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.
In theory I’m waiting for daylight savings before I do any contact training outside on planks. But well … last weekend my scungiest rotten 20+-year-old crossover plank made its way into my living room.
Able does not really fit in Rik’s bed any more. And yes, that’s an ancient crossover plank in my living room.
Able’s contact behaviour isn’t quite ready to transfer to a plank yet, but I’ve decided I also want to do some body awareness work with him on a low plank that’s parallel with the ground. He is much bigger than any of my previous dogs, and I think he may need some practice to actually learn how to walk along a 300mm wide plank and keep all of his feet on it.
Learning to Walk the Plank
I’ve been racking my brain for the last couple of weeks, trying to figure out what I have round the house that I can use to elevate both ends of the plank to around hock height. I only have one amazing perfectly sized mop bucket/kitty litter tray (although it came from The Warehouse so I could buy another) and none of my other dog training props will support a 25kg puppy and a ramp.
And then I had the brilliant idea to use couch cushions.
Last weekend we went to an agility show in Dunedin. It was surreal after three weeks of lockdown to be able to go to another town and hang out with all my agility friends. The actual agility side of things didn’t go so well – Rik and I are both a bit rusty as I haven’t been doing very much with her over the winter – but we had fun anyway.
During lockdown, Able made the exciting discovery that he could lift his leg and pee on things, instead of just standing in the middle of the lawn and lifting it on nothing. As with any cool new trick, he’s eager to try out his ninja peeing-on-things ability whenever he gets the chance. Until this point bushes and lampposts were his go-tos … but at the agility show he decided to add cars to his repertoire.
I count nine dog toys in this photo (some in multiple pieces) but my Beaver puppy still likes to bring sticks inside to chew…
I do not want my puppy to pee on cars. While I don’t really mind other dogs peeing on my car, other people do mind so for the sake of courtesy he needs to leave cars alone. I also don’t want him peeing on jump wings, deck chairs, call steward boards, or myriad other vertical surfaces in the agility environment. And I don’t want him to pee on buildings either – the outside but especially when he’s inside an indoor agility venue.
This means that I need to be proactive about interrupting him before he pees on something inappropriate. For the next few months I’ll need to pay close attention to my puppy whenever I have him out at an agility show, and move him away from things that he appears to be lining himself up with. And I may need to keep him on a shorter lead in car parks …
Never Saying “No” …
I suppose Able’s leg-lifting predilection is a good introduction to the topic of whether one should or should not use the word “No” to their dog.
Well, we’re back in Level 2, and my puppy is allowed to run off-lead again. He is very pleased about this. He’s still bouncing off the walls but Rik and I hope that he will settle down soon.
There’s a park at the end of my street where dogs are allowed to run off-lead. It’s fairly small but there’s a lot packed into it – a scout hall, netball courts (abandoned since the indoor arena was built), a velodrome/athletics field, a camping ground, a little fenced-off area with captive wallabies, and an aviary where the council keeps an incestuous flock of white pigeons, among other stray or confiscated birds.
This park also houses my town’s attempt at a botanic gardens, which looks nice and colourful at the right time of year. This is not the right time of year, but the botanic gardens also houses one of my regular daily dog training challenges … The Corridor of Doom.
I was very excited about going to Level 3, as my puppy has not been doing enough hooning around and he is getting on my nerves. Well, we enjoyed one little walk with some off-lead playtime, and then I found out that we aren’t supposed to walk off-lead until Level 2. Back to our boring on-lead walks it is then!
From a young age, Able has had a habit of bringing a stick in from the garden every day to chew up. I tolerated this at first because I was just so relieved he was taking a break from trying to eat my house. I guess I’ve been assuming he would outgrow it after a few weeks, but he turned eight months this week and it’s worse. Since lockdown the daily stick has become three daily sticks, and the spot on the bedroom floor where he chews them up is beginning to resemble a forest floor.
“Just ten more minutes” … the classic response of all kids and puppies (and some adults) when it’s time to put down the toys and go to bed.
Over the last month I’ve been working on Able’s basic stopped contact behaviour several times a week. Most people train this by getting the dog to touch a contact on the ground, either with their nose or their paws. I trained my second dog Toad with a paw target and had great success, so I’ve continued to use the same method with all my other dogs. I think the nose target method is more popular these days, but a lot of the training is very similar. I’ll make notes of how I would use a nose target where relevant.
Front Feet On the Grass
To help my puppy position his front feet, I taught him to target his front feet onto an ice cream lid. Large plastic lids like this are ideal for contact training because they are so cheap and easy to get hold of, and easy to cut up later when you want a smaller target.
One of the hard parts of stopped contact training is to make sure that the behaviour is really independent of where you are, relative to your dog. As trainers we naturally form a habit of shaping skills with our dog in front of us, where we can see him easiest. And then our dogs naturally form a habit of working right in front of us and facing us, so that their heads are as close as possible to the bikkies…
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.
