it.

(4) Annie got a couple of trials touching the target with her nose. She is extremely put off by the whole thing. The target and the clicker are both met with lots of snorting and withdrawal. This is typical Annie. Hackneys are high-strung and she is no exception.

(5) Josie was too busy eating her hay (as always) to even bother looking at the target. :)

(6) I didn't give the little guys (Bom Bom, Jeff, or Mutt) any chances to do anything. Sorry boys.

(5) Finally, the most entertaining moment of the whole morning was Riversong's introduction to the clicker, target and grain. River is the queen bee goat. She's very curious in general and friendly, though none of the goats really like to be handled. They're a pretty wild bunch. (This has to change eventually.) River was fast. Because I had already been at it for an hour or more, I collapsed the trials that paired the clicker with grain and the trials that paired the target with reward. Basically, I went almost straight to the target training. It took her a bit, but she got it. Touch the target, get a click and some grain. Touch the target, get a click and some grain. She struck me as smart and eager -- not shy at all. Nothing like Thyme. I'm going to give it some more thought before I proceed with her though, since I got the feeling that she could move quickly if I do it well.

All in all a very productive morning!