Agility Expert Articles

Training Beep by Toni Dawkins (June/July 2009)

Contacts!!!!

Here we go again, more thoughts on contacts and a big change. If you are bored with contacts you might want to give this a miss as that is all I am writing about this time. Strangely I am not bored at all and am enjoying trying to work out what is best and why. Either I am sad or it is my strange scientific mind which, would be better put to use trying to clone Kite. While I have not managed to do that yet I am constantly searching for better ways to do everything in agility. Right now I am obsessed with the dogwalk (DW).

If you have read my articles you will know what I am trying to do with Beep and the problems I have had. Well now I have made a big decision to train Beep a stop on the dog walk and will try and explain why.

Here first is a list of what I think are the pros and cons of the two methods I teach

Running

Pros:

• Obviously speed
• No need to do ‘training runs' in the ring so every run is completed with the same attitude.

Cons:

• Control or lack of it at the end of the contact
• How do you teach turns without the dog missing?
• How many repetitions do you need to do to make it a habit?
• What do you do in the ring to let the dog know when it is wrong?
• You have to have your own equipment

Stop contact (when I say stop contact I am specifically talking about what I think of as a 2on 2off. E.g. no nose touching, no targeting and two back feet on the contact)

Pros:

• Control at the end
• If you are not able to keep up with your dog then they will wait for you to catch up
• Easy for you to get a good turn
• The behaviour is easy to maintain and correct in the ring
• Less repetition is required for the dog to understand

Cons:

• The waiting for you at the bottom is also a con as you are losing time
• A lot of runs have to be ‘trained' in order for the dog to know ring behaviour is the same as in training.

First why did I even think about giving up on a running DW with Beep? I have been training this for well over a year and I believe that I have done it correctly but its not working as well as I would like. I think this is because:

• Beep's general nature despite all the work I am doing and I am seeing improvements but she is still very aware of what is going on around her and gets worried about the most ridiculous things. This affects the DW because if she is not quite sure she slows up, puts in small strides and even if she keeps the correct running behaviour up is too high on the contact. She loses concentration and forgets what she is doing so when I go to a new venue to train the contact is not so good, she does not get rewarded, hence gets more concerned and it gets worse. I did speak to Silvia Trkman about this and her advice was to let Beep have a reward for anything for a long time, even if she was jumping and it would eventually raise her confidence and she would do the correct behaviour. Unfortunatley being a sad perfectionist I can't go with letting her jump as I am too afraid it will become a habit.
• The reward I believe is the major part of the problem. I have a dog that is hard to motivate so if I call her off her toy she visibly looks unhappy and does the next contact slowly which may then cause another unrewarded repetition. When you train alone it is hard to find a way to reward the contact without calling the dog off if it's not correct. With some dogs this makes them try harder for the toy but Beep gives up. I have an answer for this now but more about that another time.
• I am learning this method too so I have changed a few things as I have gone along and really feel like I have used Beep to test this on and have confused her along the way.
• If she does not do the correct behaviour in the ring I have no way of correcting. Some people take their dog out of the ring but if I did that to Beep it would be the end of the world.
• The amount of repetition you have to do is ridiculous and I often wonder when watching some of the u-tube stuff how much the poor dogs have to go through. Once again Beep cannot cope with repetition but even if your dog can should you be doing it?

All the above are to do with Beep's nature and I feel that I am actually being cruel to keep doing this to her. I think at some point you have to look at what you are doing and be big enough (I am taller than I look) to say when enough is enough. I hate giving up on anything but if it's detrimental to your dog then you have to.

Other reasons:

I have been taking notice of where the DW is in our competitions recently and in virtually every qualifier I have done this year there have been extreme turns or traps after the dog walk. Now even if you manage to teach your running DW with good turns (and no one has yet) it will not save you time over a good, fast stop contact. I am not saying it is slower but about the same. That is because if you have a running DW you have to let the dog know early so it can put in an extra stride to turn, this is obviously slightly slower as one stride more. If you have a stop your dog will go at full speed to the very bottom and then hesitate for the turn but how long your dog stops for is up to you. I actually don't believe that a running DW would be faster than Kite's on a turn. (I have attached a video of a run at Hinckley with a tight turn at the bottom of the dog walk, see what you think. You do need QuickTime installed to watch, the first is the whole run at normal speed and the second is in slow so you can see her contact.) At Olympia Kite has done a DW in 1.5secs which is as quick as most running ones, the only downside as I have said above is that you throw lots of runs to keep this contact perfect. Most running DW's are approx 1.4-1.7secs on the straight but I have not seen a good turning DW to time. It will still be under 2secs and in this video attachment Kite's is under 2secs and I am nowhere near her so I also make up time on the next obstacle.

I am using Kite as the example as her DW is very good but Minx has been timed at 1.8secs and this was just in training so I was not pushing her and she was waiting at the bottom. I think hers would be just as fast when running it.

My point is that with a running contact you will of course win a lot of classes that others are holding their stop contacts in but we have yet to see this in a final such as Olympia or Crufts, in fact in the qualifiers so far the dogs with the running contacts at the moment have been missing on a turn. So is it therefore worth putting your dog through all that repetition? I would say no.

Thank you to Graeme MacGregor for the videos.

A-Frame

Having said all this I am keeping the running a-frame. Beep's DW behaviour has transferred to the a-frame really well. The only problem has been that I assumed it carried over perfectly and did not train on it very much so she recently missed her first one on a turn. She did not get faulted but I believe it was a miss and it gave me a kick so have been training tight turns and slow approaches so speed does not make a difference. This weekend she had three a-frames in competition and all were perfect. I will continue to work on this but not too regularly as again this is all repetition and I don't think it's good for the dogs. I have read blogs that say I have been practising my running a-frame all week as my dog missed one and I do wonder how long those dogs will last. It will be interesting to see. Is the repetition of the whole contact less stress on the dog's body than the stop at speed from a two on two off? No one knows this yet and we will have to watch the dogs to see. From my own training I practise my stop contact using just the bottom of the contact most of the time and do not ‘drill' or over repeat the whole thing. With the running there is no other way to do it but keep running the dog over, rewarding good attempts and not bad ones; you can't even use a lower a-frame as this affects striding.

Seesaw

This has been the easiest to teach and I don't understand why more people have not done it. I used a hoop but not for too long as I did not want Beep to think it's always there and since then she has done it perfectly. I can tell her left and right while she is on it and because of the hoop she always goes to the end before turning. She has never missed a seesaw and if anything as she gets faster the seesaw looks better.

So, I am back to stopping and training my DW in the ring but its great to just run the other two contacts and Beep learnt a stop on the DW so quickly that I had her in the ring after just two weeks. At the moment I am stopping and praising her when she is on it so wasting time but would do that with any young dog. She is already completely independent of me and will run to the bottom regardless of where I am. In my next article I will go through how I retrained from running to stop and show some videos of the process. I never understand why people have such problems with a stop contact as I find it ridiculously easy and even though Beep is not an easy dog it still was with her. This weekend I think she did her best run so far and even though I held her and praised her for stopping on the DW she was only a second of the winner so could have easily won the class. I am not going to stop the holding at the bottom though as I feel she needs to stay in G3 for as long as possible to gain her confidence.

Thought for the month

What is the rush to get our young, inexperienced dogs to G7 as soon as possible?

Why do other people think it's good that some have done this?

I have watched some stunning young dogs this weekend and they are stunning, I don't want to take anything away from them but…….. when others are saying ‘wow, how amazing that the dog is only two years old and G7 already'. I am thinking how awful it is to put so much pressure on these puppies; they should be in Novice grades for at least the first year to gain confidence and for you to put the groundwork in for the future. Of course by this I mean training contacts and rewarding in the ring, not rushing the dog round and telling it off for knocking poles or taking the wrong jump. (Yes I have seen all of this) Then your dog will last longer and have a better longer career, I have seen most of these young, good dogs missing contacts already and this will get worse if you keep pushing. What you do now will make the difference later. Most of these dogs are Beep's age and yes Beep is a very different dog but I don't put any pressure on her at all, I don't rush her and I certainly don't tell her off for anything. I know that when Beep does start moving up the classes it will be because she can cope and her contacts will be solid as she knows exactly what to do. I do think some of it is that people tend to compete with one another to see who is best, and care too much about what other people think. Well luckily I don't care what anyone thinks about little Beep.

You have heard the tortoise and hare story, Beep is the tortoise so watch out.

See you soon

Love Toni and the Tortoise

xx

(posted 18/01/2010)