Flying Poodles

Retraining Contacts (a historical perspective)

First off, I did a spectacularly bad job initially training contacts with Dancer. I wanted running contacts, with a 24.5″ standard poodle, and I had them in practice, so I didn’t worry about it. Of course, they immediately vanished in trial (what with the extra excitement) and then I started trying to manage the contact (i.e., slow the dog down) rather than just buckle down and train. Nothing like adding a mistake to a mistake.

When I did start to retrain contacts, I trained them using a nose touch in the classic method. I had no problems training a nose touch contact and it only took a few months before Dancer’s in-class and in-practice contacts were excellent. But in trials… the extra speed and extra excitement caused her to fail to nose-touch (although I did get a slowdown) and I compounded the error by failing to enforce criteria.

However, by diligent practicing of the nose-touch I did start to get a pretty reliable contact behavior, but not a great one, and not an independent contact, which is what I want.

Around this time I had an enlightening conversation with Andrea Dexter. She pointed out that I really needed a contact behavior that had consistent criteria, and she suggested going to a foot touch rather than a nose touch (because *I* would be better about maintaining that criteria, not because it was inherently better–acknowledging my own failure). I started clicking for, and reinforcing, those two front paws hitting the dirt on both the frame and the dogwalk–and stopping there. Around this time, I started getting contacts-to-criteria in trials.

Then in April of this year I went to the Susan Garrett Advances in Dog Training seminar. As part of the seminar, she gave a demo of teaching a dog to foot-target using a big blanket that she kept folding smaller and smaller (every few rewards). I thought it was a brilliant way to build a foot-target behavior and immediately retrained Dancer’s foot target using the method. That took about five minutes and it immediately transferred to agility equipment. I was stunned at how effective it was.

I now have a great foot-target stop in training and a decent foot-target stop in trials. I have a set of criteria I can maintain in a trial.

I have been reading the new Agility Right From the Start–which is an amazingly thorough book on training agility–and am interested to see that they also use a foot-target contact behavior for several reasons in addition to the ones I give above.