Clean Run - October 2011 - 52

Correctly Using Food-stuffable Toys to Create Toy Drive
By Laura Manchester Derrett, photos by Samantha Dillard

I could go into great depth about how important it is for your dog to have good toy drive and the many ways to achieve a strong desire for toys. But here I’ll explain one piece of the puzzle to help you get better results with your training. I will go over the beneﬁts and reasons for toy drive, but I will focus on one way to help you gain these beneﬁts: correctly using a food-stuffable toy, such as a Tug-N-Treat. Again, this is not the only way, or necessarily the best way to improve or regain toy drive. It is simply one means to an end that I think needs discussion, mainly based on the observations I have made while working with students from around the world. Most people who use these food toys are doing so in a manner that is actually working against what they are trying to achieve.

The Beneﬁts of Toy Drive
So what is so beneficial about having toy drive for agility training? Many of the behaviors we ask our dogs to do involve driving as fast and as hard as possible, either while we are moving, such as on a line of jumps or finish line, or driving into us on a front cross, threadle, serpentine, or other maneuver. We need dogs to respond as quickly as they physically can. When your dog has a strong desire to interact with you and the toy, you can easily gain these behaviors. Why? Toy drive is nothing more than predation, which all canines are ge-

netically predisposed to engage in. The physiological changes that occur during prey drive are the same ones that happen during toy interaction: increased heart rate and blood ﬂow, release of hormones such as endorphins, and other physical changes that result in greater intensity, speed, and drive. By using tugging as a reward we can increase the duration and intensity of the reward, and we can also have the dog focused solely on us no matter what is happening in the environment. Another important benefit of tugging is that it teaches our dog to shift his

weight to his back end better than anything else. The effort and work to tug naturally does this. Weight shift is crucial in all aspects of agility to allow dogs to be able to run as quickly as possible while turning properly, entering weave poles, running on contacts, and jumping. Using food is one way to help encourage the dog’s toy interaction, but you have to be careful and clever in its use since it can become a hindrance to what we are trying to gain.

Training the Wrong Behavior
Let’s talk about the use of a toy to reward the dog for driving out on a straight line ahead of us, such as on a finish line or moving out ahead of us so we can do a rear cross. The optimal place for reinforcement for this behavior is
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ahead of us on a direct line the dog is on. Ultimately, we would like to be able to have someone throw the toy or even throw the toy ourselves. If our goal is to have the dog run faster than we do, which most of our dogs should easily be able to do, then we have to give the dog a reason to do this, which means rewarding him when he is out ahead of us.

If we use a food-stuffable toy, fill it with food, and either set it in position or throw it, the dog has to wait for us to get there to get any food out of it. This is the number one mistake people make when using these toys. I say “toys” because used improperly they are nothing more than furry bait bags. Our dogs, being clever creatures, quickly learn this
Clean Run | October 11

Clean Run - October 2011

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