Five Fault Club

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.

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.

Continue reading “Contact Training Methods”

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.

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.

Continue reading “The Attention Fix, and Phasing Out Treats”

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.

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.

Continue reading “The Nail Trimming Salon”

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.

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.

Continue reading “Horse Arenas and Toy Games”

When Able was young I played shaping games with him on a variety of strange surfaces (a baking tray, a tarp, a scrunched-up cardboard box etc) but not on anything that would move a lot. Since then, I’ve noticed outside of training that he is pretty confident with things that move under his feet. His favourite game when he’s in his ex-pen is to tip his water bowl upside down, stand on it with his front paws, and glide across the floor on it.

If he was a less confident puppy I would have kept up the surface training a bit more, but instead I’ve been putting more effort into other challenges. This week I pulled my balance equipment out of the shed and Able had his first play on unstable surfaces.

I have a couple of cheap wobble boards similar to this one, and a couple of FitBones (inflatable balance cushions designed for dogs). The FitBones were more of a vanity purchase on my part – you can find much cheaper inflatable balance cushions from various NZ-based fitness shops which will serve the basic purpose of getting your pup used to uneven surfaces. For a young puppy the objects you use should be minimally inflated and feel quite squishy underfoot. As your puppy gets older and stronger you can increase the inflation level.

Continue reading “Unstable Surfaces are Fun”

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”