Flying Poodles

“Less is More” or “Quit While You’re Ahead”

I spend a LOT of time formally training the dogs. (NOTE: you’re always training a dog, 24/7, but when I say “formal training,” I mean that you have specific goals in mind, treats/toys ready, and a plan.) Since my knee surgery, though, I’ve really had to focus on making effective use of training time, because I tire easily, don’t move well, and don’t want to signal any of that to the dogs. Just before my surgery, I despaired of keeping the dogs in competitive tune, much less making progress. Steve Soberski, whom I’ve never met but who has one bionic knee and writes about agility and knee issues, suggested using the down time to train distance handling. Another friend suggested working on sends.

In the end, I decided to work on distance training, overall enthusiasm, and weaves.

The July 2007 issue of Clean Run had an article by Stacy Winkler on her magic weave pole game, which is aimed at teaching the dog to seek out and execute the weaves from any angle. I decided to use that for weave retraining. That’s worked very well.

For distance work, I went with steady practice. Find the distance that works… and go a few inches further away. If that works, a few more. Keep your signals explicit and clear, and keep your mouth shut (so the dog isn’t distracted).

Overall enthusiasm was a tougher problem. Dancer’s enthusiasm for agility was high–we’d trained it from the beginning–but it was clear that Elly just didn’t find agility anywhere near as interesting as, say, tracking the local cats around the arena or eating horse poop.

I looked at another problem Elly then had–not liking tunnels–and I thought about the enthusiasm and I thought about tunnels. I decided I needed to make tunnels more rewarding. Okay, so how? I had Elly do one tunnel and gave her a few treats. Another, more treats. Then Cheryl and I stood at either end of a straight tunnel and called Elly back and forth through the tunnel, with treats every time. Soon she was ducking earlier and charging the entrance, running the tunnel fast, and barely pausing to grab the treat before she turned to take the tunnel again.

Now the hard part. We stopped there. We didn’t do any more tunnel training that day. Off she went to her crate, and I trained Dancer for a while.

I’ve gotten better at that, but it’s still for me the hardest part of training, learning to quit while my dog is excited and wanting to do more.

We’ve been retraining Dancer’s teeter, from square negative one forward. We’ve spent weeks on the wobble board. Today when we got the wobble board out, Dancer ran halfway across the arena and pounced on it. So we played on it for a while. I even had her sit on it while I led out a few jumps. I was confident, and we pulled out the VERY low teeter. It had about an inch of teeter-ness. She ran down it, sat at the end, turned on it, played on it, got huge rewards, seemed totally unfazed. I suggested we raise it an inch.

Cheryl said “no, quit while you’re ahead.”

She’s right, of course.