Aunty Kaye's Building Blocks

Hi Richard


Here is some serious reading for you... my draft outline of my
proposed book on creative and advanced training. I'm hoping that we
can amalgamate your blogs with this framework as we work our way
through it.

As you will read, the concept of Building Blocks is that there are
generic categories of behaviour, which can be captured and
encouraged, so that the dog becomes "hooked". For example, through
the play you are doing, Fido becomes hooked on retrieving type
behaviours, and these lay a foundation for the array of specific
tricks or actions that we will eventually teach him. By noticing his
natural behaviour, you may notice that he uses his paw for something,
so you can capture that, and we can then develop the paw actions.
Many pet dogs develop a party trick in this way, and they have a
favorite way of behaving. Hopefully with Fido we can capture a broad
repertoire and get him "hooked" on all of it.

The attached file is copyright and supplied for your personal use as
part of our project. Feel free to print it out if you like.

Looking forward to your feedback.

cheers

Kaye