Five Fault Club

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.

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.

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?

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.

Continue reading “The Rise and Fall of the Clicker Fad”

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!

Continue reading “What Is a Benefit 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?

Continue reading “Reset Cookies”

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.

Continue reading “How to Call Steward”

Rik and I have been at the North Otago show this weekend, where we have had an extremely successful weekend. We went clear in our first three classes yesterday, for an AD clear round, a Novice win, and a 2nd placing in Intermediate. Today we weren’t quite as consistent, but we had a fantastic Intermediate run which gave us our final win to move up to Senior.

I was also show secretary for the event, which caused me many headaches on the Saturday when the club’s laptop crashed. Thank you to all the competitors for your patience when the results while I processed the results the old-fashioned way. I was very glad to have everything running smoothly again on Sunday!

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”