Article game

The first three places I checked this morning had seagulls hanging out. My plan had been one or two tracks followed by this game but I skipped the tracks because of the birds.



This was Rivet's first time seeing articles in anything resembling a tracking scenario. The plan was to move around the circle, rewarding for each one, picking it up, and then dropping it back onto the line behind me as she moved on to the next one.

The first thing she did was move briskly around the whole circle, nose to the spray line, and without so much as hesitating at any of the articles. I moved with her and let her check it out. On the second go around she paused briefly at one of the articles and I quickly rewarded her. She hesitated, nosed it, and then downed. YAY! We had a bit of a hotdog party right then and there.

We did a couple of circuits, as planned, with some distraction but no real issues. When I picked up an article she would immediately get up and usually would begin to move towards the next one on her own.

As I've noticed before the cardboard article seems to give her the greatest trouble, followed by the metal (but the spoon's odd shape could account for that). Today she had no big issues with either but was a little slower responding to the cardboard than to anything else.

Yesterday was our first session finding articles in the grass (in the backyard) and she found the spoon last, but I mismanaged the session and had her offlead. She found the other items quickly and then moved away from the immediate area. She was sniffing the whole time and may have been looking for the spoon or may have been checking out the squirrel tracks. Who knows... Next time I'll have her on lead so that I can restrict how far away she can get.