When I last described our foundation contact training, Able was taking a short step towards his upside-down bucket, then stepping onto and over it and stopping in his 2o2o position. I was then feeding him on his ice cream lid target.
I had grand plans about transferring this training to a plank as soon as daylight saving started, but I still haven’t found the right object to prop it up to the height I want. In the meantime I’m making plenty of progress with my trusty mop bucket anyway.
Susan Garrett’s DASH
Training the actual 2o2o stop position at the end of the plank is only a small part of stopped contact training. The much bigger and more important part is proofing – making sure that the dog is confident to go to that position at speed no matter what.
Susan Garrett has an acronym for which elements of your training you should focus on in which order – DASH (short for Desire, he finds that Accuracy, Speed, Habituation).
- Desire is mostly about your relationship with your dog, and whether he finds you more interesting than other things in his environment he could be doing. You should start most exercises in a quiet environment (e.g. inside your house with other dogs shut away). If your puppy isn’t laser focused on when you start a training session, you need to play some games to get him in the zone. For some puppies confidence is also a part of this, particularly when introducing new equipment – make sure they are happy to offer interactions with the gear you’ll be using before you start trying to train your desired behaviour.
- Accuracy is about your dog understanding the basic picture. Break it down into the smallest steps you can think of. If there’s any required skills that are missing, work on the ASH for each of these separately, and then add them to the big picture. With Able, this meant pausing our contact training so that I can work on his rear end awareness and teach him to back up onto a platform.
- Speed should come along for the ride if you do a good job of breaking things down and your dog is clear on your criteria. If any of the small pieces of your performance are slow, you need to do more repetitions of these with more exciting rewards. For example, if Able was walking slowly to his foot target to earn his reward, I would have spent more time repeating just that piece until he was happier to do it at a reasonable speed. Note that speed doesn’t mean frantically fast – but you do want to see a keen, confident dog who performs the behaviour with some forward momentum.
- Habituation is a fancy word for “proofing”. It refers to all the different possible presentations of this behaviour that your dog could see. That means training in different locations, different angles of approach, different handling … different everything.
Contact Proofing Challenges
Here’s a few of the proofing challenges that I’ve tried out with Able, to see how well he understands his stopped contact criteria on his bucket.
- Placing a bowl with a couple of pieces of kibble in it beyond the bucket, so that he would have to come forward off the bucket to reach it. This was a very difficult challenge but we got there! The key is to feed generously in place first, and then you can release your dog to the bowl if you want. I used this for most of the other challenges as it helped to encourage him to look forward. Later I will need to do some proofing without the bowl, to make sure that when I’m behind him he will still stop at the front of the bucket/ramp, instead of coming off the side slightly so that he can look at me.
- Staying on the target while I jog on the spot. My movement should not be a cue to my dog that it’s time to blast forward off the contact. He should only leave when he hears my verbal release cue “OK”, or later on a cue to take the next obstacle.
- Starting several metres back from the bucket, restraining him to get him quite excited, and running with him. This means he has a lot more speed when he reaches the bucket. Able struggled at first, and I think I need to do more work on his body awareness and strength so that he can stop from full speed more in a more organised manner.
- Starting several metres back from the bucket and sending while I stand still. Once he’s stopped I then come up behind him and drop food onto the target before I release him forward to the bowl.
- Leaving him in a stay, leading out to the other side of the bucket and then releasing him. I did this as an obedience-style recall (standing square on, facing him) and as an agility-style leadout (standing to one side and facing forward in his direction of travel). I was quite surprised at how hard he found this one – his back paw on the side closest to me kept falling off the bucket.
- Leading out to the other side of the bucket and continuing to walk forward as I called him. This is a good test of your automatic stop – remember that your dog should automatically stop in his 2o2o position without any verbal or physical reminders from you. Once I move this training outside I’ll pick up the pace and see if he can nail his position when I’m running.
The goal of proofing is to see how well your dog understands what his criteria are – not to catch him out or punish him. Reward generously for success, and calmly set your dog up to try again if he does fail. Repeated failures tell you that a particular challenge is too hard for your dog at the moment, and you need to find a way to break it down into smaller increments so that you can build up to that level of difficulty over several sessions.