Clean Run Magazine - March 2010 - 56

#9 Give the dog a choice If you want to know if your training and handling are creating the kind of versatile teamwork and communication to enable you to compete in multiple venues, give your dog a choice. When you set up puzzles, include an option for the dog. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a discrimination problem, but that is one way to confirm your teamwork. Another example is to put an obstacle (jumps are great for this) that is in flow with the original obstacle, but it is not the correct choice. It doesn’t matter if it was in the original course design, or if it is an atypical challenge for the venue that you are focusing on. Just presenting your dog with a choice will ensure that your dog isn’t responding to assumptions, patterns, habits, and so on that are unrelated to your actual communication. #10: Control the shape of the jumps The last characteristic of teams that can solve puzzles of all types elegantly and efficiently is controlling the shape of the dog’s jump. I like to think about it as if each jump is a discrimination problem between three very different obstacles. One obstacle, I cleverly call a “jump,” is where the dog jumps in extension on the approach angle that I put him on and he takes off and lands accordingly. Another obstacle, I cleverly call a “jump left.” This is an obstacle where the dog deliberately adds a stride, gravitates toward the left standard, and rotates around his center of gravity to land facing to the left (what he does afterward is the degree of turn and depends on additional body language). The other obstacle is a “jump right.” The handlers who can communicate, using whatever cues they use to show the difference between these behaviors, have a much better opportunity to set the lines they want on course, to make discrimination challenges non-issues, to avoid potential off-courses, to free up the dog to move fast through the course, and so on. A future article will spend more time on this idea. Wrapping Up To close, I think these concepts are the most important in training for NADAC-style agility without compromising the ability to compete successfully in other venues. Train yourself to deliberately manage your dog’s path using cues that you work hard to convince your dog he can trust, even if you fall far behind or are restricted from working right next to him. Train your dog to confidently perform obstacles independently, but only with your permission. And finally, teach your dog to learn how to choose to do all his agility tasks right from the beginning with high energy, speed, and enthusiasm. D Andrea is a professional trainer, consultant, and coach who takes great pleasure in helping her students, both in Seattle and elsewhere, enjoy their dog, training, agility, and success, probably in that order. Contact her via www.agilityflix.net, where you can check out her training products and services and brags about her own dogs. Clean Run | March 10

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Clean Run Magazine - March 2010

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