I bought a collapsible crate for my agility training online. It arrived this week, so I spent the weekend playing CCC (Crate Cone & Contact) games on the front lawn.
Turns out a 3XL crate isn’t quite big enough for Able. Oops.
Able really enjoys his Crate Games inside the house, but I’ve been reluctant to do too much with a wire crate in case he gets caught up and injures himself. I was very excited to finally take our games outside and play with some more speed and excitement.
The Sunroof Entry
As an easy warmup, I thought I’d try sending Able into the crate from a few different angles. This is a fun little game that helps to build the skill of looking for the entry of something – later, the entry of a tunnel or the weave poles. This exercise is featured on the Crate Games DVD but I hadn’t done it with any of my previous dogs. I thought Able would nail it.
I noticed a couple of weeks ago that Able has a strong preference for turning to the left (versus the right) when he grabs his tug toy and turns around to come back to me. This is bad enough that he’d rather make a 270 degree left turn than a 90-degree right turn – not something I want him doing on the agility course when he’s turning towards me.
I asked our animal physio about it and she suggested I try some cookie stretches to work on his flexibility in both directions.
Two months on from his first encounter with them, my intrepid Border Collie has learned to ignore the sheep at the local park. I let him hoover up a few turds as a reward.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been taking Able along to my club’s agility training on Wednesday nights. I train my older dog Rik in the 7:30 class, but I try to arrive before 7 so that I can get Able out and do some things with him before then. It’s important to train a youngster in lots of different environments, so I try to get him out and do something with him wherever I go.
Earlier in the spring we were training on the margins of the main agility field, as we needed to be under lights. This was a great opportunity for Able to practise his basic skills – sit stays, retrieves, agility handling on the flat, jumping lanes – in a more stimulating environment, with other dogs running a course ten metres away. There was a noticeable deterioration at first, but by the third week he had his little halo on and didn’t put a paw wrong all night.
And then daylight savings started and I moved to a different space behind the clubrooms, where we had more room to get moving and chuck some toys around. I decided this was the ideal time to start on Able’s more formal handling education, and I started coming to club each week with an agenda of sexy stuff I was going to work on.
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.
Our agility club show on Saturday was very very wet. Rik insisted on joining me in bed for a nap as soon as we got home.
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.
There’s one exercise that has come up and over and over again in my ongoing agility learning this year. It was featured heavily in multiple presentations in the 2021 Lemonade Conference, and I’ve seen it pop up elsewhere too. It’s not something I’ve ever put much effort into training before, but I guess that’s about to change.
It apparently improves your dog’s balance, his strength, his movement and his endurance. It’s low-impact and you can do it anywhere, even in your living room during a Level 4 lockdown.
I’ll reveal what that exercise is soon, but first it’s story time. I took Able for a walk last week, and we were accosted by a stray dog. I am used to this being a stressful situation, as my older dog gets very wound up about other dogs in her personal space. However, Able was absolutely delighted to make a new friend, and soon they were happily play-bowing at each other while I tried to move Able along. It soon became clear that his new friend was going to follow us, so we went home for the dogs to have a play-date in the back yard.
The only photo I managed to get of Able with his friend. She was VERY interested in him…
Well … I brought home a bitch in season for my intact male ten-month-old puppy to play with. They had a delightful time playing chasie around the back yard before I realised – and fortunately the penny never dropped for Able. I guess he isn’t quite all grown up yet, but it’s a very important lesson for me in the perils of owning an intact male dog. I was worried about whether I would be able to fence him in securely – not about bitches throwing themselves on him as we walk down the street!
Now, back to that magical exercise that will turn your dog into a super athlete. What could it possibly be?
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).
I bought a few things from Kmart recently, including new dog beds. I thought Rik might appreciate an upgrade from her slightly-too-small bed which has lost a fair amount of stuffing to Able, but she was most indignant and refused to go anywhere near the new beds. After two weeks of watching her sleep on the floor, I caved yesterday and restored her old bed to its place of honour.
Rik is very happy to be reunited with her bed. I find the ways she arranges her legs while she sleeps fascinating.
Able outgrew his crate recently so he scored a new bed to fit the gigantic second-hand crate I got off TradeMe, and a couple of cheap toys. The toys did not last long but he enjoyed them!
Which Side Now?
I’ve been working on our outside circles recently. Most of agility is outside circles/ovals, especially if your dog is faster than you. Watch these handlers at Crufts 2020 – they are all on the outside all the way after the weave poles at #6, although they choose different places to cross on the straighter segments.
Our favourite off-lead dog walking park is grazed by sheep for part of the year. Yes, that’s right – a council-owned off-lead dog walking park filled with sheep. No warning signs either; it gave me quite a surprise the first time I took Rik for a walk there!
The sheep returned a couple of weeks ago, with fairly young lambs at foot. I saw them long before Able did and got him on lead. He had a bit of a freak out and let fly with some incredibly loud alarm barking. The next two walks we were able to get a bit closer to them before the barking started, but he was still in rather a flap about them.
And then … today this happened.
The “face” of a Border Collie puppy who just chased his first sheep and knows they went THAT WAY!
We were walking along happily, well away from where the sheep usually hang out. Able was wandering in and out of a stand of trees. I called him – and at that moment half a dozen sheep came charging out from behind the trees, with an intrepid Border Collie puppy hot on their heels.
Last weekend Able and I went to an obedience seminar. It was the first chance we’ve had to take part in a class with other dogs and people since lockdown, and I was mostly pleased with how well he behaved. He did get a bit over-excited and make a leap at my nose at one point though!
I used to compete in obedience a long time ago, when the training methods were still very traditional. I haven’t kept up with the new advances over the last decade, and this was a great chance to catch up on what I’ve missed. I took pages and pages of notes and I’m looking forward to applying what I learned with Able a year or so down the road, once he’s started his agility career.
I was particularly interested in the new method I learned for training heelwork. Regardless of the sport, good dog training is about splitting behaviour into pieces. I taught my last obedience dog to heel by just rewarding him for being right next to my leg and hoping for the best … but now I know how to split this up into different skills (like driving forward from the rear so that the dog can use his body well, and knowing exactly where heel position is during the different parts of the handler’s stride).
The heat pump has retired for the summer and Rik is back to sleeping in her bed. She has some very creative ways of arranging her legs.
The Maimed Finger Incident
I was walking the dogs a couple of days before the seminar when Able and I had a very painful misunderstanding.
Today Able is nine months old. This is his “halfway to agility” birthday, as he can start competing from eighteen months of age.
At the moment it’s very hard to imagine that we will ever be ready to run an agility course. He is not very mature, physically or mentally, and I have lost a bit of motivation for our training over winter. With daylight saving starting this week and the weather warming up, I’m hoping to find my agility training mojo soon.
Able celebrated the first evening of daylight saving with his first roll in cat poo, followed by his first bath.
Our Three Biggest Strengths
I am so pleased with my puppy’s recall. He is way better at coming when he’s called than my previous dogs were at this age (or some of them ever were) – even at high speed
Similarly, an awesome retrieve.
But best of all, I’ve managed to get him to this age without any major traumatic incidents in his life. This is partly good luck and partly good management, I suspect. It helps that he has a “grumpy big sister” at home who only tolerates him in small doses before she gets snarly with him. When he did get snapped at by a strange dog for the first time in his life, he got out of that dog’s face and carried on with his day as if nothing had happened.
