Clean Run - May 2020 - 14

Training Your Dog to Stay Responsive
By Loretta Mueller, photos by Matt Allison Photography

With the increasing difﬁculty of agility courses,

you must make sure your dog is responsive to your
handling. I prefer a dog that is supple. The deﬁnition
of the word supple is bending and moving easily. So,
a dog that listens and responds to my commands
quickly and without hesitation.
Too many times I see dogs that have a bad case of
the "yeah, yeahs" What is that you ask? Where the
dog says to the handler "Yeah, yeah, I know it is a
threadle!" when it might not be. Maybe it is a front
cross to a different obstacle, but dogs tend to try to
anticipate what is next.
To help combat that natural tendency, I will run my
dogs on sequences that start the same but will then
change the order of how the obstacles are taken. This
keeps the dogs paying attention and not assuming
that it is "always a serpentine, or always a threadle, or
always a 270".
These drills help in several ways:
* Helps us make sure our handling is correct and
always presents a different picture depending on
what we want the dog to do. A clear picture of the
differences in handling is what the dog needs to
prevent a case of the "yeah, yeahs."
* Keeps the dog responding to your commands and
looking for those differences, so they get used to
responding instantly and not developing habits that
make them less responsive.
* Pinpoint the grey areas in your handling or training
that the dog is covering you by trying to guess.
You can take any course and use it to work on your
dog's ability to respond to different handling. Just pick
the same two to three obstacles in a row. Then add a
different ending.
14

Figure 1 shows a Jumpers course designed by Scott
Lovelis. Figures 2-4 show the same course broken
down into small sections that you can use to test your
dog's responsiveness. Obstacles #1 and #2 always
stay the same, and then you take one of the lettered
obstacles as your third obstacle. For each setup, try
running each of these sequences: #1 - #2 - A, #1 - #2
- B, #1 - #2 - C, #1 - #2 - D
* How do you show your dog the differences
between each sequence?
* Are your cues clear?
* Does your dog understand the differences?
* Is your dog assuming anything?
Now, add some difﬁculty by chaining all the different sequences for each exercise together, as shown
in Figures 5-7. How do you make sure your transitions from one to the next are clean? Make sure your
handling looks very different as the dog will want to
"assume" the direction of the course.
The exercise in Figure 8 is a bit more challenging.
Your handling needs to look drastically different, so
your dog knows exactly where they are going. Then
increase the difﬁculty by combining the sequences as
in Figure 9.
I make a point to pick two things that are similar patterns
the dog would see in agility and work them together
in the same course. So, the exercise in Figure 10 is
serpentines and threadles. As the dog comes out of
the #3 tunnel, they should know which one they are
doing-serpentine or threadle.
Have fun with these! You can create so many combinations that you and your dog can work on keeping
that responsiveness for their entire career. D

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Clean Run - May 2020

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