I am so lucky! MY own backyard is a 12, 000 square foot agility field, and I also have another 4000 sf yard on the property where I can set up small courses. My real back yard though is not 150 feet away like the agility yard, it is right out my back door and is a nice little grass circle about 20 feet wide next to a big open cement patio. It is where I do much of my training. I don’t bother to go all the way to the big field. There are classes being held there mornings and evenings and there is no open space as it is all set for real agility training. I go to the closest spot where I can play with my dogs and do all the little work that is so important to my own agility training.

When the dogs are young we do retrieves and recalls and ground work, and as they grow up it is where I have single jumps, short sets of weaves, and short boards. We play and train far away from the real agility yard every day.  Today in the back yard I trained my youngest border collie Pie on 2 and 4 poles which she just started learning this week.

I am lucky that I have the luxury of a full agility field as well as a nice private tiny yard where the real work gets done. In part of our agility field where we have contact drills we had a fun contact setup this week that my husband Jim Basic designed. During my classes this week some of my students struggled on the rear crosses I asked them to try. In a couple spots the rears were necessary because the handlers could not physically get to a front cross. In a couple other situations the rear cross helped cue a tight turn and also allow the handler to get away from the turn as soon as possible. During class I broke down the rear crosses and we practiced just those individual 2 or three jump elements to help with their understanding of not just executing that cross correctly, but to go over the homework I asked them to do to train the rear crosses this week in their own backyards. It is really important that you revisit the elements of a drill or course on which you or your dog struggled or did not feel entirely comfortable.

Sometimes my students draw out these elements of the course, or take photos or videos of the setup with their smart phones. That way it is easy to go home and position the obstacles exactly as they may have been placed in a training lesson or show. If you can’t recreate the setup, you can’t recreate the training needed on that element.

This post should have been done yesterday in participating with the other agility bloggers in sharing the theme of “backyard dogs” but there was a small operator error (ahem) in editing images on my new site. Better late than never? Here are the drills from my BIG backyard and I have indicated the obstacles on the drills that I asked my students to setup this week to train. If you want to read more backyard training blogs, go to http://dog-agility-blog-events.posterous.com/.

I love lessons with the student who is coming this afternoon. She knows exactly what she wants to work on. She is prepared. She has course maps, she might have video all cued up to the run she wants analyzed. Sometimes lessons are in my office instead of the field and we watch her runs, look at the corresponding course maps, and do some failure or success analysis. What worked, what didn’t? She is a student of the system, always trying hard to understand where and when she should be moving or not, and trying to get the timing of her turns just perfect so the dog reads both her positions and motion and has time to respond correctly.

It makes training with her easy and fun. I am lucky to have many great students with lots of different breeds of dogs. I love that they are making an effort to learn what I am standing out there trying to teach them, and that they go home and do some very positive and effective training to the best of their ability.

Some days I wish I had a full time agility instructor telling me what to do. It would not take away my need to make daily decisions about where the holes are, but another perspective is really important at times. For now though I am in charge of the home schooling. Scoop is both easy and hard to train. I am pretty sure though that the difficult stuff just relates to the quality and quantity at times of my training. I like to train some stuff more than others, so guess what, we are good at the stuff I like to train, and we are so so at other stuff I don’t spend as much time on. I love obedience heelwork, and Scoop loves it too.  I like jump drills, so does Scoop.  I love serps and threadles, and I think Scoop has a great understanding of those skills. I need to get my brain in gear to go train contacts, so, guess what? My contacts are good, I want them to be phenomenol, but admittedly I don’t always put the time and energy into them.

I did train frames and dog walks the last two days, and I proofed my weave exits in a couple different training sessions. I stayed away from the fun jump handling  drills in the field and did some grid work with spreads in the small yard. I have been working handling but not simple grids and spreads and I had some bars down over the weekend. I don’t always have the time, nor does Scoop have an unlimited amount of energy to train everything we might consider doing every day. That might be better written by saying Scoop does have the energy but I really doubt that hours of agility training everyday is what my puppy needs. I want him to get exercise and play time that does not include physically taxing agility exercises. I don’t want to break him, he is not a machine I can pay to get repaired.

This past weekend I was at an AKC trial. Scoop did a nice job on open jumpers, but pulled the last bar when I opened my mouth a couple feet before he was going over it. He was curling back to me as well, but I will blame my jaws on the error. I have still not gotten really serious about teaching him to go on at the end of a course at a trial. He does not  know to look for his leash and he is turning back to me in his excitement. I am throwing the toy too much in training rather than leaving it at the end. For many years I would not throw a toy at the end of a course, I always placed it and let the dogs run to it. I did it because I didn’t want the dog to crash on the thrown retrieve at the last jump. Now I seem to have gone the opposite direction. I am throwing way too much. I CAN leave my toy at the end, Scoop won’t run around the jump or crash into it. I just forget to do so.  All the toy control work I did is wasted if I I don’t use it. Starting today I am going to balance up the end of the course work with toys left at the finish as often as I throw.

Here is Scoop’s jumpers course for you to critique:)

And I thought I would share one of Ace’s standard runs, he got another triple Q that day.

Genetic Studies

Katy Robertson and I swabbed every border collie at the trial this past weekend that had not been done in the recent past. We got at least 30 new samples. If you are willing to hand out swabs at a trial, and send them back postage paid by the researchers, we will be farther along the road to getting thousands of DNA samples of border collies for the control group for epilepsy, deafness and the ETS study. If you write to me at powerpaws@aol.com I will see that you are sent a package of swabs and you can join us in helping with the research.

I hope your juvenile agility dog is as much of a training adventure as mine is and that you are balancing up with your training act too.

NJG

I’ve kept my twenty ten resolution to train Scoop daily on 2o2o & nose targeting. Just when I thought we were really making progress, Scoop has decided he wants to be an anorexic. Hormones up=appetite down. I assumed this is the case with my 11 month old boy, but to be safe his vet give him a thorough exam which he passed. I was hoping for some small little disease that a round of antibiotics would cure. I do know the cure for hormones, but it requires a sharp surgical knife!

A week ago Scoop started eating his meals slowly but still trained with great enthusiasm for food. Over the week’s time he decided that he could easily skip a meal or two. His weight was perfect and I don’t want him to lose even a pound. The dilemma is not just getting him to eat enough to stay strong and not lose weight, but to be able to use food for training.

Over the last two days he is just as likely now to eat his treats slowly as well as his meals, and  at times even spitting them back out after he accepts the goodie. He is most likely to swallow a treat after he gets a click. He is programmed to do so after so many thousands of c/t’s in his life.

My normal training procedure is to use high quality meat or dog food as a reinforcement for nose touches. We do touches and clicks and vary the number of nose touches, and while we play a lot, I really depend on being able to do many touches for a food reward. It is quick. Nose touch/click/treat and repeat. After a few we break for play, or intersperse a tug game instead of/or directly following, a treat for the touch.

He is also more likely to take the treat if it is thrown to him. But if the food doesn’t have “click value“, or is moving like a toy, he just might not bother to eat it. So, the training process is changing. I need more behavior for less food reward, and I need higher quality responses for one great game of tug or a retrieve. That means I really need to be careful that I get a great touch before the release and instead of doing 100 nose touches, I might do 10. After a great strong touch, I say break-get-it, and I toy toss or tug with him.  Sometimes I ask for multiple nose touches, and then use the toy. This takes a lot longer than just handing a tidbit, and he is getting more rewards off of the target than on it.  If I throw the toy, he needs to return to me and either tug or go out for another retrieve reward. If we tug, even a very short session is at least 5 seconds long before I feel that it is fair to ask him to release the toy and do another behavior.

The moral is that I am being VERY careful to mark only the hardest nose touches, as the cost of the behavior for me is time and both Scoop’s and my energy.  Whether we are training nose touches or tricks, the reinforcement procedure is similar. He is having lots of fun though at my expense, and maybe the results of more toy training will be stronger and better behavior.

If so, then why not do more of this training whether he is eating voraciously or not.  He is training excitedly as the percentage of play greatly exceeds the length of time doing actual behaviors. I am also going to experiment with different foods, and larger quantities of food for each click. I am pretty sure Scoop is in hormone city right now, and I sure hope he get’s out of there soon. I’m an inpatient sort of person, the testicles will be gone soon if I decide the source of the anorexia is indeed from between his legs:)

I hope your puppy is still happily training for treats, and I hope mine is back on the chow wagon soon.

NJG

I am just home from the European Open Agility competition which was held this past weekend in Arnhem, The Netherlands. It was at the Olympic site called Papendal which is not far from Amsterdam. The competition was incredible and Ace and I earned the bronze medal, yahoo! My team with Elicia Calhoun, Susan Cochran and Ann Zarr  finished in 6^th place out of 84 teams. There were 358 large dogs in the competition. Some of the best handlers in the world were there. Greg Derrett, Silas Boogk (last years Champion) Sylvia Trkman, Dave Munnings from England and the list goes on and on. Ace was only ¾ of a second off of the spectacular winning run. We ran in the middle of the pack and our time held for the rest of the class until the last couple dogs. Silas ran second to last and missed an a-frame, or he would have beat us. Still his time was only a quarter second faster. I am thrilled with Ace and can’t wait to go back next year to the Czech Republic where it will be held to see if we can do it all over again! Ace does not have as much ground speed as a lot of the big dogs we competed against, but he is well trained and has incredibly tight turns. My time on the finals course was fast in great part because of those turns.

Jim took good care of Scoop and he did not go feral in my absence. He didn’t seem to forget any of his training after a week of fun and games without me. His left and right turns are still spot on, and all the other skills we have trained over the last two months are just as strong as ever.

While I was traveling I thought a lot about what I wanted to train when I got home. Being at an international competition is exciting and inspiring. I look forward to the day that Scoop and I get to run agility and I hope we will be good enough to be compete internationally. There were a lot of missed contacts that I saw over the course of the EO competition. Some of the best teams in the world were kept from the finals and from the podium because of missed dog walks, frames and teeter flyoffs. I am committed to training a running frame with Scoop, but not a running DW. I have seen too much inconsistency in running DW performances to make me want to have one. And, I am not getting any younger! The thought of needing to beat Scoop to the bottom of each DW leaves me breathless.

Today I started working on one of the skills which I want in place to train a running frame. I got out my treat’n’train and placed it on the ground. I walked forward with Scoop at my side towards the tnt and activated the remote as he looked forward towards the machine. The machine emits a beep like a clicker. I want Scoop to move towards the machine straight without looking at me. He already is familiar with the tnt so this part of moving to the machine without looking at me was easy. Then I took the machine to the field to do it again.  I put two short boards (36 by 12 inches) together side by side flat on the ground, as I don’t have a flat 36 inch square board to work on yet. I placed the tnt about 6 feet forward from the end of the boards.  I moved forward with Scoop at my side and as he walked on the boards I used the remote to mark him walking over the boards and looking forward not at me. As I clicked the remote he moved towards the machine to eat the couple pieces of kibble which fall into the bowl.  We are just walking not running and I haven’t decided how quickly I want to progress through the next flat work steps. For now I will be teaching him that moving over the boards smoothly and looking forward will earn him clicks and cookies. I won’t click if he jumps, and I don’t want him to look at me, and I do want him to move through the middle of the board. For now that is the only criteria. Using a tnt as part of A-frame training was suggested by Olga Chaiko who has a pretty spectacular running frame on Scoop’s dad Yankee. (Who won the team jumpers class at EO by the way!)                    

Scoop, and Ace and I are headed out on a road trip tomorrow to Southern California to teach for a few days. I am looking forward to being in a new location with Scoop so that I can spend time training away from home as he has not been off the property now for 10 days. I hope that you have as much fun training your pup this week as I know I am going to have with mine.

 NJG