13 months ago, Epic was just a few weeks old, but we had started some training. My most prominent goal was that he should fly back to me anytime he had a toy in his mouth – ready for a new game of tug. I started his training with some short games already when he was five weeks old, and have kept training for the rest of his upbringing. I’ve had a plan for all play and I have never let him run off with a toy on his own. The result? Fantastic! He is extremely nice to train since tugging with me is the best thing he knows. He pushes toys on me to get me to tug a little more. He almost seems uninterested in toys when he has them on his own, they get value in the interaction with me. I’ve often felt that I’ve been very lucky – this thought through training probably just coincided with the perfect dog. The behavior does feel so natural for him, with no resistance at all.
But then I thought of Squid. Little Squid that was so tired and hard to engage in training during her first year and a half. I had such a hard time building value for tasks, to get speed and endurance. But I had two prominent goals that I focused on from the day she came home – no matter what, she should love circle work and nose touches. What do you think happened? She was really hard to train in everything except circle work and nose touches. She just loved those two behaviors and has always put all of her self in them, even though the rest of the training sometimes was slow. Was that also a coincidence? I’m starting to doubt it. What to you think?
If you want to know more about how I worked with getting Epic to love to tug with me and fly back to me as soon as he got a toy in his mouth, you can buy access to Lesson 1 of my Foundation Class. For just 200 SEK (approximately 20 euro or 30 USD) you get access to my text and video, combined with the videos and comments made by the participants and my answers to their questions.
This week has been rainy and dull, but it doesn’t keep us from training. Squid is back from having puppies and is getting ready for her first trial in many months. Her weaves were terrible after the long break, but it didn’t take long to get them back to where they once were. One thing I really like about the 2×2 method is that you can go back and open up the first set of poles to show the dog what we’re after. It worked really well with Squid and she is now showing both confidence and skill in finding her entries. I look forward to the trial on Sunday.
Epic is working a lot on contacts right now. We’ve actually done nose touches, running contacts and up-contacts today. This is how his running contacts looked yesterday. It was his third session on a new height:
I didn’t get his nose touches on video, but we’re making progress. I’ve had some problems with building enough value for targeting on the stairs before, but I’ve found a way that makes him very keen at the same time as he gets more relaxed in agility training in general. I mix nose touches on the stairs with running contacts. It’s a great combination to make sure that Epic offers behaviors in order to get to run through the tunnel and over the dogwalk. If he got to do just that, he’d get tense and stalky.
I’m very concerned with keeping my dogs relaxed and open minded in agility training. Of course, this applies much more to my border collies than to the cockers. You can test the openness in different ways – Do they run to me and do great, repeated nose touches if I present my hand? Can they offer getting into position at the side without help and with good rear end awareness? Can they look up at me and walk with me between exercises? For a while, most of our running contact training was about Epic offering different kinds of behaviors before he got to run. He is much more relaxed and open minded now. I can also use running contacts to increase the value he has for behaviors that have been hard to build value for – like nose touching on the stairs. We’re now walking to the stairs between repetitions of running contacts, and he has to offer real nice and focused targeting. When he does, he gets his toy and then he gets to run through the tunnel and over the dogwalk. Perfect! It’s 3 for 1 – value for nose touches, open mind on the agility field and training his running contacts. Nice balance in training.
What about the up contacts? When I do running contacts on the full dogwalk, I’ve put a stride regulator before the dogwalk to make sure that he hits the up contact as well as possible. I don’t think he learns a lot by that in the long run, I just don’t want him to repeat a behavior I don’t want. Now I’ve started to train his up contacts separately. This was his first session and I think the video speaks for it self:
I just wanted to share another video that shows how much fun obedience training can be. This is a video by two of my norwegian friends (if the video is blocked in your country, check it out on Vimeo)
I’ve always got a lot of balls to juggle when it comes to training my dogs. Obedience, agility, herding, tricks and sometimes search and rescue. I love training different sports and I mostly think it’s a strength, both for me and for the dogs. I feel that even though it’s a lot of work, obedience training helps agility and vice versa. The tricks I teach help both obedience and agility. The border collies loves herding and if I want to breed border collies it’s an absolute must. As a bonus, I feel that herding is great conditioning for the dogs. They get to do long outruns where they run as fast as they can and they walk slowly and deliberately with sheep. Both things feels like excellent physical conditioning. The only problem I feel is that some of the obedience behaviors conflict with the cues in my agility handling (like some minor blind cross-behaviors and running away from a stationary handler).
Yesterday was a good example of how we train different sports. We started with some herding in the sun on our small training field outside the house. You can see some pictures of our puppies herding here. After lunch, we headed for the indoor arena in Kungsör, where we did obedience and agility. I made a video of Squid’s (and Pogues) dogwalk contact behaviors. When Squid was about a year old, I started working on her running dogwalk. She didn’t seem quite ready for it, so we didn’t do much until she got a bit older. Even then, I didn’t really feel like her performance was as perfect as I wanted it. While I was working on this, I also worked on a nose touch contact for the see-saw. As our debut trials came closer, I decided to introduce a stop on the dogwalk as well. I wanted to feel certain that her contacts would be good and buy myself some time to work on her running contacts during the winter. Introducing the nose touch behavior on the dogwalk was very easy, since she already knew both the behavior and the cue.
At her first trials, she got to do her nose touch contacts. I’ve been working some more on her running contacts with just the down plank, starting with it on the ground and working my way up. She’s a lot easier to train now than she was a year ago. She has much more confidence and drive, and can be recalled away from the toy when she fails without loosing speed in the next repetition. I feel like this made all the difference. I couldn’t do this last winter, so I used to just throw the toy forward as she met criteria. It worked fine, since she is good at running forward without looking back to see the throw. Her running contacts look great now, but I haven’t tried a lot of turning and sequencing. I have tried to mix running and stopping in two sessions and she seems to be able to switch well. She is adding some extra strides while running, probably because of the mixing, but I think that will get better with experience. Here is the video from yesterday:
This week has been packed with dog training. I counted 31 hours in indoor training arenas in four days! We’ve done obedience, agility and herding. Yesterday was finally the day of Squids second agility trial. We entered one trial in December, where we weren’t prepared enough for performing in that environment. Squid gets very excited around other dogs doing agility and I wasn’t really prepared for it (especially not with a sore foot that made me limp around the course). Since then, I have taken every chance to train with others, letting her go crazy and then work on start line behavior, contacts, weaves and handling. All the hard work has really payed off. Squid was completely quiet before her runs (I managed her very carefully), didn’t move a foot on her start lines and ran clean and fast. She came second in the standard run and won jumpers. We’re now one third on the way too the next class. Here is a video of our runs:
Oh yes, I’ve forgotten to share a video of Epic training heel from last week. Since then, I’ve started to walk forward and I’ll show you a new video soon. Here is some puppy heel training:
I have finally been able to make a little video to show you some of my thoughts on teaching a good heel for obedience trials. Heeling is difficult since it is a duration behavior and has many different parts that all need to be good. I split heeling into it’s parts and train one behavior at a time. This blog post is about the basics of heeling – the dog walking with me on my left side with perfect attention, attitude and position. Turns and straight sits is another part that I work on separately. Maybe I’ll write another post about that some time.
When teaching the dog to heel with me, I start by walking backwards and have the dog follow me. Doing this has many benefits, like:
It’s easier for a puppy to follow me when I walk backwards and I can get more rewards to the dog.
It’s easier for me to see what the dog is doing without having to turn and bend towards the dog.
Since it’s not the final setting for the behavior, I’m not worried about shaping one aspect at a time. I would not like to reward the dog for good attention but bad position if I was walking forward. By walking backwards, I can shape a good behavior and be pretty sure that I will get good behavior to reward once I start walking the right way.
I use the walking backwards-heeling for teaching stand, sit and down from heel.
It’s very good to have when training in a distracting environment, as the young or inexperienced dog has better chances of success.
When I start the training, I walk backwards away from the dog and mark and reward all attention the dog gives me. I’m not interested in the dog looking me in the eyes, as that is incompatible with a good heel position. As long as the dog is giving me attention, I will reward it. I keep the treats in my left pocket, or in my right hand (only if the dog can ignore treats in your hand). As i mark the behavior I want, I get one treat from the pocket (or right hand) with my left hand and reward at my left side. In the video, the rewards are pretty calm. This is because my dogs have great position by my left side and because they don’t need to get more active. For most dogs, I would recommend that the dog gets to chase the treat in your hand in a straight line and end up with his shoulder at your left knee. I show this with Squid at 1:05 in the video.
When the dog is giving good attention, I start to look at the dogs attitude. Some dogs need to get more active and with them I will mark and reward things like coming closer to my side, ears up, going from a walk to a trot, tail up, head up etc. I will also make sure that all rewards are active and that the dog has to chase the treat after the click. With some dogs, it’s a good idea to work on how to reward separately, so that the dog knows to come close and steal the treat from your hand on the click before you start training heel.
Other dogs have a little too much attitude. They might be jumping up and down, making noise or touching you too much. With them, you have to do the opposite. Walk a little slower and reward calm, quiet and rhythmic behavior. Stop when you reward and give a few treats for just standing still before you walk again.
When the dog shows great attention and attitude, I start shaping a good position. For a lot of dogs, this comes for free because of good placement of reward on the earlier stages. I want the dog close to my left side, straight in the body and far enough back. Watch the video to get an idea of the finished behavior.
When the dog can do a nice heel while I walk backwards for a few meters, I start to turn around. This is demonstrated by Squid in the video. It is an advantage to have worked on some rear end awareness before doing this, so that the dog is willing to swing his rear end in before walking forward. In the beginning, I will reward the dog as soon as he finds position by my left side when I walk forward.
There is of course a lot more to be said about heeling, especially when thinking of all the problems that might arise. If you have questions or comments, please post them below.
Shejpa and I went to Gothenburg for this years first agility trial. It’s an international trial at a big dog show called “My Dog”. Shejpa ran really well and came in second in jumpers on Friday. We then went on to win the standard run, which gave us our first CACIAG (international certificate). I was really pleased with the jumpers run on Saturday as well, but we only got fifth place. Four world team dogs from Sweden and Denmark was a little bit faster (0.8 seconds to first place). Here are video of our runs:
We have been working our puppies with Maria Hagström (awesome obedience instructor from Sweden) for two days and we’ve had a lot of fun. If you think obedience is boring, take a look at this video. There’s a lot of playing going on, but also a lot of obedience training with high precision, and even sequencing. Do you think the puppies even notice the difference?
With that, I wish you a Merry Christmas! Please leave a comment if you have something on your mind. I’m off to clean the house and prepare for my parents and brothers arrival tomorrow.
