Farm Dogs - Seeking Rick

The good news about all of this rain is that I have time to catch up on this blog. :)

Yes, my dogs are spoiled....but to be fair...I make them work for it too. One of the issues I realized early on was that my husband was always working at the shop or somewhere around the farm and would lose track of time. I would have dinner ready or there would be a call for him and I did not know where he was. The dogs are much faster at finding him than I am, AND as a bonus, they think it is fun to find him. Unlike me, I do not think it is fun tracking him down. So, I trained them to find him and send him messages. Here are a few of the issues I had in the beginning:

1. If the message tag was too big on the collar, Dante would pull it off of Karma's collar.
2. Dante is not the reliable one, because he gets distracted too easily, but he will follow Karma's lead.
3. It took a few tries for them to realize they had to actually seek him out and he might be in different place each time, they would only go to open spots and see if they could visually see him.
4. If it is pouring down rain, they are still not 100% reliable yet.
5. While learning to seek him out as the first step, they started seeking him all of the time, even without the command....haha.

I uploaded a video (again to my Google Drive) where I send them to go send a message to Rick this morning. It took them less than 20 seconds to find him. I actually called him to see if they found him and he told me they were there sitting and getting their reward as he was talking to me. Rick does not always have his phone on him, but today he did. (Video of me sending the dogs to deliver a message.)

I had already told the dogs the command before I recorded the video. That way I could attach the message to the collar. I could not record and tie the message at the same time. So, they were ready to go and just waiting to start their mission by the time I had my cell phone ready. They love learning new tricks and maybe another day when it is not so muddy, I will video them running around finding Rick too. :)