So much of agility isn’t about the obstacles, it’s about what happens in between–your handling. I think developing your puppy’s understanding of handling takes longer then anything. The good news is that it’s something you can start from when you very first bring them home. Circle work (as outlined by Greg Derrett), is a heck of a lot easier when you have an 8 week old puppy that you are faster than.
For those who may not know, the basics are this. Starting in small circles, move with your puppy on the outside. They should not cut behind you to the inside, they should continue to drive around that outside shoulder as your circles get bigger and bigger. You can use your tug toy to reward–every couple of steps at first, then less frequently. You are teaching your dog to follow your shoulders–a pretty basic handling concept. You also work these with the dog on the inside–you want to be able to push into your dog without them flicking away. This foundation work helps your eventual introduction of rear crosses, where you will be driving into the dog’s path to cue the turn, and don’t want the dog to “flick” off the jump.
Once your dog understands how to run the circle, you can add a front cross. Run in the circle, front cross into your dog, and reward with the opposite hand. Again, your dog should not cut behind you.
The other corollary of circle work is the straight line. When you run in a straight line, you want your dog to drive ahead of you. This is the basics of your dog understanding acceleration–if I run straight ahead, you run past me and keep going as long as I’m heading in that direction. You can start this as a separate exercise–put the toy out ahead 10-15′, get your dog excited, and run towards the toy. When you get there, play. At first, they’ll probably be looking at you, but as they start to understand the game, they should start running past you to the toy. Set the toy farther out, until your dog really blasts past you. As I’ve been repeatedly reminded, don’t slow down until your dog reaches the toy.
Once your dog understands these two exercises, you can mix them together. Run in a circle, do a front cross, and accelerate on a straight line, throwing your toy as your dog forges ahead of you.
These exercises are outlined more clearly in Greg Derrett’s DVDs, but these are the fundamentals as I understand it.
Ahhh, the million dollar question…how are you going to train your contacts? Are you going to do running? Are you going to do two on two off? Four on the floor? Trkman? Stride Regulators? It can almost make your head explode.
Currently, I have a running aframe and dogwalk with Trip. What most people don’t know is that both are retrains, and the running dogwalk is a complete and total accident. When I was retraining the aframe, I somehow managed to lose my stopped dogwalk in the process. Since I was doing it in a very accelerated fashion and didn’t have access to equipment often, I wasn’t in a good position to keep this from happening. With hindsight and all that, if I were doing the same thing now, I’d make sure I was working and reinforcing the stopped dogwalk each session along with running the aframe, and stop the running the dogwalk the very first time she ran it.
For almost a year, I trained and reinforced a 2o2o dogwalk in practice, but got a running dogwalk in every show. I tried to fix it, but we don’t have a lot of “match” opportunities, and she would always stop on a second attempt in the venues that allow training. I can count on one hand the number of times she actually missed the yellow during that time. I finally gave in and went with it, training and trialing a running dogwalk. I use a very thin metal hoop made of fishing line at the end of the dogwalk–completely invisible. Trip’s dogwalk is stride dependent–when she does 3 strides, she’s solidly into the yellow on even an FCI contact. Even with 2 strides she will almost always hit an AKC contact–the shorter ones can be a little more iffy. So, I train and reinforce the 3 strides.
I always planned to do a running aframe with Ticket. I think the reality is that it’s necessary to be competitive at the highest levels, especially with a dog that will be competing against dogs 2 inches taller then her. But, I didn’t start this training until I had the xrays that showed Ticket’s growth plates were closed. So more on this later…
But the dogwalk? What to do, what to do? Trip has a fantastically beautiful running dogwalk, but is a “natural” at everthing she does. Plus, it’s a complete accident, so not a great example to follow. I think to have a successful running dogwalk, you need to understand a few things…
1. You NEED to have a dogwalk of your own, or a place where you can practice multiple times a week easily. I don’t think there’s any escaping the fact that a running dogwalk is a “vaguer” criteria, and requires more reps to train, and more reps to maintain. This is even more true for larger dogs, whose natural stride can carry them over the yellow.
2. It’s not just about the running dogwalk, it’s about your ability to HANDLE the running dogwalk. A running dogwalk by itself does you no good if you are 20 feet behind your dog when they exit the obstacle. The dog’s not the only one who needs to run–so do you. OR, you have to have phenomenal verbal discrimination/obstacle skills. I still don’t think this will allow you to be maximally successful on International-style courses, which are tricker.
3. You have to accept that you WILL get bad calls. And sometimes there will be a course where you feel like the judge hates running dogwalks. Probably not true, but the course design can sometimes be pretty brutal if you don’t have a stop.
So, thinking everything through, I decided I was going to teach Ticket to stop on the dogwalk. My goal was to teach the fastest, most brilliant, independent dogwalk contact I possibly could. I wanted it to be completely black and white, with no doubt in her head that her job was to sprint across that board as fast as possible and get into position. If I do that, and can’t be as competitive as I want, then I will know that I did everything possible, but it wasn’t enough. And my next dog will have a running dogwalk. 🙂
So, that said, I still had to decide on the method I wanted to use to teach Ticket to stop. I decided to go with the 1 rear toe on method developed by Linda Mecklenburg. I like the idea of teaching the dog what to do with it’s rear feet, versus it’s front. I think if you teach them that their job is for their rear feet to stay in contact with that board, that’s a pretty black and white criteria. And I think it can help give you a little more drive to the bottom of the contact.
Here is a link to the Clean Run article where Linda outlines the method–it’s really very straightforward.
Reprint–Clean Run, One Rear Toe On, Linda Mecklenburg
So, at about 4-4.5 months, I introduced Ticket to the plank. She very quickly “got it.” The only things I really modified were that I don’t actually ask for 1 rear toe on, I ask for two feet in contact with the board. I would have been fine with one toe, but Ticket never offered it to me–she always kept two feet on the board, while still doing the stretching and keeping her back straight that I wanted to see. So, I kept it. I also did not do a lot of reinforcement for coming off the board and stepping backwards to touch the board. I did a bit, but I have seen dogs trained with this method who do this often in shows, and I didn’t want THAT to be the end behavior. Even with what I did do, we went through a stage when Ticket was running the plank on the ground that she did think that was the game–she run off the board and immediately step back. Ignoring that behavior and rewarding STAYING in contact with the board solved it, but I definitely saw how it could become a problem.
Again, I think the dog understanding the release word is very important here. I think a lot of contact troubles stem from the dog not understanding when they’re supposed to move on. Is it when the handler moves? When the handler stops, then moves again? When you say the next obstacle? I wanted Ticket to understand that her job wasn’t done until she was released (“ok”). So, I would click and reward multiple times in that end position on the board. I’d also reward with a treat when I did release her.
Because of all this training, Ticket has more rear end awareness then any of my previous dogs. There is not a doubt in my mind that she understands absolutely that she is supposed to keep those back feet touching the contact. I first realized that when we were working with the plank, and I put it away to work on something else. She went over to it, and picked up a rear foot to touch the plank on the wall. She tends to touch her back feet to anything she can–she likes to do 2o2o in her crate at feeding time. In fact, when it came time to teach her a running aframe, I struggled at the beginning because she didn’t want to run the contact–she wanted to stop at the bottom. When I threw a toy, she’d leave the contact, get the toy, and bring it back and get into 2o2o again.
So, if you’re going to teach a stopped contact, I think 4-5 months isn’t a bad time to start teaching the preliminary behaviors, assuming everything else is going the way you want. If you’re still working on fundamentals (focus, playing, etc), then that’s way more important. Whether you’re teaching a nose touch, or to drive to a target, or 1RTO, the basics are great for a puppy to learn. And teaching to run to the end of a board and stop is also going to be important in your teeter training, regardless of the contact method you use.
I incorporate some of NILIF (Nothing in Life is Free) into living with a puppy–I think it helps really build that relationship. I’m not talking about keeping your puppy in some kind of sterile bubble away from any possible interesting stimulus except you, but just some basic concepts. I don’t give out cookies for looking cute–gotta earn it. If your puppy can’t be supervised 100%, the best place for them is in their crate (this is for their own safety as well). I know some people won’t let their puppy play with their other dogs. I definitely keep an eye on this, because I don’t want my puppy to prefer the other dogs to me, but Ticket spent plenty of time loose and interacting with all my other dogs.
When I first brought Trip home as a puppy, she was playing with Mardi within 5 minutes of being home. I did at times separate them and put one or the other up so that Mardi wasn’t the coolest thing to baby Trip, but once I started interacting and working with puppy Trip, it really was no longer an issue, so it wasn’t something I had to be very diligent about.
With Ticket, I was even more worried, because she was going to be living with Trip, her MOM. That’s a whole different obstacle to overcome. And Trip was a much better mom then I thought she’d be–she actually a little TOO tolerant of their antics. Trip and Ticket still play everyday, chasing each other around in proper Sheltie fashion. But, luckily for me, Trip is also my biggest weapon here. Trip is MY girl through and through, and she will drop Ticket in a hot second every time if I ask her. That definitely made an impression on Ticket. I still would separate them occasionally, if nothing else but to give Trip a break, but the problem I imagined never materialized. Now, if you have a puppy that is ignoring playing with you in favor of running off to play with your other dog, then you definitely need to do some managing of the situation so that your puppy can see how much more fun YOU are.
Anyway, back to YOUR puppy. You’ve worked with your puppy, and she likes to tug and play with you, she’s starting to retrieve, and she’s learned some basics–ie sit/down. You’ve spent the last few weeks working on playing and being the center of her world. Time to introduce some self-control. Before you get that toy you want SO bad, you have to do something. It can be anything at first–eye contact works great. Look away from the toy at you, “ok” (release word), get the toy. Sits and downs too. One of my favorite parts of Susan Garrett’s Shaping Success is all the games–get it, read it, live it! And get her Crate Games DVD too–another great puppy resource!
So when my puppy is tugging enthusiastically, I up the distractions. I want her to be able to tug around other dogs, around agility, etc. So, we slowly started introducing that as well. As a young dog, I would have Ticket near the ring at an agility trial, just working on tugging, release/self-control, tug again. Starting out as far away as necessary, and working up to next to ringside. At 6 months old Ticket was tugging ringside at AKC Nationals–pretty darn distracting. At any indication that it was too much and I started to lose her attention, we backed off the distractions a bit, and worked back up to it. Again, I benefited from a puppy who was always pretty focused and toy-motivated, so it was a pretty rapid process for us.
Along the lines of self-control, I want my puppy to be able to readily switch back and forth between toys and food. This is something I struggled with when Trip was young–we’d be working great with toys, but once the food came out, she didn’t want the toys anymore. I put a lot of work into being able to use both with Trip, but knowing that potential pitfall ahead of time let me plan on working on it with Ticket before it became a problem. From Day 1, I was switching back and forth between toys and food with Ticket. If she held out for food, I started to find that toy REALLY interesting, which peeved her off to no end–didn’t I know that was HER toy? She’s able to eat a cookie, then grab the toy, switching back and forth without hesitation. Very useful when it comes to training.
We’re getting closer to actually thinking about agility…! 🙂
