March is almost gone, and April soon upon us. Today was my last day to do some training with Scoop as tomorrow I head out for AKC Nationals, sadly just to watch not to compete. Last year I was only able to compete in a couple AKC trials, and did not come close to qualifying. I have already shown more in 2011, than I did in all of 2010!

I have been on the road a lot this past month, and more to come. I will be spending only 12 days sleeping in my own bed in April. Some of those away days I will be competing. Scoop will get to attend a few USDAA shows, and I am looking forward to the experience while still a bit anxious about the outcome. I have not trained Scoop on the higher A-frame, and would really prefer not to, however I doubt USDAA is changing their rules for me this month:) so I will be doing some scrambling to introduce the higher frame to him starting next week.

What I have been thinking about this past week with Scoop is duration in behavior training. As I push Scoop to perform longer without reinforcements, I am seeing some of our weaknesses.  I need him to be able to perform multiple accurate contacts in a row without stepping in to reward each one, and have them not fail. I need him to hold his stays in the face of extreme distractions and for him to stay in those positions longer. It is easy to get Scoop to do a 15 minute down stay while watching agility when I step in every few minutes to reward him. So is that five, three minute down stays, or a 15 minute one with 5 reinforcements? I’d like Scoop to be able to do his accurate and animated heelwork on both my left and right for a minimum of a few minutes without me needing to carry a toy with me, or to reward in the middle of the training.

I don’t expect him to train without rewards, but I also know that asking for longer duration on some behaviors at least once in a while, will help me in the long run by teaching him to be able to focus on a job for longer periods of time, like being able to run a couple standard classes over an hour time period with the confidence to know that his start lines, contacts and weaves won’t deteriorate without the almost ever present toy and treat reinforcements he gets when we train.

Some of Scoop’s behaviors seem extremely durable. I can leave him in an open crate at the opposite end of my field, 150 feet away from where I am teaching a lesson. He is quiet, relaxed and never gets out of the cage. At the same time if I call him out of the crate to me on his release word (break) he will come tearing as fast as he is able to me at any given moment. I love that! I want all his behaviors to be this reliable with as much duration as I have time to teach.

The weather was a huge interference again this week in my training plans. I have been home for a week, but only a few of those days have been without rain, and soggy standing water training fields. We have done lots of indoor games and tricks and have continued to polish up his 2o2o behavior so that he is not trying to reach back and target the board instead of nose touching the ground between his feet. We did some sessions on multiple position changes; sit, down, stand, break, stand on your hind legs, drop your head to the ground, and did them in fast multiples without a break before he got reinforced. I did heelwork for minutes at a time and had a great game at the end. I’d have rather been out in the field but we had fun nonetheless.

Tonight I let Scoop run in a class that I taught.  He was a pretty good boy, no bars, good contacts, great serps, perfect start-lines, a little struggle with a tough weave entry, but so did some of the other talented dogs in this masters level class. Mostly the wheels stayed in place and we had a fun time training.

Since we couldn’t train much over the last week we had some fun time in the fields and in my winter pond which comes with the rain, and goes away with the sunny days soon to come. I hope you enjoy all the wet photos and I hope you enjoyed your week with your  champion in training as much as I did with mine.

NJG

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

Scoop is wild, maybe feral. He looks a lot like the photos at the top of this page, only bigger! I was only gone 5 days but he went south on me while I was in the east. I got home from teaching seminars at Clean Run yesterday afternoon and immediately took him to the field to play and train. Maybe I was too tired and he just thought he could take advantage of my obvious deficit in brain power. He barked his way through teeter, frame and weave training. He was still crazed today even though I got him and the rest of the dog family out for some vigorous exercise in the fields a few times.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that even with him acting like a feral beast, he still had a good sit stay. ha! I think taking him off the course 10 days ago at the show, as well as lots of really high value rewards last week in training made some lasting impression on him. ( i can dream can’t i?)

The weather is bad, every jump in the field was lying on its side when I went out to train this afternoon. Wind and light rain on and off then clearing for tonight’s classes which was nice. I have a show this weekend and want to train lots in the next two days. On the list: dog walk and teeter targeting and proofing; start line rewards, 20 A-frames and no more, lateral distance on weaves. Rain rain go away.

I wish I had time to do some of the fun drills I did at the seminar. Maybe next week. I put up five of the drills I did on the first morning. They are somewhat elementary as that is how I like to start a seminar, but there are a few threadles thrown in because it was a masters level group and I just couldn’t resist. They are at the end of this post, maybe you’ll have time to run them even if I can’t!

I put up a new page on the epilepsy study which can be accessed on the front page of the blog on the right side. The email of the researcher, Allison Ruhe is on the page, and the form you will need to send a bloodwork sample is there too. Just click and it will open up.

The ETS study is on track. The researchers are setting up a web page for information about how to participate, and there is more cool stuff to tell you about in the coming days. Thanks for reading, thanks for participating, thanks for your patience.

I hope you have a great week training your beast this week, even though mine is wild, he sure is fun and I sure do love him.

NJG

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