Have you had any issues with ‘laser pointer syndrome’ or have you found the dogs you work with generally don’t get too worked up over the laser? Teaching this same skill with my “Guinea pig” dog (not actually a service dog but I’m training assistance skills for my certification). She’s a border collie and though I haven’t had any severe problems since she has an established ‘leave it’ and ‘finish’, + we don’t use it as a toy, but her change in attitude does cause her to make some careless mistakes. Interested to know if you did any desensitisation work with your dogs or if they have always been fairly indifferent to the laser? I’ve been hanging it up on a string to a curtain rail then turning the fan on so the laser moves around the room enticingly for a few hours, all while enforcing downtime to hopefully take some novelty out of the laser. It’s all going well but I’m still a bit nervous about it backfiring and causing things to get worse since this is a pretty untouched frontier in training. Generally the rules are “don’t use laser pointers at all” so I’m mostly winging it here.
Have you had any issues with ‘laser pointer syndrome’ or have you found the dogs you work with generally don’t get too worked up over the laser? Teaching this same skill with my “Guinea pig” dog (not actually a service dog but I’m training assistance skills for my certification). She’s a border collie and though I haven’t had any severe problems since she has an established ‘leave it’ and ‘finish’, + we don’t use it as a toy, but her change in attitude does cause her to make some careless mistakes.
Interested to know if you did any desensitisation work with your dogs or if they have always been fairly indifferent to the laser? I’ve been hanging it up on a string to a curtain rail then turning the fan on so the laser moves around the room enticingly for a few hours, all while enforcing downtime to hopefully take some novelty out of the laser.
It’s all going well but I’m still a bit nervous about it backfiring and causing things to get worse since this is a pretty untouched frontier in training. Generally the rules are “don’t use laser pointers at all” so I’m mostly winging it here.