That's great I only have a survey of one dog myself, because I've not really employed it with Shadow yet, long-term. That's work to be done when I'm back in Spain with him. Willow is very food motivated, Shadow is less so, so it'll be interesting to see how he reacts - if he turns out more like Charlie.
I'm really happy, yes, it worked out perfectly. I am just a bit confused about whether the 'look back at me' is the point of LAT or not - I do very much agree without it, it worked out really well. I also did a great deal of waiting. With Charlie tied to something (so I couldn't mess with the lead) and a handful of king prawns, cheese, roast duck on offer - really, on offer, held out in my hand. When Charlie relaxed his fixed gaze on the excitement, he took the food. I did nothing else. No clicking, no LAT cue, just waited. In a way, as soon as the fixation relaxed a bit, the food was there. This worked really well too.
Sorry, just to mention - Donna Hill puts 'LAT' on cue and the result is the dog looks and turns back.
This is really helpful, thanks I guess I hadn't realised that LAT could help when Ella was excited to get to someone as I assumed it would encourage her to go towards it. I have been using LAM at training when we do the dreaded weaving exercise (we weave in and out of each other) as Ella finds it so exciting. Not sure if I was just hoping that she somehow wouldn't realise that a dog was walking right next to her if she was looking at me
I do agree that once you start on LAM, you are stuck with it. What you train is 'don't look at that, look at me'. I do use LAM time to time. I do have a 'watch me' cue but it works on things like at the vet's to distract him from an injection etc. (used tonight, he was fussing while the vet tried to look at his paw, so I can say 'watch me' and he will instead of fussing). I haven't worked hard on it, and it's not a very strong cue.
This is Donna Hill's version of LAT - she is definitely training 'look back' and she only creates the uncued behaviour in order to put LAT on cue:
Ah, yes, very different to the Control Unleashed version and very much more "look at me" than what I understand by "look at that".
page 129 in my book is where Look at That starts and she clicks or says Look or Yes when starting it.
They all sound like event markers rather than cues, though. I'll have another read tomorrow. I have the Kindle version, so page numbers will be different
I will have to read this in more detail to be clear what I am doing, however, I would say Ripple is more like JulieT's Charlie as he is an excitable dog rather than reactive. My aim is to stop him darting across to other dogs to try and play (and consequently nearly pulling my arm out of its socket). He also used to try and rush off the pavement towards buses and large noisy vehicles (very scary when this first happened) but he now automatically looks to me when a large vehicle comes past. So I have certainly had success there.
There are a lot of similarities in how you deal with it, I think. Also some differences - the main one being that you can use a technique of just waiting for the dog to calm down, which you wouldn't want to do with a reactive dog. It's worth reading control unleashed, but it's a bit frustrating beacause she does seem to assume all readers have nervous border collies!
I'm using LAT with Obi and I've put it on cue. I feel this makes it something we're doing together and when he looks away at the click if he doesn't immediately look back at the thing then that's my opportunity to cue some other behaviour (often a hunt as that's strong and keeps him in one place) and subsequently reward that. It feels like it brings him back to me mentally and he's more engaged. I'm not a passive bystander. I wish I'd known about this when Riley was young as I think it would have helped with his desire to greet dogs. I used LAM and that has just made him look around for what I want him to avoid as several people have described.
I still sometimes cue ahead of time, as when we are about to walk past the big black dog, I have to get the LAT working before we get there. Walking into training class I'm not saying anything. So what happens? A lady pooh poohs it, saying Oban is just looking at me to get a treat.
