Able and I are continuing to make the most of lockdown with some of our inside games. This week I decided to revisit something that’s been a struggle for us – pivoting – and see if we could get to the next level.
Somehow when Able plays with his toys on Rik’s bed, it just seems to leak green fluff. Every time I look up he’s playing nicely with his own toy, but the green tide around him has risen a little further…
I like my agility dogs to be able to sit straight next to me, and to be able to pivot round in front of me from one side to the other. This is how we start every single agility run – I ask Rik to sit next to me, stroke her head while we wait for the previous dog to finish, and then I start my lead-out. The pivoting is how my dog learns to reliably set herself up straight, and is useful if I walk into the ring with my dog on the wrong side of me (I’m not the only one who does this, right?).
Dusting Off the Pivot
In our last episode of pivoting, a younger Able had just learned that he could in fact pivot independently of my motion, and mastered the exercise of pivoting himself onto a pair of boxes. This seemingly simple skill had taken us weeks to learn, so I took a break from it for a while … besides, I was hoping that Able would grow a bit taller so it would be easier on my back.
The lockdown is a welcome break for me from one of my biggest challenges with Able – his ridiculously exuberant greeting behaviour. We have made good progress on this, but it’s very time-consuming to work on. I have to take him out to where the people are – the Saturday morning market, the supermarket car park, outside the bottle shop on a Friday night. And since we live in a small town, even then there is a lot of Waiting For People to Appear.
As a result I’ve not been spending as much time as I’d like on all the exciting stuff I could be training – but now’s my chance. While we do usually keep a 2m distance from our unwitting training partners anyway, it’s not really appropriate to go out and look for people to hang out near during a Level 4 lockdown.
Teaching the Stand
This week’s focus has been on teaching Able to stand on cue. I’ve taught all my dogs this, mostly so I have a useful third position cue to work on cue discriminations – my dog’s ability to listen to the actual word that comes out of my mouth, instead of just guessing what I want based on past patterns. Cue discrimination is a very easy game with two cues, but once you add a third one into the mix it becomes a lot more challenging!
Able the Beaver found a piece of wood the size of his head outside.
I taught Able to stand using a method I learned from Susan Garrett’s blog, which I hadn’t used before. I found that I had to get the rewards in very quickly at first, as Able already has an automatic sit at my side and he was very good at popping up and then sinking back into a sit as soon as he landed. I like the results I got from this method – my puppy lands with his feet well behind him in a more balanced stand than my old method.
Able is now seven months old, and this is about the time that I like to start my formal contact training. It will still be a long time before Able is working on full-height dogwalks and Aframes, though. At this age he is only learning how to do my desired end behaviour away from the equipment. Puppies should not go on any ramps or other equipment that is raised above their hock height until they are at least 12 months old – if they fall off they could injure their growth plates and their agility career could be over before it’s begun.
My foundation work at this stage involves teaching my puppy to touch an ice cream container lid with his paw, at first running over it and then stopping with at least one front foot on it. This is a fun winter training game. I can sit on the couch with the target in front of me. Able starts on one side of the room and runs across the front of me to his target, and I biff his reward to the other side of the room for him to chase.
We went for a winter walk and found a rainbow rock to brighten our day.
The “contacts” are the four agility obstacles that involve running up ramps – the Aframe, the dogwalk, the crossover and the seesaw. All of these have painted zones at the end (the “contact area”) that the dog must touch with some part of their body on the way down. The “up contact” as the dog goes up the ramp is also judged on all of these except the Aframe, but for many dogs this doesn’t need explicit training.
Down contacts are not really difficult to teach, and they’re not really difficult to maintain either. But most people’s first (and often second) agility dogs will have crappy contacts. It does take a bit of repetition at the foundation level to get the behaviour you want well installed, and you need to be careful not to progress faster than your dog is ready for … and to uphold your criteria once you’ve done all that work.
A training plank should be the first piece of agility equipment that you acquire for home use. It’s hard to get in enough practice at just the right level in a beginners class at club when there’s eight dogs in the class and they all have different needs. Your training plank doesn’t need to be fancy – a discarded painter’s plank or similar is perfect. It should be about 30cm wide (as this is the width of a competition dogwalk) and have a nonslip surface – paint and sand is fine if you won’t use it when it’s wet. The length is less important, although it should be multiple dog body lengths long.
Last weekend we went to Christchurch for an agility show. This was particularly exciting because Able’s breeder lives nearby, and this was the first chance she had to see him since he left home. Unfortunately his mum was in season so we couldn’t compare sizes (I reckon he would be as big as she is now) but it was awesome to catch up and talk about how our puppies are coming along. Her daughter has kept Able’s sister and intends to compete in agility with her later.
A midwinter trip to Waimairi Beach – Able’s second ever beach outing. The tide was right out and Able’s long tongue says that he was very happy to have so much space to run around in.
The Lolly Jar
One of the things that came up in our discussion was how I use treats in my training. I’m quite lazy and I can’t be bothered with special treat pouches, or stuffing food into my pocket and having to fish it out (although I do need to do this when we are out on walks). The easiest solution is just to have a bowl or jar of food available at convenient hand height nearby, that I can grab a handful from when I need to.
Over the last month I have been getting Able used to sharing the spotlight with my older dog Rik while I trim his nails. Until this point I have been shutting her out of the room so that it’s easier for him to concentrate on holding still.
Might have to wash those grubby toes before I can clip them…
This will make my life easier, and it’s also the first time either of my dogs have had to “take turns” with another dog in the same room. Thus far in my dog-owning career, when I want to train one of my dogs, I’ve had to shut the other up in a bedroom. This is often noisy and can lead to damage to doors since of course my other dog would very much like to take part in training too!
So with Able, I really want to establish the idea of sharing my attention and taking turns at training. I’m not sure how far I’ll be able to get with Rik, who is very demanding when she’s not the centre of attention and also gets very wound up watching other dogs play. If I work through this challenge with Able, though, he will hopefully be more cooperative when he is the oldest dog in the house and I get a new puppy.
