@Nella68 Ahh! I went to an appointment today at lunchtime and sat down and squeaked – or rather, the resident dinosaur in my pocket did.
Disclaimer: all of our Not Chasing Things work is ongoing and pupsy is better on some animals than others! Pigeons in our garden still risk their lives daily, crows get almost universally blanked, and we continue to work on rabbits and game birds.
I guess I have approached it in lots of small ways all at once but without any kind of theory – just doing it totally uneducatedly as I go along. But if I think about it I guess this is what I’ve done.
You have to link a more positive action with what they want to do. So they see the bird/furry creatures and they want to run but you capture that moment and get their attention for something better. A good ‘leave’ works here too, so when I was working on crows in particular I would see the crows, see her see the crows and shout ‘leave’ so she got to know that seeing crows meant ‘leave’. And she knew that performing ‘leave’ meant she’d be rewarded in some way. I think that is fundamentally all any kind of training is but doing a good ‘leave’ on a crow is the sort of thing that gives you an immediate result as they have simply not chased it, if you see what I mean. Onlead this works well too – they see a duck, say, by the river and you can stick in a ‘leave’ and combine that with physically moving away from the duck – or better still pre-empting it as it's not a surprise.
Equally, I accepted that progress wouldn't be linear. If she took a few paces towards a crow but turned away, she’d be rewarded for the positive action, or even if she did chase it but recalled off it, I would reward the recall, and then I built it up in stages. A long-line helps a lot here because you can control the action and we did make judicious use of it when she was little.
Secondly – exposure. We did a lot of sitting watching deer quietly when she was little – and I mean loads, and from about 14 weeks. We live at the back of a deer park so I have an uninterrupted, unlimited, and almost private supply of moving creatures for her, and we used to go and sit as close to them as I’d dare with her on a long-line and just do nothing. We used to sit and wait and I’d hope that they’d take off so that I could show her that the response she needs when deer run is to do nothing. If she moved to run I’d say ‘sit sit sit’ and then when she had and she was calm again she’d get a reward and we’d move off, walk for a bit, and then do the same again at the next group of deer. The other day we were in the woods that border the deer park and came across a group of roe deer on the other side of the fence. They were about six foot from her. I sat her down and she waited, tail sweeping the floor, quivering with excitement, but quietly – crucially. I just reinforced her with ‘sit sit sit’ in a calm, positive voice, and fed her some pate to reinforce her cleverness, and she carried on sitting as they moved off. As they moved, I turned her round saying ‘this way’, and she came nicely because I hadn’t pushed it too long and got her frustrated. For cockers frustration is a big thing so I’m mindful not to ruin her good behaviour by making her do boring things for too long.
I think a lot of it comes down to familiarity – how I see it, you can’t teach them not to chase something that they’ve never encountered, or to not do something that they’ve never been told not to do, if that makes sense. I don’t know if that’s the right approach – a lot of people with working dogs keep their pups naive about game for a long time and I understand that, but where we live pupsy couldn’t stay naive for long if I ever wanted to take her on a good walk as there’s so much of it around. I had to show her what to do with it instead. That’s what I mean when I talk about going to gamey places with her – I put her into environments where there are ‘hazards’, albeit in safe, fenced fields not near a road, so that she can learn what to do when she encounters them. It means that yes, they probably will chase a deer/rabbit once or twice, but then they learn not to when you show them what to do instead and reward them for it.
I don’t know if any of that is helpful. I am such an amateur (and a beginner) and I’ve no idea if any of what I do with pupsy is right. Please don’t get the impression that she’s steady as a rock because she is definitely not! But we work on it every day.