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.
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.
There are several methods for training the down contact. Some are much clearer to the dog than others, which makes them easier to train, more reliable in the ring, and easier to maintain. See if you can guess which two I recommend, and which two I definitely don’t!
The Stop and Wait
This is the most intuitive way to train contacts from a human perspective. The dog goes down the plank, and as he gets near the bottom you tell him to stop and wait for you. When you catch up, you point at the bottom and he goes all the way down. It’s how almost all agility dogs were trained in the late 80s and early 90s, and how many people train their first dogs now.
Pros:
- It’s quick to train. The first time you put your dog on a dogwalk, he’ll probably stop when you say any random word, because he’s not too sure what he’s doing without you. Voila, you’ve trained the entire contact performance in one repetition! (but have you really?)
- No home practice required. You can train the whole thing in half an hour at club, and then there’s not a lot of need for ongoing training.
Cons:
- It’s frustrating for a keen dog. Most agility dogs like to run. They find it colossally frustrating to stop and wait for their handler to catch up. This often leads to dogs that stop halfway down the plank as trained, and then do a diving board off because they just can’t wait any more.
- It’s unreliable. If your dog gets into the habit of doing the diving board leap, you’ll miss an awful lot of contacts. Ditto if your dog just sometimes doesn’t bother waiting when he’s feeling fired up. Remember – agility dogs like to run, so they’ll opt out of your stupid boring wait if they can.
- You’ll make yourself hoarse. Every time your dog jumps off the contact, you’ll get a little bit growlier and shoutier, until you are shrieking “WAIT! WAIT! WAIT! TOUCH IT!” at the top of your lungs. Personally this isn’t the way I want to interact with my dog in the ring … and it also tends to add to the dog’s excitement level and actually increases the rate of jumping off before the contact.
- It’s unclear to your dog. He stops and waits for you, then he takes a little step down. And another step. And another step. And maybe one more … None of this makes any sense to your dog. This often leads to the dog freezing and waiting for you to say “Touch It” multiple times before he moves, and/or creeping down an inch or two at a time.
- It’s slow even if your dog doesn’t creep. Your dog has to wait until you catch up, and then you have to manoeuvre him into the right position. In the meantime the clock is ticking. It’s easy to take 5 seconds longer on the dogwalk and 2-3 seconds on the Aframe with this method compared to the others – even longer if your dog becomes a freezer or creeper.
The Stopped Contact
This is a method that first became prominent in the mid 90s. The idea is that the dog is trained to independently go to a specific position on the plank and stop there until he’s given a release cue. The most popular variation is the 2-on/2-off (or 2o2o), where the dog stops with his front feet on the grass and his back feet on the plank.
Pros:
- It’s very clear to the dog. If you choose your criteria properly and train it patiently, your dog knows exactly where he’s supposed to be going – right to the bottom with his front feet on and his rear feet off. It’s also very clear to you whether he’s done that or not, so it’s easy for you to be consistent.
- It’s less frustrating. Again, your dog knows exactly where he’s supposed to be. He doesn’t have to wait for you to catch up and then do a weird shuffle down the plank – he can just go right to his position. Agility dogs don’t like to stop – and if you release him fairly promptly from his position, there’s only a little bit of stopping involved.
- There’s a built-in failsafe. If your dog goes into position but moves before you release, or starts running into position and bails a bit early, he’ll probably still touch the contact. You don’t want to rely on this very often, but if you’re running in an important event it’s a nice bonus.
- It’s not as slow as it sounds. If you are consistent in your training, your dog knows exactly where he needs to go, and he can get himself there quickly. And because he’s working independently of you, you can release him as soon as he’s in position if you want, without making him wait until you catch up.
Cons:
- It can be tedious to train at first. The most common way to train stopped contacts is with back-chaining (more on that when I start Able on a raised plank). This means you train just the last little step into position first, and you repeat it a lot so that your dog gains a lot of confidence about what he’s supposed to be doing. The first (or should that be last) third of the dogwalk takes at least 80% of the training time, so you need a bit of patience to work through this before you get to see the finished product. Sadly in a club environment there is often some pressure to “keep up” with the other students’ pace and this foundation can be rushed, leading to an unreliable performance.
- It can be very very slow if poorly trained. To be fast, your dog needs to exactly where he’s going. If you don’t put enough time into the foundation, or you’re not consistent enough with your criteria, your dog won’t know where he’s going. This leads to freezing and/or creeping, as in the “Stop and Wait” method. And because the dog takes ages to even get into the contact area, you’ll be tempted to release before he’s in position – which will make it even worse.
The Hope and Pray
This one is a favourite of small dog handlers. You just let the dog run down the ramp and hope that he touches it.
Pros:
- It’s quick to train. So, so quick.
- No need to train at home. Again, you can train it in one session at club.
- Sometimes it’s reliable. If your dog has a short stride and isn’t highly motivated to run fast, you might find that your dog hits most of his contacts throughout his agility career, with little effort on your part.
- It’s fast. If your dog isn’t going at full speed, there’s a lot of appeal to using a training method that doesn’t require him to slow down even more.
Cons:
- It’s often unreliable. Many small dog people choose this method because they think their small dog won’t miss contacts. Unfortunately small dogs (even very small dogs) absolutely can and do miss contacts, particularly the ones that really enjoy agility. Often they won’t start missing it until months or years down the road, once they’ve become more confident about agility and built up a bit more speed.
- It’s hard to fix. If your dog begins to miss contacts, you don’t have any prior training that you can refresh. You have to either live with it, start training a new method from scratch, or try to convert to the “Stop and Wait” method by screaming at your dog as he comes down the plank. Your dog already has a long and fun history of running down the plank and leaping off, so stopping and waiting isn’t going to seem like a very attractive deal to him.
The Running Contact
A true running contact behaviour is trained with a great deal of precision. The dog is taught to independently adjust his stride so that he naturally lands in the contact as he runs down the plank.
It was surprising hard to find good short videos of contact performances on YouTube, but here’s a nice example of the same dog performing well-trained running and stopped contacts. You can see that the running contact performance is a little faster, but a well-trained stopped contact can be pretty quick as well.
Pros:
- It’s fast. This is the only method where you’ll see dogs acceleerating as they run down the plank. It’s very impressive to see a dog running full blast down the plank and hitting his contact every time – and sometimes very difficult to beat this dog.
Cons:
- It’s the hardest method to train. Full disclosure: I haven’t actually trained a running contact myself yet, but I believe it is harder than a stopped contact. You have to think about your criteria carefully, and you have to be able to accurately observe your dog’s performance in motion. This is not something you can train by yourself with limited previous agility experience, although there are online classes that can help you.
- You need full size contact gear at home. You’re not going to get a reliable running contact training once a week at club, both because of time constraints and often a lack of knowledge among instructors. And because your criteria is about the strides the dog takes along the plank, rather than just the end piece, you need to do most of your practice on the full piece of equipment.
- It can be “too fast”. If you need a tight turn off a stopped contact this is fairly easy, because the dog has stopped and you can get him to wait until you’re ready to show him where to go next. If you need a tight turn off a running contact, you need to do another layer of extra training to work on this – otherwise if your dog is fast you have a very small window of time to get into position and show him the new direction before he blasts off over the first thing he sees.
If your goals are world domination and you have the money to spend, it’s worth the investment to obtain full size gear to train on and take an online class to train a really good running contact. If not, I think the stopped contact is a great option.
For Able, I have decided to train a stopped contact first, and then maybe work on a running contact after that. There are a few things that went into this decision. Firstly, my other dog Rik will be over 10 years old by the time he is 18 months, and I know I can have a strong stopped contact performance ready in that timeframe. I haven’t trained a running contact before and I don’t have access to a full size dogwalk so that would likely take longer – but I do also want to have the experience of training it later on, so that I can learn how to do it for my next puppy.