Month: May 2020

The upcoming move to Level 2 means that some of our dog training clubs and businesses may be looking for a contact tracing solution. I know that many of us in the dog training community prefer canines to computers, so I thought I’d put my nerd hat on and share a free, simple setup for people to check in with their phones.

Obviously this won’t work for people who don’t have phones, so as an instructor you’ll need to keep an eye out and make sure you fill in the form for anybody who can’t.

If you don’t want to go high-tech, the Agility Committee has a form that you can print out and use. Please remember to be careful about sharing pens – it’s best for the instructor for each class to fill out the whole form rather than getting everyone to write their own details down.

Step 1: Build a Google Form

Head over to Google Forms and create a form (you’ll need to create a Google account if you don’t already have one).

I love Google Forms because they are such a quick and lightweight way to replace the paper forms in your life. My club has started using them for class registration and membership applications, and it makes things much simpler for our treasurer.

It has been incredible to see the way our lives have changed over the last six weeks, since New Zealand entered lockdown. Hopefully we will soon be able to return to a less restricted way of life, but in the meantime here’s a few “human training” lessons from the lockdown that we can apply to our dogs.

1) Unclear criteria cause frustration and anxiety

During the early weeks of lockdown I saw a lot of posts on social media from people who were unsure whether they could or couldn’t do something. There was never a real threat of harsh punishment (our police in NZ usually prefer education to handcuffs in my limited and white privilege-laden experience) but just the possibility that they might be pulled over and asked to go back home seemed to stress some people out.