Flying Poodles

Where you’re looking matters….

I’ve been working with both dogs on their contacts. (I’m always working on contacts.)

I’ve made this observation: if I look at the end of the contact–stare at it while running–the dog hits it, every time. If I look up at the next obstacle, so does the dog–and then she leaps.

Roger Coor gave a seminar a while back that I attended. He pointed out that dogs evolved from wolves as the hunting partners of humans, trotting along with us as we stalked prey. In the absence of verbal commands–you wouldn’t want to alert the prey–dogs had to learn to read our body language as they hunted with us.

And of course, agility is just hunting with rules. Well, rules, obstacles, and no prey. But there is the thrill of catching the elusive Q!

Anyway, back to the point here, which is that the biggest problem with independent contacts seems to me to be the problem of teaching the dog NOT to watch what we’re doing, but to see the behavior as discrete from the rest of the task. In a jump series, the dog runs with us, taking cues from our bodies and NOT stopping after each obstacle.

But in training contacts, most of us want the dog NOT to flow to the next obstacle, but to stop and wait. It’s the only time we ask for that.

So now I’m wondering if I want independent contacts… I want safe performance, yes.  But I want flow, too. I think I need to investigate this “where I’m looking” thing more.