I started dabbling with Able’s back-up behaviour a couple of months ago, but we didn’t make much progress and I shelved it. That’s part of the truth, anyway. The other part is that I do most of Able’s training at mealtimes using his kibble, but that doesn’t really work for back-up training. Puppy kibble comes in tiny tiny pieces and it’s too dark to easily see against the carpet, and I need to deliver the food behind him where he can’t see it land.
I was a bit annoyed with myself to realise that my puppy was six months old and still couldn’t back up on cue. I didn’t have any plans last Sunday so I cut up a huge pile of cheese and set alarms so that I could get in four training sessions that day to knock it off. I was surprised to find that he was further along than I thought – and now I’m pretty pleased with his back-up.
Backing up is a very useful body awareness exercise for agility puppies. It really helps them to understand where their back legs are, and how to move them independently. Later I’ll work on backing up onto a platform – which I’ve found to be vital to training a stopped contact – but first I want to see if I can get a bit more length onto our back-up down the hallway.
Tips For Training A Back-Up
This is an exercise where form matters. The puppy should be stepping backwards with one back leg at a time, and you should see the back legs moving before or with the front ones.
The most intuitive way to train a puppy to back up is to just walk into his personal space, and then reward him for moving backwards. The problem with this is that it usually results in a puppy that walks backwards with the front legs first, and then the back end just gets pushed backwards.
There are a few keys to training a nice back-up behaviour:
- Wait for the puppy to offer the behaviour. Don’t try to push or drag him backwards, or crowd into him.
- Deliver the reward at or behind the puppy’s front legs. If the reward is forward of the puppy, then the puppy will want to come forward more. It’s not possible to move forward and backward at the same time.
- Deliver the reward while the puppy is moving. This is harder than it sounds. If you get too greedy your puppy will stop. Wait him out for a bit and then throw the food as soon as he moves back again. If he doesn’t offer it, reset him and reward him during his first step.
- If you want your puppy to be able to back up without you having to step forward, don’t ever step forward during the training. It’s a really cool trick when your puppy will back up several metres without you, and it’s also another opportunity to teach your puppy that he can work at a distance from you.
With my last two dogs I sat on the floor and rolled cheese between their front legs, so that they would naturally step backwards to get it. This worked pretty well with Spring. It did not work so well with Rik, because she proved be an excellent goalie and not very many pieces of cheese made it past her defences. I got there in the end, but I wanted to try a different method with my new puppy to see if it would be easier.
How I Trained Able
I read something about using a channel to train it last year, so that’s what I tried. I made a channel that was just wide enough for my puppy in my living room, using a couch and a coffee table. At first I stood in the middle of this channel (well, I straddled the coffee table since I am a bit wider than my puppy) and asked him to come one body length into the channel. And then I waited.
Nothing interesting was happening in the channel. Able couldn’t walk forward or turn around. So when he finally got bored, he took a step backwards and I reinforced this by biffing a piece of cheese over his back into the space behind the channel. Now he was highly motivated to take a few more steps backwards so that he could actually get to the cheese!
There are two things I love about this method – my lousy aim at a distance doesn’t matter too much, and it’s much quicker to grow the behaviour from one step to several steps, without relying on any human body language. Once your puppy figures out where the Cheese Zone is and that backing up is the way to get there, he’ll be quite happy to back up the full length of the channel before you throw it.
The big struggle I had was with fading my channel. It wasn’t too hard to get rid of the coffee table. Able tried to turn around and walk to the Cheese Zone a couple of times, but when I didn’t pay for that he quickly returned to backing up. At this point I switched to throwing the cheese to land next just in front of him, and then waiting for him to offer another step or two.
When I moved away from the couch, however, I lost the lovely straight back-up that I’d had. Able knew where he wanted to go, and if he had to do a banana bend to get back to his Cheese Zone, so be it!
I fixed this last week. I warmed up with a few back-ups next to the couch, and then we went out into the hallway. Able was much less confident there and I had to spend two sessions reinforcing one or two steps, but it all came back and now he understood that the Cheese Zone was not a vital part of the picture. I think I could have made this easier by working on backing up in both directions while he was was still in the channel, so I’ll try that with my next dog.