Clean Run - September 2014 - 41

When several dogs are making the same mistake in the same place, it is more than likely
there is a clear reason, from the dogs' point of view.
Back home, to test if this really could have
affected Hitti's performance, she placed
the corner marker poles in the middle
of the first and last board of the spread
to see what would happen. On the first
try, the last piece was knocked over. Hitti
had learned to clear the spread by looking at the corner marker poles instead
of the pieces of the long jump. Janita
was pleased, because now she knew
what they needed to work on. So they
started to change the placement of the
corner marker poles randomly all along
the sides of the long jump. At first Hitti
was very uncertain, because now she
couldn't evaluate how to clear the long
jump in the way she was used to. She
started to jump about 1 ½' farther than
before because she had a hard time perceiving the length of the obstacle from
the outside edge of the last piece. Nowadays we often notice similarly placed
corner marker poles in trials abroad. We
can help dogs that have difficulties with
this issue because now we know what to
look for and how to address the problem.

It's a Blur
Inexperienced dogs often have problems clearing the tire. In trials, dogs
face different types of tire from those
they are used to training with, and they
sometimes have difficulty finding the
right gap to go through. If the spacing

September 14

| Clean Run

between the edge of the actual tire and
the frame is wide, the dog can easily
make the mistake of going between the
tire and the frame from the side, or he
might even attempt to clear the obstacle by trying to jump through the gap
above the tire.

making it challenging to clear the jump.
Janita moved her dog 6' back from that
spot and checked from that point of
view that the dog could now clearly
separate the first two obstacles from
each other. Her dog cleared the first
jump without problems.

Wide space between the tire and the frame.

The first bar and the lowest part of the tire are aligned
from the dog's point of view.

At the 2013 European Open, the opening sequence in the Standard Agility
Large class consisted of a jump-tire-tunnel combination where several dogs
had problems clearing the first jump.
Because of all the mistakes by previous
dogs, when it was Janita's turn and she
was setting her dog up for the start,
she kneeled at her dog's level to check
the dog's perspective of the opening
sequence. From this view, the first bar
and the lowest part of the tire were perfectly aligned with each other so the bar
blended into the tire in the background,

When several dogs are making the same
mistake in the same place, it is more
than likely there is a clear reason, from
the dogs' point of view. If we see this
happening, we should always trust the
dogs, pay attention to what they are trying to tell us, use our knowledge to figure out what is going on and why, and
try to solve the problem to help them
clear the sequence safely.

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Clean Run - September 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run - September 2014