Last week was, of course, Guy Fawkes Night. The one magical night a year when people let off fireworks to celebrate some political intrigue I don’t quite understand that happened 400 years ago in another country.
I say “magical” because Guy Fawkes Night defies the normal laws of time, in which a Night is shorter than a Week, and much shorter than a Month. In fact, any random moment of time can be Guy Fawkes Night, if somebody just wishes it to be so (and blows up the dodgy parallel imported fireworks they’ve been storing next to a petrol can in the shed for the last few months).
I am very lucky with Rik that she does not mind loud bangs like fireworks or thunderstorms. I am now doubly lucky with Able. When the first firework went off he sat up, looked around the room for 30 seconds, glanced over at Rik, and flompfed back onto the floor to resume his nap. By the end of the first week of Guy Fawkes Night, he wasn’t even opening his eyes when another fire hazard went zooming off above our heads.
Puppy’s First Cone Wrap
This week I tackled something I’ve been meaning to do for a month or so, and taught Able to wrap around a cone. This is a skill that a lot of people teach to their puppies while they’re quite young, but I worry a bit about the impact on the shoulders of repeated wraps, especially for a fairly large puppy like Able.
I have a few collapsible cones that I bought from Mitre 10 last year, just after the first lockdown. I like them because they are quite big, but fold down flat so they are easy to fit in the car and take to the park. I have tall dogs so I need a cone tall enough that they understand to go round it rather than over it, and being a bit wider at the base means it is not quite such a tight turn for them as a smaller cone would be.
During Able’s first session of shaping him to go around a cone, he offered all sorts of interesting behaviours. I had expected that he would try to step on the base, and that he might use his mouth on things if he got frustrated. I had not expected that he would repeatedly offer a very high rear leg lift (exactly as if he was about to pee on it), so that was a new twist for me! When you’re shaping you should do your best to calmly ignore the incorrect stuff, but I obviously had quite a strong reaction the first time I saw the leg come up. I suspect he was planning to pee on it at first, and when I interrupted him, it made a strong impression on him that leg lifts = attention. Never underestimate the value of your attention as a reinforcer!
Able now understands the basic idea of going around a cone. He is still struggling a bit to understand which side of the cone he is supposed to wrap. This was my first time teaching the wrap behaviour as a pure shaping exercise while I was standing still. With my previous dogs I was walking towards the cone/post to support their path, and I think they understood much sooner which direction they were supposed to turn around the cone. Your dog should always (until you train some fancier skills later) go out around the opposite side of the cone from you first, so that he is turning towards you as he goes around it.
What’s the Point?
The purpose of the cones is to provide a set of low-impact pretend agility obstacles that Able and I can practise our handling with.
I started serious handling training with my previous dogs at about six or seven months, using jumps with no poles or one very low pole on them. I no longer think this is the best approach to foundation agility training, because it gives the dogs a lot of rehearsals of not jumping as they pass between the uprights of a jump. One of the dogs I trained this like from a young age grew up to jump well. The other tended to take down a lot of poles and it seemed to me like she was trying to get the jumps over and done with so that she could get back to her favourite part of agility – sprinting ahead at top speed like she’d been doing since she was a young pup.
I don’t know whether a different foundation training approach would have made Spring a more reliable jumper – sadly, you never get a do-over with a puppy. But I am have refined my approach to training over the years, and prefer to “pre-train” things in another context before I add them to the picture of our agility training. I have already introduced these handling skills at a young age on our walks, and the cones make it easier to work on these skills in a more systematic way. I can work on so many skills with them, including:
- Driving ahead. This is such an important agility skill – that my dog actively scans ahead for obstacles in the direction that my body language is supporting. It’s one that most dogs don’t fully master until they’ve been competing for a few months, but we can make a start on it now.
- Commitment. I am a lot slower than my dog, so I need to take short cuts on the agility course. That means that once Able has found an obstacle and I’ve told him to take it, he needs to stick to that plan even if I move away. This has been the hardest skill for my older dog Rik to learn, and has been a big limiting factor on our success in the ring.
- Lateral distance. This is another one that is important to me because I am slow and my dog is fast. I can work on this quite easily by sending him to a cone, moving to the side as he wraps it, and then sending him to another cone. If I’m moving straight ahead and have my shoulders pointed forward, I want him to keep going parallel to me and look for obstacles on that path, rather than curving back towards me.
- Handling moves. Until now, I’ve been working on my front and blind crosses by calling my puppy and running away from him while we’re out on a walk. Now I can send him to a cone, and then turn around as he wraps so that he is behind me and I can perform the cross. And I’ll be able to vary his angle of approach to me by changing my position relative to the cone.
I have already worked on all of these skills in other contexts, either with a crate or in our mini handling sessions during our walks. When I transfer them to the cone, that will be a fresh challenge which will help my puppy to generalise his understanding of my body cues. I can also set up several cones in different patterns (e.g. a triangle) and put together little sequences of 2-3 wraps in a row on different cones – our first tiny “agility course”.