Clean Run - March 2018 - 15

Bonus training tip: Everybody on their
own trips, just be cool with it.

mified giant turtle floating on a piece
of wood. Other than that, all business.

Step Five: Precision.

Bonus training tip: Agility works better with an accent.

Set up your poles, memorizing carefully how your footsteps space exactly
24 inches between each one. I like to
set up by the fire hydrant because I
can send my dog in from the wood
chip pile, wrap the hydrant, and let her
get her very own self into that pole
entrance without me pressuring her
line to do so. Then throw the toy
toward the dumpsters.
Bonus training tip: Use the stairs
leading to the loading dock for some
contact training later.

Step Six: Add challenges.
Carefully consider the challenging
entrance angle of the day. If the sun is
going down, mind the meth people who sometimes caravan
with their bikes and bike trailers full of worldly goods up the
hill from the pond. Couple of Pitbulls wedged in there, too.
I see them lots. I believe them to live down in the ravine by
the last stoplight at the edge of town. They always travel in
a group, fronted by a tiny, leathery woman. She stares at me
from little, squinty eyes. If there's only minutes 'til the sun goes
down, it's going to be those soft-sided right-angle entrances
from a distance. Those are hard ones for us. I'd like far more
independence at speed.
Bonus training tip: Excessive squinting now will cause fine line
crow's feet later.

Step Seven: Verbals.
The meth folk seem to be content having a smoke on the
rocks near some electrical boxes and drains that smell like
sewage. I love how we all share. It makes me feel warm and
fluffy inside and gives me hope for existence in the cross hairs
of nuclear war. I send Banksy round the hydrant again and into
the poles. I use my best dog training voice. It's high, and loud,
some may say shrill, but it works. I'm a strong proponent of
using verbals, a nifty trick I picked up when I started training
my very fast Border Collie puppy and realized that my legs
were actually not so much.
One set of weave poles might sound something like this:
"Banksy, Banksy, Banksy, ready, ready, go cik cik cik, yay go go,
poles, poles, poles, poles, poles, yay, yay, yay, yay, horray yay for
yoooooouuuu!!" Imagine helium inhalation, third grade girls being gifted ponies, and a vaguely Slovenian foreign accent on
certain phrases for optimal sound effect set up in your brain.
A jackpot victory is a lot of noise.
I always have a lot to do. All the entries, all the hard entries, by
dog do we need to get those entries better. Really, the only thing
that could distract me from better weave poles is if one of the
drunk guys fishing in the pond down the hill found another mumMarch 18 | Clean Run

Step Eight: Use of
no-reward markers.
Shrieking aside, it's tranquil in the
evening. Rosy cooling sun slipping
behind the apartment complex in the
distance, the sounds of the highway
murmuring in the background. In
between sets of poles, all the dogs
get a little Frisbee game to jackpot
the good entries. There are misses,
not perfect yet. I use a cheery
no-reward marker, so those poles
usually sound like: "Oh yay for you,
let's try it agaiinnn!!"
Bonus training tip: No-reward markers... awesome or aversive? Discuss at your leisure.

Step Nine: When to quit.
At some point, I can't say if it was on the third repetition or
the eighth, certainly before the tenth because how many poles
do you really need to do in one session anyway, the queen
bee of the dog trailer drug club leapt to her feet and started
to yell. At me. "That's it! This is my private place! Mine! And it
was quiet and now it isn't and I've had it!"
I have a general code of when the mentally ill or drug impaired start yelling at me to not engage. But I still felt the
need for a couple more entries. A common training problem,
not quitting whilst ahead. So I called back some sage, hippie
response along the lines of, oh hey, no worries, groovy togetherness of the proletariat via shared land use, almost done.
Didn't go over well. Then the sound started. A howling like
not just one coyote but a whole pack of them. The big kind.
"AHOOOOOOOOOO! WAAAAHOOOOOOO! YIP YIP
YIP AHOOOOOLLL!"
The mothership had arisen, and began to whirl like a dervish.
Her arms flailed out at her sides as she picked up speed,
around and around, head tilted to the sky, in a voice that
topped mine and then some. Spinning like a corkscrew in
overdrive, bearing down into the earth.
I wasn't sure what that meant, but first thought was a meaning not so good. So I figured, being a good sharer and all, to be
done sharing and let her have the grass for her private place.
I started rapidly plucking up poles and calling dogs. A lot of
gathering of the things, of the dogs, who would prefer to stay
a while longer for some Frisbees and running.
Not quickly enough, unfortunately. Plucking a tennis racket from
her ample collection of items in her bike trailer, she started
moving in on me, wielding it above her head like an axe. I had a
bundle of plastic poles with spikes, so kind of a fair fight, I guess.
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