So I'm trying to run Frankie at trials now. She's quite the handful. She is blazing fast, heedless of personal safety, and has some strong opinions about what she is supposed to do out there.
At our most recent, rather disastrous, attempt at trialing, a friend asked me, how's her start line? And I had to admit that it wasn't great. He replied, if you start a run with chaos, then the entire run will be chaos.
I've been thinking about this every day for the past three weeks. It's a great example of how advanced handlers can readily see problems and solutions for other handlers and dogs but get a bit blind when it comes to our own situation. His comment spurred me to dig deeper into Frankie's training, and to go back and retrain a lot of her behaviors.
She is unlike any other fox terrier I've worked with. She is astonishingly smart and relatively easy to train since she is both toy- and food-motivated, which gives me lots of options for rewards, but I'm having to learn how to work with unexpected minutiae of behavior that I never saw in my other dogs.
Frankie has also made me rethink how I train, literally the mechanics of how I approach teaching, rewarding, and reinforcing behaviors. The most important change is that I can't fix problems in the moment. With Frankie, I need to keep going forward no matter what. If I stop, regroup and redirect her to fix something, like ask her to repeat a contact, she blows up. She becomes so over-aroused and so anxious that she can no longer perform at all. I can only note the problem so I can isolate it later in a separate training session.
The second most important change is that I need to keep her training sessions very short. The longer she works, the more overstimulated she becomes, and our connection becomes very fragile.
There are many, many dogs whose stress and anxiety produces the opposite: when they shut down, they disconnect, walk away, stop performing, sniff, leave the ring, etc. When Frankie tips into over-arousal, she doesn't want to leave but she's not able to actually do anything. She has big emotions and big energy but doesn't know what to do with them. It's my job to monitor her and manage her training so that we finish before she reaches that state. It doesn't take long, sometimes just 10 or 20 seconds.
And the third thing I've learned is that I need to stop micromanaging her and put the responsibility of self control onto her. There is no physical reason she can't easily clear the jumps, no physical reason she can't hold a start line stay, no physical reason she can't stop on the contacts. It's all mental control. I have gone back to the very basics of these behaviors and am retraining them with criteria that are more clear to both of us.
Our journey is a bit rocky now but I know that I will be a much better trainer and handler with her as my partner.
