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.
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.
We went for a winter walk and found a rainbow rock to brighten our day.
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.
Last weekend we went to Christchurch for an agility show. This was particularly exciting because Able’s breeder lives nearby, and this was the first chance she had to see him since he left home. Unfortunately his mum was in season so we couldn’t compare sizes (I reckon he would be as big as she is now) but it was awesome to catch up and talk about how our puppies are coming along. Her daughter has kept Able’s sister and intends to compete in agility with her later.
A midwinter trip to Waimairi Beach – Able’s second ever beach outing. The tide was right out and Able’s long tongue says that he was very happy to have so much space to run around in.
The Lolly Jar
One of the things that came up in our discussion was how I use treats in my training. I’m quite lazy and I can’t be bothered with special treat pouches, or stuffing food into my pocket and having to fish it out (although I do need to do this when we are out on walks). The easiest solution is just to have a bowl or jar of food available at convenient hand height nearby, that I can grab a handful from when I need to.
Over the last month I have been getting Able used to sharing the spotlight with my older dog Rik while I trim his nails. Until this point I have been shutting her out of the room so that it’s easier for him to concentrate on holding still.
Might have to wash those grubby toes before I can clip them…
This will make my life easier, and it’s also the first time either of my dogs have had to “take turns” with another dog in the same room. Thus far in my dog-owning career, when I want to train one of my dogs, I’ve had to shut the other up in a bedroom. This is often noisy and can lead to damage to doors since of course my other dog would very much like to take part in training too!
So with Able, I really want to establish the idea of sharing my attention and taking turns at training. I’m not sure how far I’ll be able to get with Rik, who is very demanding when she’s not the centre of attention and also gets very wound up watching other dogs play. If I work through this challenge with Able, though, he will hopefully be more cooperative when he is the oldest dog in the house and I get a new puppy.
Last weekend I went down to Dunedin for the Zone 5 Games weekend. We don’t have a lot of opportunities to play games in the South Island, so this is one of the highlights of my calendar. Rik was very happy to be back in action after a couple of months off, and I enjoyed the chance to choose courses that played to our strengths.
This was Able’s first time in an indoor arena. Some dogs find these a bit intimidating. They are usually large uninsulated metal buildings, so they echo a lot – particularly when a barky dog is running round the course. Able took that in his stride, although he was a bit worried at first about walking over the metal tracks for the large sliding door. I’m glad that I had the chance to get him into this venue so that he could get used to it. We’ll visit another equestrian arena in Christchurch next weekend and I hope he’ll be calm and confident there too.
It was also his first appearance at an agility show in a couple of months, and I was pleased with his behaviour overall. He was polite towards the new dogs that he met (he particularly liked Zinc de Wit) and he mostly settled down quietly while I watched the action – except when he saw his favourite people, of course.
The “almost indestructible” rhino was not, in fact, indestructible. But it was a lot of fun!
I realised this week that I haven’t done a lot of work on toy games with Able. This is fun stuff that burns up a lot of puppy energy – but also requires a lot of human energy, which can be in short supply for me over winter. As Able’s legs grow (see photo above) we also don’t really have enough room inside for some of these games, so I need to make the time to play outside while the sun’s up.
Running to a Toy
This is a very simple game that goes by several names (Race to Toy, Drive to Toy etc). The idea is just to throw a toy ahead, and then race your dog to try and catch the toy. We are looking for our puppy to laser-focus on the toy and run to ahead of the handler. Later on, this should lead to a dog that runs ahead of the handler to an obstacle at high speed.
