I recently got a new puppy – my first baby puppy in 14 years! This happy event has been several years in the making, and I have spent most of that time working on an absurdly detailed puppy plan that will no doubt go out the window shortly after first contact with a real puppy.
One thing I’ve thought about a lot is the Very First Training Session, which has been a frustrating and disappointing experience with each of my previous dogs. After a lot of research and reflection I think I’ve figured it out and Able had a much more pleasant introduction to training. But first, a tour of my previous dogs…
1995: FUNZIE
The only baby photo of Funzie where she isn’t just a blur of fluff. Berta the cat does not look amused.
When: Six months old, at the local obedience club. Everybody knows you couldn’t train a puppy before it was six months old!
The Plan: Not be the worst puppy in the class, and pass our Grade 1 certificate.
The Result: 3 stars
Funzie was rather overwhelmed by being in close proximity to 9 strange large dogs at once, so walking with me on a loose lead wasn’t a problem. She was also good at sitting when I pushed on her bum, but not so good at lying down ad very bad at staying – because she was terrified. Still, not the worst puppy in the class so goal achieved!
Well, it’s been an interesting year. What with lockdown and a back injury, I’ve only competed in 2 shows since mid-March, and I was at home for Labour Weekend for the first time since I started competing in agility in 1997.
I have struggled a bit with my motivation for agility-related things this year, but my dog is sound again and I came away from the Taieri show feeling very motivated to get back into it. I’m sure I’m not the only one dreaming about all the successes I want to achieve in the agility ring next year, but here’s a few other resolutions you could add to your list…
1. Give Your Dog a New Nickname
Shithead. Retard. Stupid dick. Idiot. Nightmare.
These are all names I have heard handlers calling their dogs in the ring this year … usually after they’ve just stuffed something up for their dog.
Please stop it. It’s not as cute or funny as you think it is.
I know your dog doesn’t know what those words mean, and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you don’t actually think your dog is a shithead. But spectators don’t know that, and newcomers to the sport don’t know that, and this is not a great first impression for our sport.
And even if you don’t really mean these words, I do wonder how they affect your attitude towards agility training on a subconscious level. At least 95% of what goes wrong in the ring boils down to either handler error or trainer error. If one handler leaves the ring saying “you’re such a retard” and another one says “whoops, we really need to work on those weave entries”, which handler is taking responsibility for the problem and also helping their brain to develop a growth mindset about their dog’s potential?
2. Speak No Evil
This has been my New Year’s resolution for about 4 years now, after I heard some not-nice stuff being said about me. I realised that I too had a tendency to say not-nice things about other people at agility, and so I decided to cut it out. For what it’s worth, I’ve “failed” 4 years in a row, but I’ve definitely reduced the amount of backstabbing that I do, and I’ve found that there are plenty of more interesting things to talk about anyway.
I don’t think we have a major malicious gossip problem in our sport, but it does happen and it can lead to some awkward situations, especially when it starts happening within a club. There’s lots of people at agility and you won’t like all of them – but focusing your energy on the ones you find irritating won’t make anything better. It won’t really make you feel better, either.
So next time you catch yourself looking over your shoulder to make sure So-and-So isn’t in earshot before you make a catty remark, try just thinking it instead of saying it. And if you just can’t keep it to yourself, tell your dog all about it on the drive home.
3. Help a Newcomer
Way back in February 1997, I started a Beginners agility class. I entered Elementary at our club’s Anzac Day ribbon trial and I got a ribbon.
It’s getting harder for our newcomers to get started in competition, not just because the standard required is higher but also because in recent years some practical barriers have popped up. These days you can’t just mention an upcoming ribbon trial to your newbies on Thursday night and have them turn up and enter on the day. There are fewer ribbon trials to enter, and there’s permanent numbers and measuring to worry about first.
The gap between the first-time competitor and the experienced handler running their baby dog in Starters is growing. Courses are getting harder to remember, the best dogs are getting faster, and sometimes you’re going to encounter backsides in Novice. It’s inevitable that somebody who’s been doing agility for 20 years will have more skills than someone who’s just entered their first show, but we need to help our newbies to succeed and enjoy the sport so that they will stick around and become the next generation of Senior handlers.
This is an area that I’d love to see the incoming Agility Committee work on over the coming two years, but we can all do our little bit to help all of our newer competitors (young and old) to feel welcome, and to help them learn the ropes of the sport.
4. Train in the Ring. Or Don’t.
Here’s one I have often been guilty of in the past few years, and I’m going to try to be more aware of how I train in the ring next year.
I’ve been on a dog geek video binge this week, watching a four-hour lecture by world-renowned animal trainer Bob Bailey.
According to Bob, the definition of training is that it changes behaviour.
You’re not “training in the ring” if your dog misses their dogwalk contact, and you go back and repeat it four times, and your dog misses it four more times, and then you carry on to the next jump. You’re just adding thirty seconds onto the show’s finish time while you rehearse crappy dogwalk performances.
Judges like to see people and their dogs succeed and work together as a team. They don’t mind if you go back and try a tricky handling sequence again, or use your time in the ring to build confidence for your young dog. But it must be rather frustrating to watch people repeat the same mistakes over and over … and then over and over in their next run. I know I find this pretty tedious viewing from the sideline!
If you’re going to train in the ring, use that time strategically to build towards your future success. Have a plan before you go in about what you will do if your dog misses a contact or breaks their start line or stuffs up their weaves. How many retries you will do, and what you will do if your dog keeps getting it wrong? If you notice that your dog is often failing at the same thing, think about how you’re going to fix it. Maybe you could take a toy into the ring next time so that you can reward your dog as soon as he gets it right?
And ask yourself afterwards whether you and your dog are better off than you were before you started the run (another tip from Bob!).
5. Sharpen the Saw
My last dog Spring had a little problem with her retrieve. She always came straight back, but I nicknamed her the Grinch because she just couldn’t bring herself to let go of the toy. If I asked her to drop it she would – but then she’d grab it before it touched the ground. Then she’d lie down with her chin pressed into the ground so that it was almost impossible to wrestle the toy out of her mouth.
The Grinch, aged four months. Possibly the last time she ever let go of a toy!
I put up with this minor annoyance for at least five years, and then one day I decided to actually fix it. It took me three weeks to train a new cue for Spring to jump up on my leg and push the toy into my hand.
Suddenly I could get the same amount of training done in half the time, and I wasn’t constantly having to bend down and get hair in my face while I negotiated with the Grinch.
My current dog Rik has a pretty awful retrieve because she likes to parade around and chew her ball for a while. Yesterday I took a ball and some high-value treats outside to work on tunnel threadles, which she finds very difficult. I don’t often train with food, and I was shocked to discover that her retrieve was flawless and we got heaps of repetitions done in just a few minutes.
So this is another of my New Year’s resolutions – I am going to fix Rik’s retrieve so that I can get the ball back straight away, even when I don’t have pockets full of dead animal.
What’s one frustrating or time-wasting behaviour in your dog that you could improve? Maybe it’s a slow or fidgety start-line sit, or a fondness for keep-away like Rik, or a dog that won’t let go out of a tug toy. If you work on it several times a week you should be able to make a huge difference – and then you’ll have more time for agility!
The upcoming move to Level 2 means that some of our dog training clubs and businesses may be looking for a contact tracing solution. I know that many of us in the dog training community prefer canines to computers, so I thought I’d put my nerd hat on and share a free, simple setup for people to check in with their phones.
Obviously this won’t work for people who don’t have phones, so as an instructor you’ll need to keep an eye out and make sure you fill in the form for anybody who can’t.
If you don’t want to go high-tech, the Agility Committee has a form that you can print out and use. Please remember to be careful about sharing pens – it’s best for the instructor for each class to fill out the whole form rather than getting everyone to write their own details down.
Step 1: Build a Google Form
Head over to Google Forms and create a form (you’ll need to create a Google account if you don’t already have one).
I love Google Forms because they are such a quick and lightweight way to replace the paper forms in your life. My club has started using them for class registration and membership applications, and it makes things much simpler for our treasurer.
It has been incredible to see the way our lives have changed over the last six weeks, since New Zealand entered lockdown. Hopefully we will soon be able to return to a less restricted way of life, but in the meantime here’s a few “human training” lessons from the lockdown that we can apply to our dogs.
Rik has been getting in some quality snoozing time during lockdown, but she is looking forward to returning to agility soon.
1) Unclear criteria cause frustration and anxiety
During the early weeks of lockdown I saw a lot of posts on social media from people who were unsure whether they could or couldn’t do something. There was never a real threat of harsh punishment (our police in NZ usually prefer education to handcuffs in my limited and white privilege-laden experience) but just the possibility that they might be pulled over and asked to go back home seemed to stress some people out.
This weekend I went to an agility show in Oamaru. Naturally, coronavirus was a hot topic of conversation, and there were a few other subtle changes. Handshakes at prizegiving were replaced with elbow bumps. Some people were asking others to give them a bit more personal space. We all seemed to stand a bit further apart when we were chatting – especially when we were talking about the virus!
Today the Ministry of Health has issued advice about mass gatherings and events. The current advice is to cancel events with 500 or more people attending. This is more than we would see at any agility show except for a North Island NZDAC. Dogs NZ (via email) and the Agility Committee (via Facebook) have also issued statements stating that it is up to individual clubs to decide whether they wish to proceed with their shows.
We’ve got a long way to go
At the moment there is no evidence of community transmission of coronavirus in New Zealand. Nothing has changed in the last 2 weeks. The 5 additional cases in that time are all in individuals who have recently travelled to virus hot spots, or who live with others who do. The new self-isolation requirement means (in theory) we are all better protected.
However, I see it as inevitable that we will have community transmission here, and a significant number of deaths. This is likely to be the largest pandemic in 100 years. It’s not going to just stop in a few months, and we can’t keep the border closed forever. This isn’t as simple as “if we stop agility for a few months, thousands of lives will be saved”.
Rik and I spent our weekend at the Zone 5 benefit show in Orari. This was a huge event with over 1800 entries and up to ten runs for each dog. We finished very late on Saturday night (in fact we had to postpone Tunnellers A until the morning) and at around 6pm today – phew!
We had lots of willing helpers with everyone in Zone 5 chipping in on multiple jobs over the weekend, and many from Zone 4 got in on the action as well. The competitors were also very good about getting onto the line promptly. Thanks everyone for making the show a success – hopefully we are all trained up and ready for the challenge of running an NZDAC now.
This was our last weekend in Novice and in Jumpers B. On Saturday the steering was very good, but the weaves and the contacts let us down a bit. On Sunday Rik nailed both her weaves, but we weren’t quite in sync about where she was supposed to be going. We did get one clear round – 6th place in Jumpers B on Saturday – and we had a really nice “almost” run in our last ever Jumpers B on Sunday too.
What did you and your agility dogs get up to this weekend?
12-year-old Trixie the Pocket Rocket thoroughly enjoyed her return to the agility ring in Tunnellers.
This was going to be a post about the appropriate use of clickers in agility training, but I got sidetracked. Instead, here’s a potted history of twenty years of dog training techniques in New Zealand!
Shaping: A Training Revolution
Clickers first came to the NZ agility scene in the late 1990s, when a few clubs teamed up to bring an Australian trainer called Steve Drinkwater out to run some seminars. Sadly I missed his Wellington seminar because my parents made me go to school, so I gathered it second
At that time most agility handlers had a rather limited understanding of the science of how dogs learn. A lot of training involved pushing, shoving and pulling on the dog – drag him up an Aframe on lead, push him into a tunnel, use your leg to guide him into the weave poles, smack him on the bum if he won’t sit. At more enlightened clubs, they tried dangling a cookie in front of the dog’s nose for him to follow around instead.
This weekend Zone 5 will be hosting a benefit show at Orari, between Christchurch and Timaru. Unlike a typical show which is hosted by a single club, this is a show hosted by all Zone 5 clubs to raise funds so that we can put on the best possible NZDAC later in the year.
The benefit show will be the second largest agility show ever held in the South Island (excluding national events), and it will require a team effort from lots of people to make it a success.
Who’s Running This Thing?
Zone 5 covers the bottom half of the South Island, from the Rangitata River south. This includes all members of South Canterbury, North Otago, Otago, Taieri, Queenstown and Southland clubs. If you live within this area, you are helping to run the show!
This week I’ve been trying to teach Rik to sit straight in front for obedience or rally-o competitions. It’s proving quite challenging – she has a long history of being reinforced at my side, so she keeps gravitating into heel position.
As a first step, I’m getting her to come in between my legs while I’m sitting on the couch, so that she doesn’t have that option. To build more value for being in that position, I need to reward her while she is sitting there. This provides a new challenge, though – how do I get her to leave the position so that we can do another repetition, without having to stand up and rearrange myself each time?
The main job of the call steward is to ensure that there is a handler waiting to run at all times. Your second job is to try to keep everyone more or less in order, and to prevent mass queue-skipping. This is ideally a job for an assertive person with a loud voice.
Before the Class Starts
Position your call board in a location where you won’t be in the way. You need to be outside the holding area, and facing away from high-traffic locations so that you won’t cause too much congestion. Face the board away from the entrance to the holding area, so that people won’t get in the way while they are looking at the running order.
Try to stand to one side of the board most of the time, so that you aren’t obstructing people’s view of the running order. If somebody spends a loooong time standing right in front of the board, you can politely ask them to move away so that other people can see. This happens more often than you would think – most agility people love to talk, and lose their situational awareness when they are chatting with their mates.
When People Check In
Hopefully you will soon have people and their dogs turning up to run. They will come up to you and tell you their number. Draw a wee dot above their number on the running order sheet, to help you keep track of who’s turned up and who hasn’t.
Some people may check in and then go away to warm their dogs up. Usually you can rely on them to be back in time, but you do need to keep track of where everyone is.
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