Chicago – totally stuffed!

This is how I feel; very satisfied but so tired! I am absolutely totally stuffed with knowledge, new ideas and a huge portion of motivation. Last day I completely passed out at my room. I’ve been jet lagged, which means dizziness and nausea. Today I’ve been feeling much better, and could really enjoy the last day at CE 2011.

Instead of going through all speaks I’ve been to I just highlight some things that I’ll think were rememberable.

Again, Ramirez was great, and his lab about reinforcement gave me insight of some things, like the conditioned reinforcement of clapping your hands. I use it a lot (all I can see is the alot animal when writing a lot, please release me!!) with my dogs, but not with my other girls. I will most definitely go home and discuss this with my work mates. I know from lectures by Ken before, that this is something they use a lot at Shedd, and I think it might be useful for the girls as well. Emelie gave me the tip to use it in my freestyle work as well – of course! Why did i not come to think about that!! 😀 Maybe because I haven’t come that far in my f-work yet… 😉

One other thing that he did was evaluating a training session with one of the dogs (the one at the picture) and was evaluating the dog’s focus. If you have great focus during the whole training session – you’ve got it! The focus is one of the most important things in the whole session, and even though you’ve got great timing skills, the best plan and criteria, you’ll not come that far without a great focus from your animal! This reminds me of one of the best moments at my work where one of my training mates watched my training and afterwards said something like: ”Your girls don’t let their eyes from you – they’re totally focused on only one thing – to get your attention!” That made my entire day – week, and month, well… it still make me happy to think about her comment – tank yoy M!! ❤ )

Patricia McConell was the speaker of Saturday night dinner and it was such a good presentation! She presented a whole bunch of new science about dogs, and I promise to write about it as soon as I found and read all the articles.

Today, at the ”good bye session(?)” when she spoke about digs and emotions, she made the whole audience burst into tears – I think everyone just wanted to go home and give our dogs a warm hugh and just tell them how much we love them!

Best quote: ‘You know, like a ”Children of the corn puppy”‘ (P.McC) 😀 Yeah, I know the type.

More good stuff? Ken (hey, he held a lot of lectures, okey 😉 ) talked a lot of training and science and actually combined these two in a very good way. His thought’s about science is that it’s a important to understand and when you practice you morph the theory to suit the circumstances you work in. We can’t set up a laboratory setting in our training, but we can use the scientific knowledge to understand what we do and also how we may develop our training. (Why don’t I live in USA?)

…I’m falling to sleep… have to be cristal clear tomorrow! So, write a lot (alot!!!) more when I come home. Keep your finger crossed i get to photo a lot(…) of great training tomorrow which I can share with you!

I miss my woderful family, alot!!

Why did she put a photo of a pig doing slalom in the blogg? A bad picture, taken from a video? Beacuse I wanted to show you guys that anyone can learn to do the slalom! 😀