This weekend Able accompanied me to an agility show in Dunedin. He hadn’t been to an agility show since he was about 11 or 12 weeks old, so I was interested to see how he would take it all in.
He was a super well-behaved puppy. He enjoyed meeting lots of new people – and playing with lots of new dogs. He walked off-lead in the exercise area without chasing other people’s dogs (I did keep him quite a distance away) and he was even able to focus on some impromptu training sessions with lots of distractions around him.
On the down side, he also spewed all over his bed as we drove through Herbert.
Fake Relaxing
The thing I was most pleased about was that he never got frantic about watching other dogs doing agility. We kept a good distance away from the rings, but we were sometimes quite close to the practice area. He watched a couple of dogs doing their warmups but he stayed quiet and the lead stayed loose.
He spent a lot of time lying on his hip and looking calmly at me. He got lots of bikkies for this behaviour when I first took him up to agility club, just because it was the first thing he did that wasn’t obnoxious. It now seems to be his default behaviour that he offers whenever we’re out in a busy environment and I’m sitting quietly. He looks semi-relaxed, but I don’t think he is truly relaxed – he’s a Border Collie in working mode and he’s offering “fake relaxing” because that’s what I’ve been rewarding him for. Nonetheless, it’s a much nicer behaviour than many others he could do, so I’ll keep paying him for it.
The Relaxed Beaver
Speaking of relaxing … last week Able lay down for a nap outside of his ex-pen for the first time. This is something that’s been worrying me. My other dog can only tolerate him in very short doses, so he spends a lot of time in his ex-pen. I get him out several times a day, but usually only for half an hour or so at a time.
To be honest that is all my nerves can stand because he seems to spend the entire time literally trying to eat my house. Actually trying to chew the floors, or the walls, or the skirting boards, sometimes the furniture, and most especially the doors. I had already given him the nickname “Beaver” as a young puppy because he liked to chew sticks and had a good go at chewing the boards of the deck … but he is astonishingly good at hunting down and seeking to eliminate wood.
So I’ve been worried that I might have taught Able a habit of “go at all the wood like the Energizer bunny” while he’s out of his pen, and then collapsing for a nap once I put him back.
Well … the puppy’s a bit older now, Rik’s getting used to him, he’s making good progress with his toilet training, and he’s getting better at entertaining himself without trying to literally eat my house. He’s discovered Nylabones and other toys, he plays with one toy at a time for more than three seconds, and I don’t hve to spend every moment hovering over him. His breaks out of his pen have been getting longer and lo and behold, he actually lies down to take a nap after a while. Phew!
Left and Right
I had some free time with my puppy at the show, so I started on training his paw waves. This is “just a trick” – it’s not something that we’ll need in the agility ring – but I thought it would be useful to shape a trick that can be done with the left and right paw, and train different cues for each one.
Some agility handlers teach their dogs cues to turn left and right, and these are very useful in the agility ring. I used “Back” and “Turn” (hangovers from my obedience days) with my previous dogs, but I never systematically trained them and I think Toad was the only one who understood them. I started teaching “Left” and “Right” to Rik during lockdown last year and we made good initial progress, but she got confused once I tried to put it on a jump. “Left” starts with the same sound as “Lala” (her favourite cue, which tells her to go round to the backside of a jump) and “Right” starts with the same sound as “Rik” and she was losing a lot of confidence when I tried to teach her the difference, so I abandoned mission.
For Able I am going to use cues that start with L to cue left turns (probably two different cues, for a gentle and a tight turn) and cues that start with R to cue right turns. I am not going to start any of my other cues with these letters, especially if I intend to use them in agility, because courses at the top level are getting more difficult and I think we’ll need strong independent directional cues to help us succeed.
But for now … back to the paw waves. I’m going to call them “Paw” and “Wave”. It feels instinctive to train the dog to do both of them right from the start, but I suspect that this won’t be the quickest way in the long run. I started “Paw” (right paw) this weekend at the agility show. It’s still a bit tentative, but once I’ve got a stronger wave and I’ve tried a couple of other environments, I’ll introduce “Wave” (left paw) in a separate training session. Then my plan is to mostly work on one cue or the other in each training session over the next couple of weeks, only occasionally throwing in the “other” cue (and other “other” cues like “Down”) to help my puppy learn to discriminate between his verbal cues.
This isn’t something I’ve taught to a young puppy before, so it’ll be interesting to see how quickly he picks it up.