http://www.clickeragility.blogspot.com

…that is: I love the foundation after it’s trained

The other day I was helping my father in law with his puppy. He’s had dogs before, but the last one lasted almost fourteen years, so it’s a long time since he has dealt with a puppy. In addition he’s got a quite challenging puppy, so he’s very happy to get advice. One of the things I want to show him is that a lot has happened with training over the years. To demonstrate how efficient shaping can be, I picked up my own youngster, who is ten months now, and decided to teach retrieving for competition retrieving. Boy, was that a fun session!

I finally realized what a good foundation I have been working on with this dog. Everything worked perfectly on the first try! After ten minutes, he picked up a rolled up newspaper, came back, waited for my signal, and then dropped it in my hand. When I taught my other dog the same thing it took a week… All we need is a bit of proofing and perfection, and it’s an exercise ready for competition. Not that I probably will bother to do the last bits of it, since I’m not too interested in obedience competition, we did this only to demonstrate methods. My father in law was really impressed and, frankly, so was I!

The method I’m using is basicly chaining the behavior backwards. That means starting with rewarding interest, biting and then holding the item. I then proof the holding to the point where I can dangle a treat in front of the dog’s nose and he knows if he drops that thing the treat will disappear, so he waits for my signal (which is first a yes, then swapped for a “release”). I then add the criteria of the dog sitting before getting to drop the item. When that’s done, retrieving from a distance is usually not an issue. It’s so much fun already, that none of my dogs so far has had any trouble running to get it. Last thing is the dog sitting, me trhowing, dog waiting and then running to get it. That’s easy if you have a good sit command and the dog understands not to go before you release (Orkan knows that form throwing toys and running to get them, and agility starts). Then you switch the release word with “retrieve” or whatever you say in english, and the thing is done!

What I realized during my session with Orkan is that he has such great understanding of how training works! With Storm I had to work for a while on biting and holding, but Orkan already has an understanding of biting stuff that I hold in front of him, because of the shaping I’ve done with tug toys. It was a bit harder for him to keep holding it when I let go, but that was solved by another thing he knows from before. When I close my hand with the treat in it, he’s wrong and needs to change his behavior or improve his position. When I open it, he’s right, but needs to freeze until I tell him he can get it, or I give it to him. That way I could easily give him the message that the holding was right, and he needed to keep doing it in order to get the reward. Easy! When I dropped the newspaper on the floor, he had an easy time picking it up, but when I threw it further away, he first stayed where it had landed, patiently holding it. That was also an easy thing to solve, I simply showed him my open hand, which he knows from nose touch contact training, and he came running. I wouldn’t use that nose-touch more than a few times, since he has already learned to put toys in my hand that way, and then he doesn’t need to wait for a release command before dropping the toy, in contrast to the sitting down and waiting. But it came in handy that one time to put him on the right track of coming back to me! I also used the crate games to have him wait while I throw and give him the command, since his sit is not perfect yet

Training is so much fun when it works!

Background and general stuff

• Susan Salo’s jumping technique system is based on the goal of teaching the dog to jump independently of the handler, regardless of what we do (not regardless of handling, but we don’t want to have to tell them when to take off etc). Aka “the job of jumping”

• It’s very important that the dog learns to jump on all kinds of surfaces, gravel, mats, grass etc, all kinds of surfaces we expect to ask the dog to jump on in competitions.

• Good jumping promotes speed to, but most importantly: the dog’s health. We all know numbers of dogs who had to retire early because of arthritis, calcifications, etc

• Bad structure of the dog is not as bad as it could have been, as long as the dog learns how to use their body. But dogs with different things like very short bags, poor angulation etc, have a harder time learning how to use their body in the best way. Their backs tend to stiffen up.

• The exercises are set for the dog to try, feel and learn what feels right. The right thing is supposed to feel good, the wrong things to feel awkward.

• Re-training for experienced dogs with a patterned jumpng style is like folding your hands the wrong way.

• No speed into the exercises sets the dog up for sucess, it makes him work better.

• When you give the dog a new exercise he should try different ways to deal with it. If the dog doesn’t, he’s likely to be scared or stressed, or dogs in retraining tend to have the same patterned way to deal with things. Then reduce the height.

• To jump well the dogs need good core muscles, which most dogs don’t have. The bones in the shoulder are not connected, there’s just muscle and ligaments holding it together. to train core muscles: different exercises with statick balance or extremely slow movement.

• After training jumping technique you should walk the dog in a nice trot (quite slow) for 30 minutes. That helps them to be fresh the next day.

• No correction for refusals or dropped bars! This is a message to us about the level being too high. Reduce the difficulty and try again.

• When the dog is not heard in the grid (feet on the ground should make as little sound as possible) he is well balanced. Loud banging shows too much weight on the front legs.

• After at least a year of jumping technique training you can start adding difficulty to the grids by walking towards them, running, coming at an angle etc.

• Reward the dog for thinking!

• All kinds of balancing work is good for core muscles

• Sitting ON the hind legs, not on the butt or sitting crooked, mean the dog already have the weight back. The spring is loaded, and the dog is set up for success.

• All the grids are rewarded by something in the end. Handler doesn’t move (thtat’s really advanced).

• Never put jumping and sequencing together until the dog is good at both. Work handling with the bumps until then. Bumps just equal an extended stride, and don’t produce flat, bad style in the same way as low jumps would have.

• Evaluating distance applies to all kinds of obstacles. Put them in the end of the distance grid, even weaves, contacts etc.

• Importance: 1- fun. 2 – solve problems on their own

• Training easy things is putting money in the bank. Hard stuff, like difficult exercises or trialing, is taking money out. You need to keep making deposits!

• Good jumping? Look for movement in the dog’s back. It should flex upwards.

• Bumps make any learning easier. Remember to do it all on different surfaces!

• For some dogs, height intervienes with the technique.

Skill set needed for the jumping dog

1 – Correct path

• Short, fast, safe => cost efficient

• The handler needs to tell early enough. In sequencing, the absolutely latest point to give the dog info about where to go is one stride before take-off. Usually they need this info 3-5 obstacles before. Try to give them the big picture, 3-5 obstacles being one line. Greg Derrets handling system takes care of this.

• As long as the dog is healty and well taught, they should always turn close to the wing. V-shaping (pushing the dog out to create a better turn later on) should never be done, as long as it’s not for health reasons. When the dog is trained right, he should be able to figure out the best path himself, without our shaping of his line.

2 – Distance evaluation

• Implies both real distance and the ground surface

• The dog needs to know their own limits by technmique, strength, balance etc

• the dog is able to save time by eliminating extra strides when not neccecary, a large dog can for example bounce a 5 meter distance when well trained.

• When the dog knows all the aspects and they have the confidence, they save the right number of strides. We don’t.

• Distance exercises are very important for young dogs, they develop all along and new limits are set.

3 – Correct take-off place

• This is the place where the dog makes the weight shift etc to take off

• The jump should be in the middle of the dog’s jump arc.

• Huge oxer: the dog needs to go closer to take off in order to make the whole thing

• Normally the dog finds it nicely.

• How trained? Manipulate with distance grids

• Fear of jumping? (pain) or afraid of height can screw up the take off place descisions

4 – Weight transfer

• This is very, very important!

• Dogs that are trotting or staidng has 60-80% of their weight on the front legs. They are front heavy creatures! Made worse for those with big ears etc etc.

• If the dog looks at you, this gets a lot worse

• In the air the dog should keep its weight ofer the spring that gave the push into the air (legs, mostly hind)

• Skill comes from muscle, function (body), anxiety, take your time.

• Oxers make the dog load their weight to the hind

• Banging to the ground (hearing the landing) means the dog is poorly balanced. Injury risk!

• Exercises that look difficult (the dog’s perception, not ours, f.ex. prolonged crosses, not height!) makes the dog shift their weight better, since they think they need to perform to make it.

• After a weekend of triallyng all dogs are out of balance. Sequencing makes flat, bad jumping. All dogs need re-balancing every week at least.

• Injuries to the hind legs or lower back will ruin the weight shift.

• The back needs to be rounded in the air! This is harder for square dogs with short backs.

5 – Angle of elevation

• Steep angle means the dog needs a lot of weight shift. They need to figure that out, vice versa more flat jumping.

• No legs, ears etc should be sticking out of the immaginairy tube around the dog when jumping.

6 – Height

• Constant heiht on the jumps leads to no thinking and then patterning. Bad!

• Always vary the height in sequences with 10-20 cm lower and 10 cm higher than the ideal height for your dog’s size.

• Jump low the first year of jumping, but have the high bar there every now and then, to make them think and not go into flat jumping patterns.

• Height introduction for young dogs until approximately two years: only occasional high ones.

• The only way to really go wrong with all the exercises is to add height.

• All new stuff, also height, should be introduced as the end of a distance grid.

7 – Rebalancing

• If the back is convectual, shaped as a downward arc, the dog has pushed off with the front paws, and the landing will be loud

• The back should be curved upwards!

• Re-balancing promotes both speed and safety, since it reduces the strain on the dog, especially the front shoulders, and it enables the dog to push off forwards with full force directly after the landing.

• If the first step is made to save the nose from crashing into the ground, the push will be really crappy

• The dog needs to land head up, rising its head after the jump apex (top of the arc), and do the weight shift in the landing, then pushing forward immediately.

• Good rebalancing comes for free when everything else is in place, so it can be seen as a kind of symptom of other stuff.

Exercises

• One jump
  Normal jump or an oxer. Bump in front, 4 ft away for small dogs. If the jump is high, move the bump away up to 6 ft, 9 for large dogs. The dog sits close to the jump. One step, bump, then bar. Spider is a kind of one jump exercise, designed to help the dog jump right. During the weekend Vappu used normal bars lying on the jump towards where the dog is coming from as some kind of the same effect, the dog lifts his feet at the v-shaped bars and then makes a take-off between them. Hard to explain, see for yourself…

• Basic grid
  Work for collection. 4-5 jumps wit bump in front. 4 ft distance for small dogs, bump 2 ft away. 6 for L dogs (3 for startbump). Jump height: 20-25 for L dogs, 10 for small. Usually same height, but jump 2 and 4 can be higher than 1, 3 and 5. Or some bumps, some jumps, but always bump, low, high, low, high and so on. Variations: move the jumps sideways to both sides so the dog needs to think a bit more, or turn them a bit, every second one each way. Bars can be crossed, or leaning to the side, or they can be slight oxers. Slice is also a kind of basic grid, only the jups are turned sideways to the same side.

• Progressive grid
  Distance is bigger for every jump. Teaches extension. Vary this and basic grid. BG is difficult after progressive. Extension requires muscle. Landing/take-off should be in the middle between the jumps, that means the dog has understood his limits and requirements. Heights like basic grid.

• Distance evaluation grid
  Startbump, then three jumps like in a basic grid. Then distance to the last jump between 6 and 18 feet for small dogs, 9-21 for large. The dog has to decide weather to add an extra stride before the last jump. Bump can be added to help this descision, but not closer to any of the jumps than 4 (6) feet, so 8 (12) feet is the minimum distance you can add a bump in. Change the disthance with one foot for every repetition, either longer or shorter. This makes the dog think.

• Height exercise
  Use a distance grid, then add height to the last jump. Start with a bump, then a bar over the bump, then just the bar. This can be done with any obstacle, use distance grids whenever indroducing something new, like oxer, length jumps etc.

• Slice
  Like a basic grid, only each jump is moved a little to the side, so that the whole thing is shifted sideways, or seen in another way, it’s a straight line with the bumps turned a bit. It’s important to do this grid to both sides, and that means changing it. Doing it backwards doesn’t matter. The dog should use a left or right gallop depending on which way you’re training. Look for static patterns. Make the angle more steep when the dog gets better at it. Slices go before bend work. All bumps!

• Bend work
  Advanced and extremely hard work for the dogs. The handler is standing still in the turn, not moving the feet. Do this grid three time one way, then three times the other, then time each way to see if there’s any improvement, that’s the dog has learned something. Then in the end do the number 2 and 3 jumps as a straight line to straighten out the dog again. If the dog has a hard time turning close you can lift the far end of the bar to make it more obvious.

Core muscle training

• Core muscles are not seen, they’re inside the dog. The core muscles on the pelvis, the back and stomack, and the shoulders are important to be able to jump correctly. Many dogs lack enough of these muscles, and will compensate by for example stiffeing their back.

• They are strengthened by balance exercises, static exercises and very slow moving, like walking only one leg at a time.

• One exercise is to gently push at the dog with your fingers, different places. Put the hind legs on some books to work the front and vice versa. The dog leans back on your fingers to keep his blance. Start with two repetitions every other day, then work gradually up to 30 reps every other day.

• Another exervise is to lift the dog’s paws, one at a time. The dog then moves his weight to the other legs. After some time you can start lifting two legs at a time, diagonally.

• When you have been working these exercises for a while, you can let the dog stand on a soft pillow, that makes the balancing harder.

• Stretching neck: bent the dog’s neck to the side, using a treat by the dog’s front shoulder. Dog sitting. Move the treat down to the paws, the head following.

• Rounding spine: teach or lure the dog to put his nose between his front legs, stretching his back.

• Walking slowly in tiny circles (no fast spinning!) is also good for the back. Alternatively you can teach the dog to touch his hind hip wit his nose.

• Hip core muscles can be trained by teaching the dog to sit between your legs, with their legs under his butt, the sit down. Or by backing in between two boxes (narrow) and then sit, stand, sit, stand between them.

The first one is nervousness. Like most pinschers she has a tendency to bark at anything that might be a little scary. We noticed that a lot the first day she was at our place, she ran to the door or window whenever she thought she might have heard a sound, trying to scare whatever to go away. After she settled in a bit it got better, but still I want to see if I can help make her a more confident dog. Mostly the method is about counterconditioning. Scary things = treats. This way I hope to give her some happy expectations whenever she gets nervous, and have her turn to me instead of barking her head off, trying to make it go away. I went to a park in a city with her, and it seemed to work very well. Whenever we met a distraction I got her attention and she kept seeking me to see if I could provide something better than the scary man, dog, etc. I used the same kind of strategy with one of my own dogs, but that was more in benefit of contact training. He learned that he wasn’t going to get to run after that dog anyway, so he might just as well behave and look in my direction – something nice might happen.

Another issue is her food aggression. It applies to any kind of situation with a resource that might just turn out to be valuable to her. Like when my boyfriend dropped an id-card on the floor the other day. My dogs certainly defend themselves if someone tries to steal a very tasty treat from them (that i do understand!) but they don’t try to kill anyone within three feet of anything of any kind of value. She is obviously not very used to living with other dogs, which is understandable enoug since she lives only with her human famliy.

One of the things she is getting used to is that in our house there is always boring cow-skin bones all over the place. If she tries to defend one, my dogs will just walk away and find another – it’s not a high value bone to them since there are others in the next room. This seems to work out fine, she can live with a bone in the room and still relax. Improvement! Today she even played with Orkan and an old sock, they had a great time without too much teeth and barking.

She is also working on sitting with my dogs in front of me, being fed when behaving nicely. A bit difficult for her when one of the other dogs move, like when they perform a trick, but so far we’ve had no accidents. When she acts out she just gets to leave the situation, no treats for her. I’m going to train some crate games with at least Shanti and Orkan, maybe even with Storm, to work on releasing only one dog at the time. My dogs are very good at “misunderstanding” release cues when I release the other, something Susan Garrett’s post on “table trading” gave me a bit of inspiration on. This will provide a training situation suitable for the treat acceptance. If she acts out, she’ll have to go back in her crate, simply like a time-out.

We also try to get rid of her barking to achieve just about anything. Like when we stop the car she is convinced that the only way to get out of the crate is to bark. Hard nut for her to crack, that we leave her alone ’till she’s calm and quiet

It might not sound like it, but Shanti is really a very nice dog! If she had a bit more furr and ability to move in snow, I might just have stolen her… Hee hee! Thanks to Laxmi and Sveinung for giving me the opportunity to learn a lot about this little girl and dog training for some weeks. Hope you’re enjoying your vacation!

But it still sometimes occurs during shaping sessions, when the reward is really high quality (food in his case) and the criteria is a little difficult, making the reward frequency a bit low. Apparently, his stress level gets too high for him to handle, and he bursts out in loud, high pitched ear-splitting yells.

Simply waiting has helped, and it happens less frequently now, but it’s kind of hard not to say or do anything when that sound is distroying your hearing, if you see? This has made me (more or less by accident) avoid the situations when he starts yelling, by keeping the reward frequency high. And still, when he’s almost one year old, it still happens sometimes. So I figured he needs some awareness of his own stress levels. His little brain rooms a lot of stress, so he might need that awareness for later occasions

My solution is to give him time-outs (go to your crate, and lay there for a little while. Along with this I give him a verbal marker, in english it would be somthing like “oups”. I think the verbal marker is important in this kind of training, since time-outs don’t give him a specific message on what he did wrong. He also gets a second of time to do something different while my descision about giving him the time-out is being put into action. The first session I saw the potential of him associating stretching (a trick he has learned) with the time-out, since the yelling tendend to happen when he jumped out of a stretch.

Now, it seems to work. I am very happy about that! I still keep his reward frequency high, but now it’s not to avoid stress, it’s rather because he is an extremely fast thinker, doer and learner. When things don’t happen in time, he learns something else, or gets a bit confused. It’s time to start pushing it a bit, to provoke his frustration. Dog training is fun when it works!

This one is of our “water bowl projeckt”, to teach him some body awareness and also build some muscle:

More body awareness, some time consumption on a ferry ride:

Orkans strategy on how to get the toy before Storm, who’s bigger and stronger:

Status update on his tugging, two months ago:

Our first really really great training, the day that the tugging was finally fun enough for Orkan to really work for it:

Indors tricks and sit&stay training on a rainy day:

Agility training:

Play bow/stretch and applying it’s your choice for static exercises:

That’s it so far. If you watched these, you know where we’re at… Sort of. If I had the time and energy, I’d translate some of my past norwegian blogging into english, but hey – it’s christmas. Now it’s time for some marzipan and chocolate fun

Merry christmas to all of you!