Water Hides Part 3
These blog posts detailed how I taught Iona the concept of water hides starting easy and slowly increasing the difficulty. It is important for me to remember that if she shows confusion with a new skill, it is probably because I skipped or rushed a step in training it.
I lost the video for one of the searches in this progression. Basically, after the last bunch of searches, I practiced the shell game with the screens on top of the containers. This was a pretty important step because with the screens, the hide is very inaccessible.
After she succesfully searched through three boxes (one hot and two cold). I added one more hot box and another cold box and then switched them up with each run. It looked something like this.
Make sure to check out how I feed her on the very last hide. She is still not completely solid with these boxes. Until she is fluent with this task, I feel that it is important to pop the top off the screen to allow her to get close to source. This gives her clear feedback that her choice was indeed correct. You can see that even though I feed her right over the water, she still gets some in in her mouth before we leave!
The progression after is pretty straight forward. I will add in some hot and cold sand boxes and then practice in a variety of settings to get her ready for the trial.