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I started dabbling with Able’s back-up behaviour a couple of months ago, but we didn’t make much progress and I shelved it. That’s part of the truth, anyway. The other part is that I do most of Able’s training at mealtimes using his kibble, but that doesn’t really work for back-up training. Puppy kibble comes in tiny tiny pieces and it’s too dark to easily see against the carpet, and I need to deliver the food behind him where he can’t see it land.

I was a bit annoyed with myself to realise that my puppy was six months old and still couldn’t back up on cue. I didn’t have any plans last Sunday so I cut up a huge pile of cheese and set alarms so that I could get in four training sessions that day to knock it off. I was surprised to find that he was further along than I thought – and now I’m pretty pleased with his back-up.

Backing up is a very useful body awareness exercise for agility puppies. It really helps them to understand where their back legs are, and how to move them independently. Later I’ll work on backing up onto a platform – which I’ve found to be vital to training a stopped contact – but first I want to see if I can get a bit more length onto our back-up down the hallway.

Tips For Training A Back-Up

This is an exercise where form matters. The puppy should be stepping backwards with one back leg at a time, and you should see the back legs moving before or with the front ones.

The most intuitive way to train a puppy to back up is to just walk into his personal space, and then reward him for moving backwards. The problem with this is that it usually results in a puppy that walks backwards with the front legs first, and then the back end just gets pushed backwards.

Continue reading “An Easy/Lazy Method for Training Back Up”

Yesterday Able turned six months old. He is 53cm tall and weighs 21kg – about the same size as my older dog Rik, and his sire Blitz. He eats an astonishing amount – more than twice what Rik eats – so I suspect there is still a bit more growing to happen.

I am now entering uncharted territory in one regard. All of my previous dogs were desexed at around six months of age, but Able won’t be. It’s unlikely that I will ever breed from him, but I have decided not to desex him until he’s at least eighteen months old … and quite possibly never. Since I last had a puppy, there has been research to show that early desexing affects a puppy’s growing skeleton, so I want to wait until he’s all grown up. More on that later, but first …

Supermarket Distraction Training

I am continuing to work on Able’s Very Very Excitable greeting behaviour. It’s hard to find strange people to train near in the middle of winter, so we go to the supermarket a couple of nights a week and train in the car park.

Continue reading “The Power of “Legs”, and the Desexing Decision”

Last week I spent several days playing Crate Games with Able. We’ve improved a lot at our sit stays, although we still need to proof against very high-value distractions (see blurry photographic proof below). Now I’m focusing on the more active games that teach the puppy to drive ahead of the handler into the crate.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I am very unathletic and I need to put a lot of work into building forward drive into my puppy. He’s too young to work on agility equipment at his age, but not too young to learn to drive ahead to an object. A couple of weeks ago it was a peanut butter lid, and this week it’s his crate.

Able’s crate is set up opposite the door in my bedroom. I’ve worked up over the last few days until we can start from the other end of the hallway and he will spring down the hall and through the bedroom to get into his crate.

Continue reading “Full Steam Ahead”

As Able nears six months of age, I’ve begun doing a longer formal training session with him for his dinner. He eats a colossal amount (more than twice what my adult dog does) and this means I have a big bowl of reinforcements I can use. I tend to use handfuls of kibble rather than individual pieces because his puppy kibble comes in really small pieces. Even so, he usually eats the last third or so of his dinner out of his bowl, because we run out of things to do before we run out of food.

I don’t time our sessions (although I probably should) but I think they are about 10 or 15 minutes long. If I have a new skill or something that’s difficult for us to work on, I do that first. Then we take a couple of the things that Able’s already pretty good at, increase the difficulty level, and do a few repetitions. I like to structure my sessions like this so that we always finish on something that the pup finds fun and has a good success rate at.

When Things Go Horribly Wrong

If things are going wrong with our first exercise, I will sometimes abandon it without making much progress and go on to the fun stuff. It’s very tempting to stick at something until you see the light bulb go off, but sometimes this leads to a spiral of doom. Many dogs get a bit stressed if they aren’t having a lot of success, and in my older dog Rik this leads to a flurry of limbs as she attempts to do All The Tricks at the same time.

Continue reading “Training Snakes and Ladders”

Able and I are working through all the exercises in our Fenzi course on calm greeting behaviour. One of the assignments was to teach the puppy a nose-to-hand target, and then get him to do that with people he greets. It’s an interesting idea to give a busy puppy something to do, besides sproinging up into the person’s face.

Able’s hand targets are already really strong, but I’m dubious that he’ll be calm enough to recognise an outstretched hand from a strange person as a cue to hand target on them. I thought I’d train him to nose target on a prop – this should provide a more distinct visual cue that can be transferred to another person.

So this week I taught him to target on a peanut butter lid. He already knew how to do it when it was in my hand, and then I stuck it up on various vertical surfaces with BluTak so that he could learn to look away from me for his nose target. After playing around a bit with this, I managed to turn it into a fun, active game that teaches some foundation agility skills – just the thing for a nasty winter night!

The Setup

You’ll need two small cardboard boxes, a small target, and something to stick it up with. I found that the BluTak was not really sticky enough to withstand my puppy’s enthusiastic nose touches, but I couldn’t think of a better alternative that could be easily transferred between surfaces.

Place a box on your armchair of misfits to elevate it to puppy head height (let’s be honest, I already had two boxes I hadn’t unpacked yet on my armchair of misfits). Stick the target to the box, stand in front of it with your puppy between your legs, and send him to target. Deliver his cookie right next to the target. This is very important in agility training – deliver rewards where you want the dog to be, not where you happen to be.

Continue reading “The Peanut Butter Lid Game”

Able is now 5 months old. Over the last couple of months, I have put a lot of work into encouraging him to walk on a loose lead. A lot of agility people don’t put much effort into this, but I have set myself a goal – I want Able and I to walk up to the start line together on a loose lead before his first agility run.

I have a few reasons for this:

• I have two off-lead walking areas near my house, and I walk to them several times a week (although mostly with just Rik at the moment). I want to be able to walk both dogs to the park, and to enjoy that experience, because I’ll walk my dogs more often if it’s not a frustrating battle of wills.
• If we find ourselves in another covid lockdown, those local walking spots will be our only options, and I’ll have to walk Able on lead every day. And he’ll probably be more excited than usual since he won’t have other fun outings in his life. Again, I want to be able to enjoy walking him on lead, so that it doesn’t get put in the Too Hard Basket if I’m in a grumpy mood.
• Constantly pulling on the lead is bad for a dog’s neck and trachea, even on a flat collar. Constantly pulling on a front-clip harness pulls the dog’s spine out of alignment. Pulling in a headcollar is not great for the dog’s neck either. I want our walks to be enjoyable for my dog too, without increasing his risk of injury.
• I want to enjoy stress-free warm-ups and cool-downs. Agility dogs should be walked around for several minutes before and after they run. I haven’t consistently done this with either of my last two dogs, because they were/are inclined to pull on lead when they can see agility happening. Again, if walking my dog on lead is unpleasant, I’m going to do it less often.

This is moderately high up in my priority list (if I don’t have a lot of success at some point I’ll drop it so I can put more time into agility training), but I think it’s worth investing the effort while he’s young to try and get nice loose lead walking.

Today I’m going to share some of the things I’ve been doing with Able to help develop this skill. If this isn’t something you care about with your dog, you may not find the rest of this post very interesting – so here’s a picture of a cute puppy before you leave.

Continue reading “Adventures in Loose Lead Walking”

Agility training has changed a lot since I last had a puppy in 2001. “Teaching a puppy to jump” back then meant teaching it to run over a low pole between two uprights … and then suddenly raising that pole up to competition height during the last 3 or 4 months before he hit the ring. And it worked well enough – most dogs figured out how to get over the jumps with some degree of accuracy, although not always in the most efficient way.

Since then most people have begun to use jumping grids to actually teach their dog the skills that go into jumping – identifying the correct spot to take off from, estimating the size of the gap between them and that spot, and adjusting their stride so that they can arrive there with their legs organised and their weight in their rear end, ready for takeoff. This concept came from the horse world (where it’s too dangerous to let the animal just “figure it out” through trial and error on full-height jumps) and has become popular in agility circles through a series of DVDs published by Susan Salo.

I’ve watched Susan’s Puppy Jumping DVD a couple of times, and last week I finally had the chance to try it out with my puppy for the first time. I don’t have any jump bumps at home yet, but I’m lucky that we have a set at my club so I got them out after rally-o training for Able’s first gridwork session.

Before Jump Bumps

This turned out be a learning experience, rather than an actual gridwork session, because he didn’t actually go over many of the bumps. Here’s some things I need to work on or remember for next time:

Continue reading “Before Jump Bumps, and Agility Practice On a Walk”

This weekend my club had a rally-o show. Able went along to watch, and enjoyed meeting some more people and dogs. He was fairly well-behaved on the whole – and I was so impressed when he Sat and lay Down because he heard another competitor giving cues to her dog!

After the show on Saturday we went to Knottingley for a walk. There was a cricket match in progress and Able completely lost the plot once we got close enough to the cricket oval to see the action. When he’s spooked by something he likes to let everybody know with some Extremely Loud alarm barking.

As I’ve already written, it’s important to keep socialisation up throughout the first year. That doesn’t mean forcing the puppy to interact with things that frighten him, though. It just means going out and seeing lots of different things, and giving him time to get used to something at his own pace.

So we sat down on a log at a not-quite-alarm-barky distance, and we watched the cricket horror movie while Rik hunted sheep poo in the long grass. There was a lot of snorting and Wuffing at first, but after twenty minutes cricket was fairly boring. He could even take his eyes off it sometimes to look at me and play a game of tug. I would have liked to stay a bit longer, but alas cricket was over. We met a couple of the cricket players – who turned out to be normal people and not ogres – and went home.

We didn’t quite watch enough cricket for Able to get bored of it, so I’d really like to get him out to watch some more soon. Unfortunately at this time of year I suspect there won’t be a lot of opportunity, so it may have to wait until the spring.

A Pivoting Breakthrough

A few weeks ago I started a new body awareness exercise with Able – teaching him to stand with his front paws on one low platform (shoebox sized but sturdier) and his back paws on another one. He cottoned onto the concept fairly easily, but he couldn’t get himself onto the platforms very efficiently from some angles.

Continue reading “Pivoting Success, and a Cricket Horror Movie”

I was playing tug with Able the other day, and I suddenly noticed that the toy was covered with blood. He’s already lost most of his front teeth, but I guess another one came out. He clearly enjoys his tugging enough that he doesn’t mind if his mouth hurts – but your puppy might not. If you notice any sudden changes in play habits or in your retrieve behaviour, don’t panic. Just try again a couple of days later, and maybe things will be back to normal.

On Thursday night Able had his first week of puppy class at my agility/obedience club. He was the youngest puppy in the group (we don’t take them prior to 4 months) and he spent the entire class trying to bounce on all of the other small breed puppies. He was particularly besotted with a Cairn Terrier, which was bouncing around doing play-bows at him as well.

Do You Need to Go to Obedience Class?

Last year my landlord sent a tradie round to install some underfloor insulation. He saw all the agility gear on my lawn and told me that he’d tried to take his own dog to agility class but “I just couldn’t get her to do anything with all the other dogs running around”.

Continue reading “Bleeding Gums and Puppy Class”

This weekend Able accompanied me to an agility show in Dunedin. He hadn’t been to an agility show since he was about 11 or 12 weeks old, so I was interested to see how he would take it all in.

He was a super well-behaved puppy. He enjoyed meeting lots of new people – and playing with lots of new dogs. He walked off-lead in the exercise area without chasing other people’s dogs (I did keep him quite a distance away) and he was even able to focus on some impromptu training sessions with lots of distractions around him.

On the down side, he also spewed all over his bed as we drove through Herbert.

Fake Relaxing

The thing I was most pleased about was that he never got frantic about watching other dogs doing agility. We kept a good distance away from the rings, but we were sometimes quite close to the practice area. He watched a couple of dogs doing their warmups but he stayed quiet and the lead stayed loose.

He spent a lot of time lying on his hip and looking calmly at me. He got lots of bikkies for this behaviour when I first took him up to agility club, just because it was the first thing he did that wasn’t obnoxious. It now seems to be his default behaviour that he offers whenever we’re out in a busy environment and I’m sitting quietly. He looks semi-relaxed, but I don’t think he is truly relaxed – he’s a Border Collie in working mode and he’s offering “fake relaxing” because that’s what I’ve been rewarding him for. Nonetheless, it’s a much nicer behaviour than many others he could do, so I’ll keep paying him for it.

The Relaxed Beaver

Speaking of relaxing … last week Able lay down for a nap outside of his ex-pen for the first time. This is something that’s been worrying me. My other dog can only tolerate him in very short doses, so he spends a lot of time in his ex-pen. I get him out several times a day, but usually only for half an hour or so at a time.

Continue reading “Agility Show Weekend: Paw Waves and Quiet Watching”