Epic recently turned 15 months and is starting to do some big dog stuff!
Full height dogwalk:
He is doing well with his running contacts and I have started to work on turning after. The biggest problem is that he often tries to go for three strides and then is high in the contact (and sometimes misses). He is also doing full height a-frame in a nice way.
12 straight weave poles:
Weaving has been a lot of fun to teach him. He learned extremely fast and I could progress fast. Good thing since I’ve been away a lot the past month and also have put a lot of energy into his contacts.
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:
This fall, I am presenting my first ever online class. The class is open for 6 working participants and 20 observers. As a working participant, you will follow the class with your own dog (one dog per working spot) and post video for the entire class to see. I will of course comment on your videos and help you through all the lessons. The observers get to read and watch all material from me, watch all the posted videos, ask questions and join in on the discussions. This is a foundation class, much like the one we do IRL at home. It will be great for anyone wanting to get the most out of reward based methods. There is also the option of buying access to just one of the lessons. With that option, you can read the text and watch all videos, but questions and discussion is restricted to the participants and observers that follow the whole course.
The class will run from October 3rd to January 9th. A new lesson with text, video and homework will be posted every other Monday, for a total of 7 lessons. Every lesson has a theme, these are the themes that we will cover in the 7 lessons:
Play! How to get your dog to tug with you and how to use playtime to teach your dog invaluable lessons for future training.
Self control. How to use rewards to increase control and gain clarity when working with the dog.
Shaping. Getting you and your dog started with shaping, or fine tuning your shaping skills. How to plan, execute and evaluate your sessions and bring fun into shaping.
Heelwork. How to get your dog to heel with focus, precision, attitude and duration. Great for any dog, even if you’re not planning on doing obedience trials, as it teaches the dog many valuable lessons.
Stand, sit and down. Learn how to teach the “jumping stand”, how to get fast and precise behavior, generalization and a dog that will keep the positions no matter what. Also great for any dog, not just obedience dogs.
Retrieve. Build from the play we worked on in lesson one and teach your dog a fast, precise retrieve where the dog never chews on the dumbbell. Our method of teaching the retrieve is different, fun and very effective.
Stimulus Control. Adding cues to behaviors, teaching the dog to wait for the cue and to discriminate between cues. Every clicker trainer needs this lesson!
What you need to sign up:
Computer with good internet connection
To read and write in English
If you want to work with your dog in the class, you’ll also need:
Video camera and a video editing program
YouTube-account where you upload your videos
Sign up now! There’s only 6 working spots and 20 observer spots in this class.
You will receive log in-information when you have payed via PayPal. If you already made an account here, let me know and I’ll give you access to the classroom.
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:
Thomas has been away teaching in Norway for a week now and I’ve been home alone with my dogs. I haven’t had much teaching to do this week, just one evening class, so we’ve been training a lot. We’re fortunate enough to have two indoor dog training arenas within about an hours drive. They are warm and have turf footing, which is a life saver when it’s cold and icy outdoors. We also have a riding arena where I have my agility equipment just 5 minutes from our place, but it’s not quite the same. I’ve been training a lot of obedience the past month and both Squid and Epic are doing well. Squid will do her first obedience trial in march and I feel very well prepared for that. We’re working on a lot of sequences with 3-6 exercises in a row with only one reward at the end. I’ve also started to add more and more distractions to the sequences, trying to find new things that could distract us at a trial. I will keep doing that, but now that everything works well as a whole, I’m also planning to take care of some minor details that will make our performance even better. My goal for the trial is to be so well prepared that there will be no surprises.
Squid, tired from four hours of training in one of the indoor arenas
Epic is mostly working on heeling, the stand (which i promise I will talk about in the blog soon), sitting still with distractions (people coming up to him is one of the hardest, he is such a happy dog, just like his sister) and always retrieving his toys to me in full speed. We’re also working on some tricks and agility foundation behaviors, like circle work, nose touches and puppy jump grids. He is so much fun to work with – always keen and focused, but also very good at relaxing in his crate when I work with one of the other dogs or watch others work. He will be 6 months old this week.
Epic, running in the snow at home
Shejpa doesn’t do obedience, but I’m working on some stimulus control and standing still waiting for a cue with her, something she’s not very good at. We’re also training agility, like today when we went to a riding arena where our dog club has training every Sunday. This year, my goal with Shejpa is to get a more consistent performance in trials. She really has ups and downs and I’ve never really figured out what makes the difference. I’m starting to think that the correct warm up is very important for her and I’m trying out different warm ups and record keep so that I can get optimum arousal and focus in every run. So far I feel I’m on the right track and I’m very excited to do more trials so that I can tell if I am or not.
Crazy cocker spaniel <3
Right now, I’m preparing for two days of obedience with our favorite instructor Maria Hagström. I’m really looking forward to it and I’m sure I’ll have something to tell you about it later this week.
