Five Fault Club

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”

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.