Frankie and JWW--Out of Novice At Last

Frankie and I have been struggling to advance in AKC JWW (Jumpers With Weaves). She's been stuck in Novice since I started trialing with her. At first she knocked bars, oh so many bars. That problem fixed itself as she started to understand the game better and learned to balance her speed with better take offs.

At the Novice level, the dogs are allowed a couple of errors but knocked bars are always an elimination. Bars down lost us a lot of Qs. But in JWW, the dog also can't take any wrong obstacles. Frankie has a tendency to curl into me so even when I want her to take 4 jumps in a straight line, she usually turns towards me and takes an off course. 

That's what happened in the video I've attached here. The third jump she takes is not the correct one even though I was doing my best to keep her from turning into me. I stopped and chose to use the Fix-N-Go option where you can go back and correct that mistake. The run is no longer scored or timed. I turned her around and wrapped her around the first jump (backwards, but it didn't matter anymore) and on the second attempt, she ran the course correctly. She bobbled the weave entrance but that's allowed in Novice. She rarely misses weaves in practice on grass but on this fast turf, she comes into the weaves very hot and sometimes misses the entry. I lifted her up like Simba at the end because she stayed with me all the way to the leash. 

 

 I only needed one more Q to get her (and me) out of Novice. And we pulled it off the next day! She almost breaks at the start line--that scooting forward is a problem and I'm working on it. Notice how she curls into me as she comes out of the tunnel. That's partly because that's what she does and partly because I wasn't in the right position to get her over the next jump. She never took any obstacles and she never crossed the plane of the next jump so the judge didn't call any faults while I was fumbling around getting her lined back up. It was just time on the clock, not errors. She hit the weaves super hot but managed the entry this time for a nice clean finish back to the tunnel. 

 

 I've learned a few things while trialing with Frankie this summer. She is true to herself. She becomes extraordinarily overstimulated in a flash of a second but is still predictable and trainable. Frankie is not Archie--she isn't looking to please me. She is willing to go along with my rules, more or less, so she can get what she wants. And what she wants to do is move. I may never have clean start lines with her. She crouches down like a sprinter in the starting block (good). Her focus forward training means she doesn't look at me but at the course in front of her (good). She drools (eh). She creeps forward (not good). Clearly I can shape some of that but I can't change her fundamental nature. 

I'm making peace with that because she's starting to get good at this agility thing. People stay late to watch her run, and although smooth fox terriers are in general crowd pleasers, they are staying late to watch because she's doing great things in the ring. I lost count of how many people told me at the trial how much progress she has made this summer. And I agree.   

Invite to the Agility Invitational

Archie got his third invite to the AKC Agility Invitational! He is the second-ranked Smooth Fox Terrier in the Preferred class. That's pretty good for my old man--he will be 10 years old in September. He's had a decent run of successes in the past few months and the invite is evidence of that.

 This is my fourth invite to the Invitational. My first was with Iz back in 2006, at the very first Agility Invitational event. 

Big events are not my thing. I don't like the crowds. I really don't like the Orlando venue. That's a lot of money and leave time to set aside for an event I don't want to attend. And Archie of course doesn't care. So I'm going to decline, opening up a spot for the next Preferred SFT in the rankings.  

 

Cicada

I was smacked in the head by a cicada heading for the backyard deck floodlights one early morning last week when I was taking Frankie out to potty. I gave a bit of a shriek and swatted it to the ground.

 Frankie was on that cicada like, well, like a terrier on a bug.

I let her chase it around for a while. It was probably near the end of its life anyway since it didn't seem to be able to fly well, but Frankie certainly didn't help. She isn't a gentle dog and all of the pawing and nosing disabled it further until it could only fly a foot or two. At last it lay buzzing on the ground and I figured that was enough cicada torture. It was time for Frankie to pee so we could get back inside.

As soon as I stepped towards her, she grabbed that damned cicada and took off trotting. I could hear it buzzing inside her mouth and I could see one of its wings sticking outside her muzzle. Fox terriers get this weird pooch to their face when they are trying to hide something in their mouths. It's terribly obvious what they are doing, which makes it funny. But it is summer in central Arkansas and the weather even at 5am is hot and humid. I wasn't all that amused. I just wanted to go back inside and get on with my morning.

I followed Frankie as she did the grand tour of the backyard, cicada buzzing away in her mouth. Her recall is a thousand times better than it used to be but I didn't bother. I just trailed after her, stumbling over rocks and tree roots in the dark areas in the back forty (what I call the lower end of the yard). Finally she made her way back up to the house. I grabbed her and pried her jaws open. The cicada, stunned, dropped to the ground. It was still alive but I decided Frankie was done. I picked her up and carried her up the stairs. 

I gave her a treat anyway when we got back in the house. She wasn't naughty. She was just being a normal fox terrier.

  

Summer Training Goals

 My training goals for Frankie this summer are to expand her repertoire of skills. I'm particularly focusing on skills that are needed to run the more international-style courses such as AKC Premier. For those courses, the dog needs to have many different collection and turning cues, far more than are needed to fumble one's way through a regular AKC course. 

AKC got rid of the pause table in Excellent/Master classes last year. This was a long-overdue decision. Nobody will miss it. However, the pause table was often used by judges in their course design to create a hairpin change in the dog's path. Rather than toss out their old course designs, many judges replaced the pause table with a wrap on a jump, in which the dog approaches a jump, collects, and turns very tightly around the wing, usually with a 180 degree change in direction. While wraps were used before the pause table was removed, we are seeing them in almost every Excellent/Master Standard course now. 

Frankie doesn't like to collect. It's a common problem with some dogs that want to go go go. Collection means slowing down. It's not that they can't collect, it's that they don't want to. It's a training problem. So one goal for this summer was to help Frankie learn to collect more reliably.  

To make this even more complicated, the dog can wrap to the handler or wrap away from the handler. In a wrap away, there is a side change (dog ends up on the other side of the handler) and a lead change (dog changes lead leg at the wrap). Jumps have two wings. So which wing is the best choice for that wrap in that location on that course? I tell my students, once you identify a wrap on a course, you start with that question--which wing? The decision depends on many factors: the path the dog is on as he approaches the jump, the path he will be on after he lands and comes around the wing, the lead leg the dog is on as he approaches and the lead leg he would be on after the wrap, the dog's ability to turn, the distance between the wrap and the next obstacle, the position of off course obstacles around the wrap, etc. It's complicated!

 It's a core tenet of dog training that if you expect different results, you need to apply different handling. That means different handler body motion and position and different verbals. You can't use one command for five different things. How will the dog know which one you mean? The result will be a dog that slows down until the handler sorts their shit out, a dog that starts taking any obstacle he sees, or a dog that gets very frustrated very fast. So another part of this summer's training is to expand the verbal commands I use with Frankie.  

Here is a list of the skills that I am working on with Frankie, and the verbal commands I'm using for them. She already knows several of these but I am doing a lot of drills to solidify her performance. 

• Jump in extension (jump, go on)
• Wrap to (check)
• Wrap away (dig)
• Soft turn (left, right)
• Rear cross (switch) 
• Backside wrap (back) (handler on landing side)
• Backside slice (push) (handler on landing side)
• Tunnel threadle (look)
• Threadle pull (look)
• Inside slice (in) (backside with handler on takeoff side, another type of threadle)

Everything starts with one obstacle, usually a jump. You gradually add handler motion. Then you gradually add distance. Then you add another obstacle or two so the skill is performed with more speed in a sequence and go back to working close to the jump. It's a slow process. There's a lot to keep track of. 

I am by no means a top tier handler and I have no interest in going to big events. But Frankie has a ton of potential and I want to explore more challenging courses with her. 

Frankie's Big Feelings

There are some skills that I never really had to train with Archie. I just did the handling, he read it correctly, and that was that, more or less. I mean, there still had to be some proofing and refining, but he has always been an easy dog to train.

For example, there is a handling move called tunnel threadle. When the dog is facing a curved tunnel, and their line is taking them to one opening of the tunnel but you need them to go into the other opening, you execute a tunnel threadle: raise the arm opposite the dog about waist high to pull the dog off their path, across your body, and scoop them into the correct tunnel entrance. The tunnel threadle usually has a verbal associated with it. I use "look look" with Archie. He sometimes makes a mistake when he's got a head of steam but he's pretty reliable. I've certainly not had to spend days or weeks training that particular thing.

Frankie knows what tunnels are. She has decent obstacle independence and will send to tunnels 20 or 30 feet away. But when I tried a tunnel threadle with her, her brain leaked out of her ears and she started spinning in place. I could be standing inches from the tunnel opening, and if I raised that opposite hand and said "look look", she started spinning. I could not get her in the tunnel. But if I stepped back, lined her up, and said "tunnel tunnel," she would shoot into the tunnel. 

This was such bizarre behavior that it made me think more about what was going on and how to fix it. When Frankie starts spinning like that, she is so far over her arousal threshold that she can't function anymore. She rockets into that state in a fraction of a second. She can't hear. She can't continue forward. She certainly can't learn. At that point, it's not even a matter of the timeliness of my commands. She literally can't do anything except spin in circles. I need to interrupt that behavior and help her move into a different, hopefully lower, state of arousal.  

I've been taking a lot of online training classes to learn how to use pattern games to help dogs change their state of arousal. I don't want to get into the weeds of that training here, but I can summarize it like this. Food releases endorphins. Executing a familiar pattern, essentially falling into autopilot, releases endorphins. Combine them and you have an exercise that can help lower a dog's level of arousal. I've been working through pattern exercises with Frankie for about 4 months but I wasn't really sure how to apply them to her specific problems in agility. 

 I finally put it together last weekend. In this short training video, she rockets into over-arousal twice. Both times I stopped moving and waited. In the most simple pattern game, the dog gets a treat for making eye contact. Notice how quickly she stops spinning and sits in front of me and looks at my face. I give her a treat or two then calmly line her up and ask her to continue, which she was able to do. 

 https://youtu.be/p1eTiTfVIRs 

Of course I can't give her treats like that in the competition ring. But I hope that I can help her learn that she can control her own emotions, and that when she does, she can keep on doing agility, which for Frankie is another type of reward.  

 

(Sorry, can't embed the video. Blogger isn't cooperating. The link should work.) 

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.