I am training my Border Collie puppy, I call him a puppy but he turned 1 year old in February, and I didn’t do enough distraction training early on and now I’m paying for it. Spike is from Wayne Butler of Hope Hull, Alabama who breeds some of the best herding dogs in the southeast. So Spike has very strong herding instincts and on top of that we have 9 other dogs that he has run with just a little too much.
Spike is very fast and has a very good recall back to a tug when it’s just the two of us and a holder. However, it is a completely different story when one of our other dogs is near. He loses his mind and it’s hard for him to take his eyes off the other dog. We now only work him with another dog present and he is starting to get better but it has taken about 2 months and he is still not completely over his obsession.
I’ve found a really good article about Distraction Work with Puppies on the Sure Shot Flyball Blog (Sure Shot Flyball blog is no longer available). For those that are training young puppies, it might be worth a look and may save you some extra work in the long run. We are following Robbie’s (Sure Shot) suggestion to do recalls past another dog and we’re a starting to see some success. We also play a ball game with him and another dog.
We hold both dogs like we would in the run back area before the start of a race and each of us, my wife and I, have a ball and our tugs. We take turns throwing the ball out as far as we can and wait for it to stop rolling. We then send the dog out to retrieve it back to a tug. As the first dog starts to run past after retrieving their ball, the next dog’s ball is thrown and the dog is released. We are really starting to see some good results with this method.
If anyone knows of other games we can play to help in this situation, please post them.
Larry
2 comments ↓
Thanks for the post Larry. I should mention
that Sonya wrote our Blog article.
I like the ball game that ya’ll are playing.
I remember doing something similar while
training our dogs to play Frisbee together.
They’d all want to go after the same Frisbee,
so I’d throw for one while Sonya held another dog,
then I’d throw for the second dog while the
first was coming back. We started by working
the two dogs in opposite directions, eventually
working both dogs in the same direction. Now
each dog has a Frisbee and they run in a loop,
some going out while others are coming back in.
(Except the Border Staffy, he demands ALL Frisbees)
One other note may be helpful for those of you
with puppies. Impulse who is now six months
old. When we do boxwork, we put two mats side by
side or only a few feet apart with two boxes and work
two dogs at the same time. This really gets them going.
Impulse isn’t ready for the box, but Sonya will roll
a ball a couple feet and send her to fetch it while a
veteran dog is doing boxwork in the other lane.
It makes her think she’s a big dog. It’s too cute!
I like that idea with the balls and passing. Something I’d like us to try with a newer JRT training with us, as she likes to make “comments” to the other dog passing her during drills. I’d like to see if maybe throwing the ball for her would help her focus better on running out.
When we got Indy, our rescue BC back in Dec. at 7 mos. old she was more interested in herding the other dogs, so I brought out extra tennis balls and frisbees when we’d go out to play. To avoid collisions, I’ve always taught my other dogs to wait while they take turns retrieveing a single item, but using multiple toys lets them be playing all at once, but focusing on their own ball or frisbee and not the other dog. After just a few weeks, Indy stopped herding the dogs and even started to honor the other dogs’ retrieves.
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