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.