A Tired Dog Is A Good Dog

 It's summertime, and I'm not teaching agility classes. But agility training and trialing don't stop just because I'm not teaching. 

My goal this summer is to step up Frankie's training with a focus on more elite skills. I want to help her be more successful in the competition ring. I could of course have not said a word to anyone and trained all summer on my own. I get up very early even on weekend mornings, and there's no doubt that I could have come and gone at the club's training field before anybody else showed up. But I like training with others--my social world is tied up in agility. 

I invited some of my students to join me on weekend mornings at the club for informal training on weekend mornings for the next couple of months. These students are the most successful teams in my classes because they invest at least a little bit of time in training and are making great progress with their dogs. Plus I like them and their dogs. 

Last summer, I got pressured into inviting people to join a training group whom I don't like personally and whom I don't respect all that much as agility handlers. So judge away, but I don't want to spend my limited personal time doing agility with people like that. I preempted that this summer by selecting the people I want to train with. Does that make it a class? No, because others can drop in and join us if they want. I don't turn people away. I'm not that much of an asshole.

Saturdays are for skills work--drills, high rate of reward, limited equipment. On Sundays, I set up a full course that gives us an opportunity to apply the skills with more equipment. 

We are going hard at it. We spent nearly 3 hours yesterday on skills and another 2 hours today working on a course. 

Frankie is a social dog who has never shown issues with being crated but she doesn't often relax in an agility context. By 10am this morning, she was lying on her side in her crate, head propped up on her water bowl, blinking at me. She was exhausted. 

We got home and I put the dogs outside while I unloaded the car. I had a snack then we took a nap for an hour. That is the most luxurious thing I can do with my weekends--play hard, nap hard. 

Frankie loves the skills work, and is soaking up all kinds of new things, but she still finds course work challenging. That's helpful for me to work through, and it helps me understand why she is performing so poorly in the ring. She will not be successful in the competition ring until she can cope with the same stresses in the practice field. 

I trust my training. I know Frankie has the physical and mental ability to succeed in agility. She's struggling with stress and anxiety that are expressed as over-arousal. I'm hoping that working with her in a high pressure, high reward training program this summer will help her push past the anxiety and allow her to go into the competition ring with confidence and focus. 

Reminder

 I'm having some fairly big problems with Frankie in the agility ring right now. I'm still processing the issue and what to do about it. Until I work through it, I thought it would be nice to remind myself of how far she has come. 

 Here is a training video of her in the weaves, taken in my garage in December 2023. I use the 2x2 method to train weaves plus a remote treat dispenser to keep the dog's head down and facing forward. 

 

And here's a clip of her a year later (January 2024) performing 12 weaves off the table in an AKC Open Standard run.

 

 

She's fast! I didn't get quite far enough down the line for that front cross before the tunnel. You can see her little hop to the side as she turns to the tunnel because I'm in her path. 

I'm feeling frustrated with the backwards progress in her trialing. But she's healthy. She loves agility. She has drive. Oh, so much drive. And she is smart. We will get through this rough spot.  

 

Train the Trainer

In early 2022, I began teaching a new class at the club. Handlers that were moving into the agility track (Intro to Agility, Beginner Agility, etc.) from Beginner Obedience weren't working with their dogs as a team. The handlers had no idea how to train a dog. Sure, they could drag a dog in a circle around a ring indoors on lead and maybe they stuffed a few treats in its mouth now and then but they weren't really communicating with their dogs. I thought, here's a knowledge gap that I think I can fill.

When I first proposed the class, to be held on Sunday mornings inside the club, the reaction of the old guard was so extreme that you would have thought I had proposed slaughtering puppies on their own front lawns. The inside of the club was sacrosanct, to be reserved for clean obedience training (of course, based on punishment), not dirty training with treats! The club had never offered classes on the weekends! Training with clickers would disturb other people who needed to train indoors! The wailing, the gnashing of teeth, and the rending of garments was extreme. 

So I spent several weeks going to the club on Sunday mornings and documenting exactly who was using it and what they were doing. It was empty, week after week.

I resubmitted my proposal and was grudgingly granted permission to teach this new class for one session, with said permission given provisionally, ready to be yanked back if there were "problems." The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse didn't make an appearance during those 8 weeks, so I kept going. 

I just finished the thirteenth 8-week session of my class. I guess weekend classes weren't such a bad idea after all because there are now Puppy Kindergarten, Beginner Obedience, and Scent Work classes offered on Saturday and Sunday in addition to mine. 

The class is called Teamwork. It's all about teaching handlers how to communicate with their dogs consistently and reliably. I use positive training methods and actively discourage negative markers and punishment. I teach handlers about rate and placement of rewards, how to use a clicker, and how to train behaviors with luring, targets, and shaping. Most of the exercises are flatwork, done with no equipment. As their skills progress, I add exercises with cones, platforms, and perch bowls. After 8 weeks, if they are paying attention and working at home between classes, the handlers and their dogs can execute all sorts of things that they will actually use in agility, obedience, and rally. 

What's so interesting about the class is that all of the training is for the handlers--but they don't know that at first. I mean, some dogs are a bit rambunctious and excited but what I am asking the dogs to do is pretty simple. Most dogs pick up the exercises right away. 

The origin of the idea for this class goes all the way back to the teaching I was doing in Saudi. I saw then that I could make a meaningful difference by helping pet owners communicate better with their dogs. It morphed to have more of an agility focus, of course, but the essential idea is the same. Owners that are reliable and predictable in how they communicate and reward their dogs will elicit reliable and predictable behaviors from their dogs.

The course content has evolved, of course. The addition that I am most proud of is what I now set up for the last class of each session: a series of exercises using hoops. Hoops are an agility obstacle used by the agility organization NADAC. Hoops don't require any jumping--the dog runs through them (see the picture below). I built four hoops to NADAC specs.

 

 

I start the last class by letting handlers introduce their dogs to the hoops by navigating a simple circle through them. Each sequence gets more complex and requires more handling. By the end of the hour, handlers and their dogs navigate a 10-obstacle sequence with hoops and cones and side changes. 

 

This is a course map. Squares are 10 x 10 feet. The shaded dots are cones. The oval things are the hoops. Obstacles are performed as numbered. 

 

Most of the students taking Teamwork have never competed in organized dog sports. They've maybe heard of agility or rally and maybe want to take more classes. They usually come to me with no more training than a session of Beginner Obedience. But after 8 weeks of Teamwork, they are successfully completing a short obstacle course. 

I developed Teamwork to be a bridge from Basic Obedience into one of the performance sports. Is it working? Well, last night, the Intro to Agility instructor announced at the Board meeting that she wanted to make Teamwork a prerequisite for her class. She said that handlers who had taken Teamwork understand how to train a dog, and that it was night and day obvious who had taken my class and who hadn't. Teamwork students are more successful and advance more quickly in her class.

I couldn't be more pleased. It's validating to have an instructor I like and trust to explicitly say, Teamwork has a measurable, positive impact. Let's have more of it!

I love teaching agility, and many of my agility students become great training partners. But Teamwork is my passion project. I am lucky that I have the opportunity to share that passion.

T3i: Costco for the Win!

I go to Costco about once a month to buy bulk items for my mother and her husband. However, the 85-roll packs of TP and strings of 18 shrink-wrapped chicken breasts are a little much for me and I don't do much personal shopping there.

But when I do go, I always check out the dog toy selection. Treasures await the discerning shopper!

 Last month, I scored a four-pack of "Friends of the Sea" plushies.

 

Costco was offloading them for $20. The toys are made from recycled plastic bottles. 

T3i gave these toys an immediate 10/10. Size: perfect. Durability: high. Colorful: definitely. Washable: Of course. The blue hammerhead shark made his way into one of the bags I pack when I travel for agility trials to serve as a hotel room toy. 

This month, I snatched up a 3-pack of Kong plushies for $14. How could I resist that price? There was a crocodile, cow, and chicken. Here's a picture of the croc and chicken:

 

 

Notice anything strange? They look like pretty generic plushy dog toys....or do they? How about those four legs on that chicken! I know it's cheaper to make them from the same pattern and just change the color of the material, but I actually find it disturbing to touch this chicken abomination. 

Fortunately, Archie doesn't care. 

T3i gave these a strong 10/10 as well. The squeakers are in the heads and the bodies are floppy with little to no stuffing. They seem well made and stood up to even Frankie's strong tugging. 

I buy plenty of specialized training toys to use in agility but there is always room for a reasonably made plushy that is used for nothing more complicated than a game of fetch.