Yesterday Was the First Time I Saw Someone Other Than Myself,?
Question by : Yesterday was the first time I saw someone other than myself,?
use the “training term” , “Indirect Pressure”. For those who understand it, and how it is used…please explain your idea of it and when you would use it.
Wait…that isn’t a question, is it?
Will you……please explain your idea of it and when you would use it?
That’s better. Sorry, my brained hopped a flight to CA a couple hours ago..the rest of me follows in 14 hours.
Best answer:
Answer by T J
Indirect pressure was the brain child of the late Rex Carr. As he envisioned it, it was a tool to brake a dogs train of thought. Therefore offering the dog the opportunity to ‘start over’.
In the early days (late 50s – early 60s) the actual process was reversed (nick-sit-nick), plus the fact that e-collars were rather crude back then. So a person really had to be on their game to use the process with any hope of the desired results.
I began using indirect pressure in the late 60s, but at that time I used it exclusively for running a dog on the “pattern field” (teaching a dog to take directional casts). What I found from that early experience kind of blew me away because I ended up with a dog that loved being handled so much that he began to refuse to mark the fall of a bird so that I would handle him to it instead of him having to do the work of finding it.
Ok, the common way to do it:
With Retrievers, we always give them a directional cast from the remote “sit” position (dog is facing the handler). In its basic form there are 4 directions to send the dog (virtual casting is more advanced). The arm extended strait up tells the dog to go strait away from the handler, the arm extended to the side tells the dog to go either left or right, and the arm extended down tells the dog to come toward the handler.
Often a dog will ‘just know’ that the bird you want is “over there”, and regardless of what command you give it “there” is where it wants to go. Direct pressure would be to give the dog a great big “NO” along with a “high 5” to emphasize the point. Continued use of this method will obviously make a dog not like being handled all that well. So instead of the big NO we just blow a “sit” whistle then “nick” with the e-collar, and then blow the “sit” whistle a second time. At this point the dogs confidence is fully restored, (it knows that it obeyed the sit command properly) and is much more likely to take a proper cast.
Having first learned to use this method with my Retrievers, when I started training my stock dog (ACD) to cut a calf out of a herd I found the method an absolute godsend.
BTW, the BC in the pic in the other thread, that is last years WORLD Sheep Dog Champion. (that guy knows how to train a dog!)
Answer by Curtis M
Yeah…what TJ said! I’ve never trained a serious dog to herd sheep so I dunno anything about it (but I don’t think it’d be that hard to have a functional sheep dog if you were a serious OB trainer with a lot of time for headaches lmao). But I assume it’d be much like training a dog patterns in the way TJ described. I’ve noticed people give a “hold” whistle to sheep dogs before giving a secondary command to make sure they have their attention so…it’d be easy to believe they’re trained with indirect pressure (or could easily be).
Indirect pressure stim is technically a correction, you use it to take only a tiny bit of drive away to get the dog to focus on you. It’s no different than Helmut Raiser tugging on his dog’s ear (which cost him the championship, you remember that!?!?! Lmfao!) Or even putting inflection in your voice…the thing is you can’t put inflection in your voice at a couple hundred yards!
TJ explained it beautifully. I’m just agreeing, and giving my 2 cents on why I don’t oppose giving a dog an automatic correction in this scenario.
-edit- yeah greek I forgot about that scenario. I do the same thing with a long line and a prong. Mark out how far it’ll reach, have the decoy just out of reach, recall at 20 feet from the decoy then 15 then 10. Use the e-collar sometimes too. Hey did you ever get around to making that belly band?