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Last week I talked about the placement of rewards. This week I’m going to discuss something even more important – your timing.

A Lot Can Happen in FIVE SecondS

You’ve got a brand new puppy that you’re just starting out with, and it’s her first training session. You decide to start with the basicest of basics – Sit. Because we’re training a young agility superstar, we want a nice straight sit, with the puppy’s back legs underneath her.

Your puppy sits. You reach into your pocket for a treat. Your puppy yawns, turns her head to watch a butterfly float past, then flops her hips sideways into a puppy sit. You remove your hand from your pocket and feed the treat to your puppy. What did you just reward?

Continue reading “Training Basics: Timing of Rewards”

In the agility community we have a tradition of celebrating special occasions by dousing people with water. This is great fun, but it can sometimes catch new competitors by surprise!

Continue reading “What’s With the Water Fights?”

This weekend I travelled to Christchurch for the CCOC agility show. CCOC is one of the smallest agility clubs in the South Island, but I was really impressed with their cheerful, hard-working members. Lots of other folk stepped in to help when needed, and the show ran smoothly and finished at a very respectable time each day.

Rik and I had our best agility day of the year yesterday, with three awesome switched-on runs where we were connected nearly all the way around the course. We came away with a clear round and 2nd place in Intermediate, a pesky knocked rail and 5th place in Novice, and a really beautiful Jumpers B run which sadly went a bit awry at the end. A lot of dogs were caught out by off-course jumps at the start of the Intermediate course, so I was really grateful for Rik’s start-line wait.

Today we were less switched on, but I was very pleased with Rik’s send to the backside hurdle in Jumpers B, something that we struggled with at a recent show.

My agility club has been teaching a tricks class over the summer, to raise funds so that we can buy more wing jumps. This week it was my turn to teach them a trick, and we worked on backing up on cue.

Dogs will gravitate towards the location where they have received their rewards. When you are training a back-up cue, this means that they need to be reinforced away from the handler, at the location where they have backed up to (or even slightly behind it). Rewarding the dog from your hand makes it hard to get more than a couple of steps of backing up, as the dog will want to come forward again to your hand to get its cookie.

Feeding from the hand is a deeply entrenched habit, and I had to remind them all multiple times to toss the cookies back to their dog after he had moved backwards. Once they had got the mechanics right, the dogs were much happier to leave their handlers and back up for their supper.

Old Lady with Labrador Syndrome

Every beginners agility class at my old club in Wellington seemed to contain an older woman with a food-obsessed Labrador. This dog learned the obstacles fairly quickly, but then really struggled to put them together in a sequence. It had an uncanny knack for tripping up its handler, which was scary as we trained in an indoor venue with unforgiving concrete pillars for people to crash into.

Continue reading “Training Basics: Placement of Rewards”

Most clubs in New Zealand have a set of Farmtek electronic timers in the shed. There are two models commonly used here. The older “wand” style has a small timing wand which is mounted on a separate pole and must be moved up and down to match the height of the jumps. With the newer “curtain” style, the is only one pole which has multiple laser beams at different heights. Curtain timers are much nicer to use because they don’t have to be adjusted every time the jump height changes.

This weekend I made the long trek to Invercargill for the Southland agility champ show. I really enjoyed catching up with my Southern friends, and the laid-back atmosphere meant I even had time to pop inside and watch my clubmates cleaning up in the obedience show.

Rik and I had a nice run in Novice on Saturday and got third. We also went clear in Jumpers B on Sunday, picking up our last win to move up to Jumpers A. It felt like a very hairy run from inside the ring, although apparently it looked less chaotic from the outside! Our other Jumpers B run was much smoother but unfortunately we had a little misunderstanding about which side to take #11 from.

Last week it was reported that several dogs had died on an Interislander ferry crossing. It’s the second time this has happened recently, with five racing Greyhounds dying in another incident in January 2018.

I’ve taken the ferry with my dogs numerous times, so was initially very concerned when this headline broke. After learning more about what happened, though, I’m satisfied that ferry crossings don’t pose any significant danger to my dogs. Here’s why I don’t think a carload of agility dogs are going to be the next victims.

Continue reading “How Safe Is the Cook Strait Ferry?”

Some people take agility very seriously. They are willing to put a lot of time and effort into their dog’s training, and hope that it will pay off with lots of success in the ring.

Some people take agility very casually. They don’t do any training between their weekly visit to dog club. They treat agility a lot like their weekly Lotto ticket – sometimes they go home empty-handed, sometimes they get a nice wee thrill, and either way they’ve had fun.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to train an Agility Grand Champion. There’s nothing wrong with just being happy to get around without getting eliminated. One of the great things about agility is that it provides many different types of goals for people to choose from.

Continue reading “Choose Your Own Agility Adventure”

This weekend Rik and I competed at the Waimak jumpers show. We saw a more technical style of course to what we’ve been running lately, and found some of the challenges a bit much. We left empty-handed, but we got some things right and I enjoyed my weekend out.

This was the fourth weekend in a row of agility competition in the Canterbury region. A lot of dogs had already won out of their grade and were making the most of their bonus runs. In one Jumpers B, four of the top five dogs had already graduated to Jumpers A. It will be interesting to see some different faces in the lineups soon!

This is the second post inspired by the recent Tracy Sklenar seminar in Dunedin. I had a working spot in the Novice dog session and this was the first exercise that she had us do.

Tracy talked about two different kinds of agility dogs. “Cold porridge” dogs are distracted or disinterested in agility, and lack focus on their handler. “Hot porridge” dogs are too hyped up, and may struggle with self-control or be focused excessively on the obstacles rather than their handler.

The ideal agility dog is warm, Goldilocks porridge. She’s focused on her handler and quick to respond to cues. She’s got her brain fully engaged so that she can give the right responses to those cues. She can resist the temptation to charge around, making up her own course as she goes.

Continue reading “Goldilocks Porridge and the Five-Tricks Warmup”