Yesterday we finished with an exercise to work on good stays. All ten of us lined up across the arena (so 10 of us across 80 feet), dogs on left in a sit. Dana (Stillinger) told us to reward our dogs for sitting quietly at our side while she talked to us, including occasionally saying our names and the dogs’ names. She summarized the class and the homework (about 5 minutes). Then, she pointed at us, one by one, and we had to leave our dog in a sit, step out five to ten feet, and release/call the dog to come to us. The other dogs were to stay in their sits. After being released, the dog and handler went back into line. Once all the dogs had been “tested”, we moved to half the distance apart (four feet) and repeated the exercise.

I was surprised by how very successful the dogs were at staying while one dog at a time was released. It’s a foundation class, full of younger dogs. None of the dogs barked; only one dog failed to come promptly when called (and he’d been struggling with that all class).

One of the reasons I’m taking this class is that I’ve seen how well Dana’s students do at their first trials. The dog always has a rock-solid stay, and even if they get the zoomies, the handlers don’t panic and they easily get the dog under control quickly. What I saw yesterday is why. It’s not just the stay exercise; during class she had three work stations (with an assistant at each station, volunteers from WAG (Willamette Agility Group) who train at the barn too); if a dog started to run off, the handler shouts “incoming!” and it’s everyone’s job to get their dog immediately under physical control. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it works, and the dogs quickly learn that the rewards come fast and furious … but only from their own handlers. Dana reminded all of us to keep the reward rate as high as possible.

Whenever I go to the Delta, I always take a bag of their favorite treats (the chicken liver and oatmeal ones), and I recall them, give them a treat, and send them off again, over and over and over and over. Sometimes I put the leash on and walk for a little bit, ten paces or sometimes more. I call by signaling for a hand touch; I call their names; I whistle their “come here now” whistle (it has four notes); I whistle their “I’ve got a treat if you come” whistle (two notes); I turn around and run away from them. Sometimes I ask them to stop halfway to me and go to them with the treat. It all helps them learn to come when called.

It makes me crazy to be at a dog park and see owners trying to get their dogs to come to them, without luck. It’s because the only time they call their dogs is when they’re going to put the dog in the car, and the dogs know that. So everyone ends up annoyed (or angry)… and the dog thinks being called means bad news. I want my dog thinking “oh, if I go back, I’ll get a cookie, and then I can run some more!”

I went right back into my version of “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” (TANSTAAFL). I expect the dogs to get into the car nicely; I expect them to walk into the agility barn on a loose leash; I expect them to wait calmly on their mats for their lunch; I expect Rush to be polite to Elly and Dancer; I expect all three dogs to be polite to me! (There are more rules, but that’s a start.)

Dancer and Elly have been through this before and swung right back into the routine. Rush is struggling a bit with the rules. “What?!” he says, “I have to earn my lunch? I have to earn my cookies?”

This afternoon, I interrupted the dogs’ nap time (after agility practice at the barn, which went astonishingly well) and worked on group WAITs. I asked them to sit, told them to WAIT, and walked to the end of the hall. I didn’t release them; I asked them to DOWN. Dancer and Elly downed* nicely; Rush got up and started walking toward me. Then he stopped, looked back at Elly and Dancer (who were both in nice sphinx-style downs), and sank slowly into a down, about halfway to me. You could actually see the thought process.

I did one more repeat, Rush downed* a little faster this time; I’ll work on it some more tomorrow.

*Dear Grammar Police: in dog training, “to down” is a verb meaning “to lay down”. Deal with it; it’s not a new coinage. Diana

Let us take a particularly egregious example: Dancer is incapable of attention to me (or anyone) in the presence of a cat. Cats fascinate her. She desperately hopes they’ll run, so that she can chase. How would I proof Dancer’s behavior against cats? I’d have to start with a cooperative cat (perhaps a stuffed one?) at a distance where Dancer could pay attention, reward heavily for attention, then move slightly closer… and repeat over and over and over.

At this point, with Dancer almost six and that distance at over 100 feet, I’m not sure I’ll do anything other than manage the behavior. Thankfully, I have never seen a cat at an agility trial.

However, I am proofing Rush’s waits, the same way I proofed Dancer’s (having learned from Elly). Wait to me means: pay attention, stay in exactly that position, and wait for me to release you. It’s an attention behavior. (Actually, having learned from Dancer as well as Elly, I am going back and proofing Dancer’s waits too.) I started with a sit-wait for Rush. Sit there, wait while I take a step back, step forward, reward for the wait, say “okay” as a release word… The classic three D’s of any dog training: duration, distance, distraction. Once I thought Rush understood sit-wait, I started training stand-wait and down-wait. (Down-wait is the weakest at this point.)

I kept training waits (in any position). I added distance, I added weird behaviors (like dancing and singing before I said “okay”). I pounded on the tunnel with his toy (and put it away and took him back to his original position when he broke his wait). I walked in a circle behind him; I dropped his toy… He’s getting really good at waiting to be released.

I’m almost ready to try again asking him to wait while I do something with Dancer…. The last time I tried that, it was a spectacular failure; I ended with two poodles happily playing with each other and ignoring me.

My current training projects with Elly are three. First, there is the perennial project of trying to teach her loose-leash walking. I wonder now if I would have been more successful if I’d been more consistent when she was a pup; I was so clueless about training that I didn’t understand why I shouldn’t allow her to pull me into the agility ring, even when it was pointed out to me. Anyway, my current method, applied consistently over the last six months or so, is starting to show results. Keep in mind she doesn’t have a collar; I use a harness because of her shoulder and hip issues. That makes it harder. In any case, I’m finding that stopping and backing up (not turning around, backing up) as soon as she’s about to pull (not once she does) gets the point across far better than anything else I’ve tried. (I use the same method with Rush, who pulls very little already; more below.)

Second, I’m trying to teach Elly not to bark out the window so much. This is challenging because she loves to bark at any dog walking by; since we live on a corner lot, this happens a lot. I was determined when I got Rush that he would not bark, so I consistently rewarded him to coming to me when Dancer and Elly barked. He now runs to me when the bark, and gets rewarded; Elly and Dancer have noticed this and Dancer now comes running when Elly barks, too. Elly seems to prefer barking to food, at least for a bit, but is starting to interrupt to come for treats too. My goal is to get her to interrupt sooner.

Third, I’m working on WAIT with Elly. She never had much of a start-line stay, because I never really trained it. Now that she’s not competing any more, I am training it. Go figure. She now has to WAIT for her dinner; to get out of the car; to go out a door; to go into a tunnel; for just about everything—and suddenly she’s learning to wait. Funny how easy consistency makes training. I can even walk around her in a sit, sometimes.

(Note: I use Elly to practice my shaping for various tricks I want to teach Rush. She’s very clicker-savvy, loves shaping and playing games, and I don’t care what the results are, which makes me that much more relaxed. It’s a good way for both of us to learn.)

With Dancer, I’m focusing on the CPE Nationals in June. This week Debbie and I worked on her double jump. She’s been nervous about it; we tried using a stride regulator (jump bump) to help her learn where to put her feet. The stride regulator is four feet from the front bar; she needs to take off from just inside the bump. It really surprised me what a difference it made to her jumping form. I am also working on her contacts, on weave entries (and fast weaves), and practice shaping her path. I’d like her to be more confident on the teeter, as well, so I’m rewarding the teeter a lot.

Now that Rush and I have started first level agility class and he’s begun to learn equipment (jumps at four inches, the tunnel, the hoop, the end of the dog walk and the bottom of the a-frame), I feel like he’s learning at lightning speed. It’s pretty clear that I have to get new things right the first time, because he learns so fast! At class on Saturday, he was introduced to the ladder. He was so tentative and so unsure. I took him through slowly, gave him lots of treats for every step he made through it; when we came back around to do it a second time, he trotted through with his tail held high like he’d been doing it forever.

I’m struggling with Rush’s excitement level in agility class. He gets so excited that he forgets his manners and jumps up and snaps at me. I remember when Dancer used to do the same thing. I know what Rush is thinking: get a move on! let’s go! come on! you’re so fucking slow! I stop and I wait for him to calm down but I want better results and I want them now—I’m as bad as he is. Dana suggests I take a step into him when he starts to jump up at me. I’ll try that the next time I get a chance.

Debbie is trying to help Rush get his focus off me and onto the equipment; we’re using his toy as a target. The final exercise this week was to send him over a jump moving away from a second jump, then wrap the jump standard (using a front cross) and send him over the jump to his toy. He did well with it, but he sure was annoyed at first, until he figured it out. There’s a lot of dog training that is very zen: to get the toy, he had to not want the toy and move away from it. It’s a lot like the “It’s Your Choice” game (my description here), which is all about not wanting the cookie to get the cookie.

Finally, I’m working on loose-leash walking with Rush as well. He doesn’t pull like Elly (meaning: he’s not a freight train), but he also isn’t a relaxed leash walker like Dancer, which is what I want. BUT… I’ve been completely consistent with Rush. He’s not allowed to pull into the house, into the arena, into the barn, through the gate, anywhere. Not ever. The first time I walked him around the block, I think I walked backward more than I walked forward. Walking backward turns him right around starts him toward me; when he’s halfway to me, I start walking forward and he ends up right at my side. Three or four steps and I reward. If I reward every ten feet or so, I have a beautiful loose-leash walk even in the excitement of class. Outside of class, we can go all the way around the block. The next part of that is to extend the loose-leash walking with more duration, more distractions, and less instruction from me; I want it to be the default.

Of course, there’s other possible explanations. His hormones could be settling a bit; the training could be working; cleaning up the fleas could have helped with his general agitation level; or he could just be a month older.

Rush did really well. He was mostly focused on me; he played with his tug without hesitating; he took treats at all times (although he got kind of sharky as he got excited).

I woke up with a nasty cold this morning, and it was several hours after I woke up before I felt like doing anything with the dogs, and even then, what I felt like doing was tiring them out so we could all go back to bed.

How to tire the dogs out quickly? Well, making them think usually works. I set up the Bosu ball, round side down, and I played with Rush on the Bosu for a while. It’s hard work, balancing on it with all four feet, and if I make him pivot and balance, it’s even harder. But he loves the game so much that I have to keep the Bosu hidden when I don’t want him to play on it. So I did that with Rush.

Dancer watched Rush get a lot of treats on the Bosu, and she came in and put a paw on it and looked at me. She does not like the Bosu. It moves, and motion is not something she likes. I gave her a treat for thinking about it, put the Bosu away, and took all the dogs down to the lawn to play for a bit. Then I put Rush and Elly inside, and I put the Bosu back out and looked at Dancer. She looked at me and very carefully put one foot on the Bosu, very slowly. Click!

She took her foot off, and I could see her brains whirl and steam start coming out her ears. She put one foot on, and I just looked at her, and she very slowly put the other foot on, trying to keep the Bosu from moving when she did it. Click! and I threw the treat away from the Bosu so she had to come back. She was a little more vehement this time, and it moved a little. Click! Now I wanted her to step on the Bosu a little, make it rock a bit. She did. Click! It took about ten treats until she was willing to rock the Bosu when she landed with her front paws, and the last time she ran over and did it without hesitation, so I gave her the rest of the treats and put the Bosu away.

I’ve assumed that she wouldn’t ever be able to stand on the Bosu with all four feet, but now I’m thinking she could get there. Something to try, anyway.

Enthusiasm.

I think everyone who competes in a dog sport wants a dog that is enthusiastic about the task at hand. And yet, at agility trials, we’ve all seen a dog or two or three that is not interested, thank you very much. Just before I retired Elly, she was one of them. In practice, with a warmup and a chance to go slow and no pressure, she was fine, even danced a bit with excitement from time to time; at trials, not so much. At the end of two days of trialing, Dancer isn’t that excited to be coming to the line for the tenth time, either.

I think training a dog so that, every single time, the dog thinks “oh my bone my bone my bone, this is the best damn thing in the whole world” as they come to the line is possibly the hardest thing ever. It means, as Debbie Berkley says, that when you’re playing tug with your dog in the presence of agility equipment, you can’t scream when your dog bites you instead of the tug toy… because you want the dog to think playing with you is always always really amazing. It means, as I’ve observed Paige do (not say), that your dog needs to be having fun. And as she says… it’s the dog that defines what’s fun. For Dancer, that means a lively game of keepaway is a fabulous reward; for Rush, it’s chasing a ball. (He brings it back, though, because that means he gets to chase again.)

And it means you don’t slow your dog down just because it would be easier; it means you figure out a way to let your dog be fast and focused.

I’m working on the fast and focused part with Rush right now. Today we played with tunnels and jump standards and going away from me to go into a long straight tunnel. Oh yeah, and a few foot targets at the end of the dogwalk. At this point, all he’s doing is the last three feet of the dogwalk, but Debbie insists that he go right to the end, no hesitating. The target is definitely helping with that!