September 24, 2011. I modified yesterday's course and made it into a simple race track.
I tried handling Belle from behind line L1. But once again, she ran much slower moving away from me than when coming toward me. When I ran Dusty, I used L2 as my handler path because my goal with him is to eliminate head checking. Since that went so smoothly with Dusty (relatively speaking), I tried it with Belle. She was faster moving away from me when I worked along the red line, but still not as fast as when coming toward me. What to do?
I decided to go back to square one for the send. I set up a traffic cone and tried using treats to reinforce movement away from me around the cone. There were a couple of problems with this approach.
- My timing of the click wasn't consistent enough to let Belle know what I really wanted, i.e., a fast send to the cone.
- In order to receive her reward, Belle had to return to me. Not the best placement of a reinforcer for the behavior I wanted to work on. (Note: The treat could be tossed indoors to the appropriate spot to reward the behavior. On grass, it's not really an option without a food tube.)
- On some of the sends, Belle moves at a pretty nice speed, but the return is always much faster. You can see her digging in after she makes the turn around the cone.
I finally brought out Belle's favorite toy, a Jolly Ball, and used it to reward the send behavior at a distance. Since I was no longer going for a send and return, I substituted a hoop for the cone. Then I added a second hoop, and finally ended the session with a send through multiple hoops to a distant tunnel.
It's been two or three days since my first two sessions with Max, so I decided to set up three hoops and work a few minutes with him this morning. Unlike my Aussies and Lacie, the Cocker Spaniel, Max does not have live to work with his people. Additionally, he is easily distracted. He no longer has a reliable recall, so I will never be able to take him out to the agility field to work since it is unfenced. However, there is a fair amount of room in the backyard, and I should be able to set up some fairly interesting courses for him as time goes by.
For today's exercise, I set up a three hoop pinwheel. Based on our short warm-up, I decided the second pinwheel was too far out, so I moved it in closer. If Max had trouble with it at that distance, I could have moved the hoops closer together and/or moved a little more deeply into the pocket. My goal when I do a pinwheel is to stay out of the pocket unless I want to do a front cross before the third jump or I'm need to run a longer path so my dog can get ahead of me before I do a rear cross.
Here's the video:
I did a second session with Max. This time I set up two hoops for him. Here's the video:
I was able to persuade my sister-in-law to bring over her American Cocker Spaniel, Lacie, so that I could try working with a dog who has no previous agility training. Lacie is being trained in field work and will be entering her first hunt test at the end of this month. She has been taught to retrieve using a clicker.
Here's the video of Lacie:
A question commonly heard is "How do I train my dog to work away from me?" I thought I might try to answer that question with a series of videos. For my first video, I used Max, my 10 year old Airedale. Max has been retired from agility for many years because I was unable to get him to stay on track when we ran. Max has several novice NADAC titles, but we were never able to earn a Q in open.
Max is not totally unfamiliar with the concept of distance. He is my first agility dog, and my first agility instructor taught her students to handle with distance, not necessarily extreme distance, but certainly you did not run by your dog's side. Also, some layering was including in almost every lesson.
I finally bit the bullet and constructed a set of hoops, so I will be using hoops to work with Max. (I'm also using them to work on increasing Belle and Dusty's distance skills.) Since Max is not familiar with hoops, the first thing I do on the video is shape the behavior I'm looking for. My criteria for Max's hoop performance were minimal: I just wanted him to pass through the hoop. Once he was doing that fairly well, I introduced the command, "hoop," and started working on increasing lateral distance. Lateral distance is the easiest distance to obtain. You simply move a little further away each time. If your dog pulls off the obstacle, you've gone too far. Move in a little closer and try again.
The last thing I am able to do in our short training session is introduce some send distance. I would say this is a fairly novel concept for Max. I think send distance is harder to train for many dogs. Your dog has to be willing to move away from you. A lot of our training involves getting our dog to pay attention to us. Telling them to move forward without us flies in the face of all that training, especially for dogs that aren't particularly possessed of a ton of drive.
