Zen Bowl games!

I am currently working on "Zen Bowl" behaviors with Rigger.  Here's the end goal:  be able to have treats in a bowl on the ground that I can release Rigger to for reinforcement, without him choosing to self-reinforce in-between.The idea is that it gets the rewards off your body, so that you can do things like competition, without the dog thinking "no treats on person, no reason to work".  In the case of something like an agility trial, the bowl would be placed outside the ring, and the dog is rewarded after the run.  So I've been recording bits of the practice that I have been doing to see how it's going and what I need to tweak.

So here's step 1:  teaching Rigger not to mob my hand for treats.  We've worked on this in the past, so he's pretty good about it.

So then I tried to introduce the bowl.  I gave it the cue of "pot", with the thought that I don't use the word much in casual conversation.

It went pretty good, but made me realize that I actually need to work on another cue, as well.  Right now I use "yes" as my main verbal marker, but realized watching these that it has been pretty strongly reinforced for static behaviors: sit, down, stays, etc.  So I am trying to refine that to mean "yes, that's what I want, and you stay there and I will bring the reward to you."  The "pot" cue will mean "yes, that's it, go to the bowl for your reward".  But I need a command to mean "yes that's right, come to my hand for the reward."  Enter the cue "Hup".  Also marvel at how well his station work and backing up has been going, and admire his solid two on/two off behavior!

And today it occurred to me that using his food bowl is probably not the best idea, since that has a long history associated with it of being able to dive into it the minute it hits the ground.  So today I re-watched the video on how to do the early stages of Zen Bowl, switched to a square glass bowl instead of round metal (or glass), both of which he gets fed in, and have come to the conclusion that he probably does not know the "pot" cue as well as I thought he did and was previously cuing off the container more.  So I may back it up a little bit more and repeat some of the association steps again from the second video.

So that's where we are right now.  This is part of an FDSA webinar, so there will be a few more days of videos to come.