At many shows, the club will provide a bucket for you to put your lead and toys/food in when you go into the ring. This bucket will be waiting for you on the finish line.
Most dogs rapidly learn that the bucket is a source of wonderful goodies and they will make a beeline for it at the end of the run. Sometimes they are a bit too keen and don’t wait until they are actually finished before they charge off bucketward – it is very frustrating to get all the way around to the end and have your dog go round the last jump!
I’ve had two dogs that were very keen on their buckets, but I’ve never had a dog leave the course early to get its toy. I think the way I train at home has a lot to do with this.
Prevention Option #1: Don’t Make the Bucket Fun
Firstly remember that although your lead needs to go in the bucket so that you will have it at the finish line, putting treats and toys in there is optional. You could leave them in your vehicle, or get a friend to hold them, and then your dog will never have any particular interest in the bucket.
This might be quite difficult advice to pull off in reality, but some people can and do make it work – for example, if you have a partner who doesn’t run a dog but does come along to shows, they would make an excellent bribe-holder.
Prevention Option #2: Choose Your Rewards Carefully
The ideal reward is not actually a toy – it is the interactive play that you and your dog do with the toy. That’s one of the reasons why tug toys are so popular among agility handlers. The dog will (usually) return to the handler with the toy because it wants someone to tug with. If the handler doesn’t want to reward the dog, they can take away the toy.
Other toys such as balls are harder to train with because the dog tends to play by herself with them, or play the dreaded keep-away game. If you are training with these toys, you’ll need to do more work at the foundation level to build your dog’s self-control around them.
When training with food you also need to make sure that your dog can’t scoff it down when you don’t want her to. Food should always be in a dogproof container when it is within the dog’s reach, unless you are certain that you can reach it before your dog does. One neat way to make food more interactive is to put the food inside a fluffy pencil case, and train the dog to bring you the pencil case for you to open.
Prevention Option #3: Build Your Dog’s Self-Control
I’ve never had a problem with bucket-driving with any of my dogs, and I think it’s because there are often treats and toys lying on the ground when I’m training at home. I do most foundation work sitting on the floor with a bowl of food next to me. This is when my dogs first learn that they need to work with me to earn a reward, even if it is already lying on the ground.
When I am training, I usually walk to the end of the sequence with my dog, leave the toy there, then walk back to the start and set up. Each young dog I’ve trained has gone through a phase of watching me put the toy down, and then grabbing it as soon as I step away. I just take the toy off them and put it back on the ground, as many times as is necessary, and they learn that if they want the toy it’s better to leave it alone and come and play agility with me first.
When I lived in Wellington I only had a small space to train in, which meant a lot of box work. I would usually leave the toy in the middle of the box and repeat whatever skill I was working on a few times, until I was happy with it. My dogs would run right over the top of the toy during sequences, and wouldn’t pick it up until I said “get it” at the end. I have more room for training now but old habits die hard and I still do a lot of box work like this.
If you’re familiar with Susan Garrett’s work you will recognise the above as applications of the “It’s Yer Choice” game. If you don’t know this game, there’s no official video from Susan I can link to, but there’s lots on YouTube of people working with their own dogs – this one explains the basics fairly well.
The Cure
If you already have an excessively bucket-driving dog, she is revealing a hole in your foundation training. Your first step is to figure out how far down the hole goes. Start with the very easiest self-control challenge you can think of and increase the challenges until your dog fails. You don’t need to spend much time at each challenge because you are testing rather than training.
Once your dog fails you have found the point that you need to start training from. Work on that challenge until your dog succeeds a few times, then progress through harder challenges until you’re confident your dog will stay in the ring with you until you’re finished. Mix up your training by doing some repetitions where you do release the dog to charge off and get her toy.
Consistency is very important in dog training. Leaving you to go and get the toy is not OK – so use rewards like tug toys or food containers where the dog can’t self-reward, and don’t engage in tugging if your dog was not released to get the toy. Choose a release cue (I use “get it”) for when it is OK to grab the toy, and remind yourself before each agility training session or competition run that you need to use it.
To get you started, here are a few challenges you could try, in increasing order of difficulty. Of course there are heaps of others – have a brainstorm and see what you can come up with. If you mostly train with food you can substitute a closed container of treats for the toy, and feed the dog at the location of the container.
- IYC with low value food (as shown in the video I linked to above) – start out with the food in your hand. Progress to dropping treats on the floor, then to walking around an area with treats on the floor.
- IYC as above with higher value food.
- IYC with a toy – place it on the ground, stand up, wait a few seconds. Stand on the toy or step into the dog’s path if she tries to grab it. Progress to asking the dog to do simple behaviours like hand targets while the toy is on the ground, then to heeling around in the vicinity of the toy, then heeling over the top of the toy. Pick up the pace and start running over the top of the toy.
- 360 spins in heel position (another Susan Garrett game) with the toy on the ground – can your dog remain parallel with you or does she cut across the front of you to grab her toy? Start at quite a slow pace with a 90 degree turn, then build up to 360, then pick up the speed.
- Advanced 360 degree spin challenges- begin the spin at top speed, then stop halfway through. Does your dog stop and stand next to you until you start moving again? Do two spins at high speed – does your dog follow you around for the second spin or has she already helped herself to her toy?
- One-jump exercises over a low jump – leave toy on ground behind you and start with turns over a single jump (basically the 360 spin game with a jump). Then place the toy in different locations around the jump so that it is more tempting.
- Figure-8s over one jump – place toy on far side of jump. Wrap dog left over jump, front cross, send dog to jump again and this time wrap right. The dog now has to go past the toy multiple times before she can get it. Start with the toy a fairly long way ahead and gradually bring it closer.
- Figure-8s over two jumps with the toy placed in the middle – now the dog will have to run over the top of the toy.
- Small sequences of three or four obstacles – try sequences with turns away from the finish jump/toy, or where one jump is off centre so that the dog has to deviate off the shortest path to the toy.
- Longer sequences of obstacles, building up to full courses. Try sequences where the dog takes the last jump multiple times, or approaches the last jump with a lot of speed but then has to turn away and wrap another jump before finishing.
Does your dog love her bucket? What’s your best tip for fixing this problem?