Day 46 -Training

For 12 nights the puppies have been successfully sleeping in a crate and only going on newspaper placed on the far side of their indoor x-pen . I decided it was time to step up their training and today added a clicker. With operant conditioning you associate a sound with a reward. Easy enough. Then you add behaviors necessary before the sound is made and reward given. The dogs learn by figuring out the desired behavior and repetition. Unlike the traditional dog training of punishing for something wrong, operant conditioning rewards for successfully doing something right. To start you do a "click-feed" exercise where after every click the dog gets a treat. You just click-feed 10 or so times and call it a day. My dogs have all been trained using operant conditioning. As soon as they see the clicker, they start offering behaviors to see if they can figure out what I will reward them for doing. Sometimes it is a made-up game, other times it could be agility, tracking, obedience, Rally-O or mushing. Try to picture 8 puppies and 3 large Chinooks all offering behaviors and being convinced the reward was theirs. Don't know if I can call today's lesson a success but I did go through a lot of string cheese and had a lot of laughs. I do need to find a way to isolate individual puppies away from the three older dogs.

Speaking of laughs, Sarah and Greg came over for a puppy-fix.

 Greg's hat was soon a tug-toy.

Hatless, those claws and teeth are mighty sharp.

Koyuk leisurely supervised from the play yard crate.

Lunch - yes, all  8 puppies are eating at once. No food aggression here even when another pup is using you as a chair.

Play, eat, crash. The life of a puppy. I liked this picture because Mr Red is on his back and using Ms Silver and Ms Orange as a pillow and Ms Pink as a foot stool.

Later Greg and Anna stopped by to meet the puppies. They have Apollo, a year and 1/2 yr old Chinook that some day will be dog sledding with Koyuk, Cedar, Willow, Sarah/Greg's puppy and our puppy.  I can't wait. Team Nookies will be even bigger.

Oh yea, the other thing puppies do is poop - a lot. This is what Dave did this evening to get out of poop scoop duty.