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.