Labradorian Life: a luring topic

Hey everyone! C'mon inside, I wanna show you something!

Mom's getting ready to do some training with me -- see all the treats she's gotten together? Let's see, there's roasted chicken, and ham, and cheese, and hotdogs, and steak, all cut up into teeny tiny little bits. They're small so that she can feed me lots without me getting full, and so I can swallow them right away without spending time chewing them.

And she's got a clicker, too. A clicker is a little box that makes a metal "click" noise when Mom presses it, which tells me that I did something right and will be getting one of the treats. The cool thing about the clicker is that my brain automatically knows I did the right thing without my having to actually think about it -- if Mom just told me I was right instead, my brain would actually have to work to understand that, which would slow down our training a little bit. Cool science stuff, huh?!

Anyway, what I wanted to show you is in this next video clip. Mom calls it "luring". I call it "having a snack". Watch and see what happens:

Look at all those things Mom can get me to do just by letting me follow a piece of food around! She's not really training me to do anything here, she's just letting me eat while she fiddles around with seeing what I'll do if she puts her hand here or there, or if she twists it this way or that way. Depending on where she holds her hand and the treat, she can get me to sit, stand or lie down. That way, when she's ready to train me to do something when she asks for it, she knows how to get me to do what she wants. So once she knows how to get the behavior, she can call it a name (like 'down') and then show me what it is she wants, clicking me for it when I do it right, then giving me a treat. Pretty smart, huh? Plus there's some pretty cool doggy strength and conditioning exercises that Mom and her friends do with their older dogs using these position changes -- maybe I'll show you that in another post. (But this post is all about me!)

Mom can also lure me to do more than just stationary exercises. Look all the different ways she can get me to move using a lure:

Mom can use the lure-in-motion to train me to do things to. As a matter of fact, she did! I learned how to do a "spin" this way:

And I can do it the other direction, too! (Mom calls it a "twirl" when it goes the other way.):