Clean Run - September 2017 - 30

Dexi is too small to be able to do ladder work, and he's also too small for the
cavalettis that I have. So I used poles on
the floor instead of cavaletti for him.
The trot is a two-beat pace, with diagonal feet moving. To begin, the poles are
placed between where the dog's feet will
fall so that he will easily be able to trot
through them. If you have problems
eyeballing this distance, either wet your
dog's feet and trot him across dry concrete, or trot him across raked sand.

The gaps between Dexi's footfalls while
trotting show me the distance I should
use for the spacing of the cavalettis.

Dexi deftly trots through the
cavalettis.

Once your dog is comfortable going
through the poles at his natural distance,
you can extend the spacing between
the poles a little to teach extension and
shorten it a little to teach collection. This
teaches the elasticity of the paces and,
although this is done in a trot, in general
dogs will generalize the concept to their
canter. When you watch dogs doing
grids, you'll notice that many dogs will
play about with the number of strides
between jumps, rather than changing the size or length of those strides.
Cavaletti help teach your dog the ability
to shorten or extend his stride to reach
his takeoff point rather than altering the
number of strides.
Please note that collection especially is
hard work, so please don't play these
games with your dog unless you have
a well-conditioned fully grown dog. As
you can see, Dexi had little or no problems with this; he has developed into a
very physically able dog. My problems

are keeping his head down and having
him facing forward. It's hard when you
can't talk to them! If I place something
out in front of him, he'll rush and try to
jump. Recalling him through gets the
same result. However, when training,
it's always a good idea to keep your eye
on the aim of the exercise and Dexi has
the idea. Over the coming months we'll
work perhaps once or twice a week on
this, adding challenges as we go.
Shady was started on a single raised
pole. Since he has so many problems
with rear-end work, he was rewarded
for each foot successfully clearing
the pole. If he knocked a pole over or
dragged his foot, I simply reset. He enjoyed this and was soon picking up his
feet carefully and placing them down. I
had a real problem rewarding his front
end whilst trying to watch his back
end-I need longer arms! His success
rate will dictate the speed of training
here. I want his confidence and therefore his enjoyment kept high. As Shady
is so large, I have no intentions of rushing into equipment training with him.
My Jester was the same size, he jumped
30 inches all of his career and was still
getting placed at the top levels of agility in the UK when he was 12. I am often
shocked at the young age people put
dogs on equipment and ask still developing bodies to jump and turn. Our
sport is called agility because it requires
an agile dog, not an agile puppy. D

Ideally Dexi will learn to face forward and
keep his head down while he's trotting.

I started agility training and competition in the late 1980's and around about that time I started clicker training. I've competed in both working trials and obedience.
I still think agility is the best of all sports for both dogs and handlers and clicker training the best way to teach it. I thoroughly enjoy training my dogs and teaching
others. Across the years I've been privileged to teach all over the world, from Australia to Japan, all across North America and Europe. I've worked with many talented
handlers and trainers and thoroughly enjoyed every moment. I remain a positive trainer; reward builds behavior so much faster and better than any other method. If
the solution to a problem is going to upset my dog, it clearly isn't the right solution. Contact me via my website: www.agility-training.co.uk, or via my Facebook page:
Jo's agility-training.co.uk.
30

Clean Run | September 17

http://www.agility-training.co.uk http://agility-training.co.uk

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