The New and the Deja Vu

My goodness. Between keeping Hokey's agility skills up and prepping her for a few trials, getting Ollie and Poppy prepared for their upcoming nose work trials, and working on Sprout's foundation training, I feel like I do nothing but dog stuff whenever I'm not at work. Not that I'm complaining!

Hokey's running dw has become pretty consistent

The New 

On Labor Day, Hokey and I went back into the ring for the 2nd time after a few months break since her successful first trial at the end of May. I decided to give UKI a try. I like their jump height cut-offs and A-Frame heights for my little dogs. Also, since Hokey has some issues with the table (the down seems uncomfortable for her, probably because she is deep chested and has no hair or body fat for padding), I like that the table is only an optional obstacle in Agility (aka Standard) and, when it is used, it's a no-count down and go. Seems like a fair compromise. UKI courses are international in flavor and somewhat technical, except for the Speed Stakes class, which, as the name indicates, is supposed to be more about speed. I like challenging courses, so really like what UKI has to offer as a possible alternative to USDAA. I also like that you can go into the ring with a toy and, at the startline, declare your run to be "Not For Competition" and then just use your time in the ring to train and have fun with your dog. I have a feeling I'll be taking advantage of that with Sprout in the future.

Sprout - proud serial decapitator of Kongs

Like I mentioned in my previous post, Hokey has some distraction issues to work through. Her first class was Speed Stakes and that went pretty well. Just one small distracted bobble at the 4th jump, but I was able to bring her around easily and continue on. Definitely not her fastest run, but it was pretty good considering how green she is and that she hasn't worked in distracting environments very much. It was good enough for a Q and 1st place. 

Next was beginner Jumpers (with weaves). It had moments brilliance and moments of not-brilliant-at-all due to her getting distracted. It didn't feel good at the time, but when I went back and watched it, it wasn't as bad as I thought. 

Her last run was Agility (standard). It was a pretty nice run. Much better than I thought it would turn out looking at the course on paper. She stayed with me the entire time right up until the last jump, where she left me for a second. I got her back quickly, but in UKI running past the last jump is 5 faults (refusals don't count at the beginners level at any other obstacle except the last) and you need a clear round to qualify. She was a little tentative on the contact equipment, but again, that's just a matter of getting her out and experience.

Overall, I was pretty happy with how she did her 2nd time out. 

Here is a clip of Hokey and I practicing this past week. The hard rear cross and table performance weren't her best of the night, but at least she hit her A-Frame contact, which is something she'd been very naughty about during her previous runs and her teeter performance looked pretty great too.

 

The Deja Vu

It seems like I just went through all this foundation training stuff with Hokey. In fact there are many posts from over the past year that chronicle her progress. Now I'm doing it all over again with Sprout. The difference is that Sprout is on the accelerated plan. I can't stress enough how important taking the time to build a solid foundation is in agility training. This dog is exceptional. He has lots of drive and learns everything so quickly. 

Sprout demonstrating that he has *a little bit* of drive

This is a demonstration of what an eager worker he is. Here he is before I got into position for some one-jump work and then after I finished the exercise. He is far too eager to begin and certainly isn't ready to quit. Every time I let him out in the yard these days, he's out there taking jumps of his own accord. It's hard to believe that when he came to me just 2 1/2 short months ago, he wasn't even interested in passing between a set of jump standards with no bar set. 

I decided I might as well teach Sprout to weave. 
He went from this first introduction to a single set of 2x2s:

To 6 poles:

To 12 poles:

All in exactly 2 weeks. (See my back-to-back posts on weave training for a step-by-step account of the training method used to accomplish this).
And here he is working serpentines for the first time and then incorporating them with his newly learned weave skills in a layering exercise:

I'll be starting Sprout's contact training soon. I've already begun working his end behavior on the teeter. (For a more detailed explanation of "The Bang Game", refer to my post on Hokey's teeter training). Soon he'll be ready to start working the teeter as an obstacle.

So that's the report from here. I have Hokey entered in 3 runs at a CPE trial this weekend and then the following Saturday is Ollie's big day - our first nose work trial! I just received the information on the location (they don't send the actual location to you until a week or two before the trial) and the run order. I'm not entirely happy with our position in the run order - last in our group. In order to prep for this, I've been putting a few hides out in the morning and letting them sit all day. Then, when I get home from work, I immediately put Ollie in his harness and have him search. So far, so good. He's a little slower at the elevated hides that have been out all day, so we'll continue to work at building his speed. I've had a couple of odor swabs cooking in a box for the past 2 days. He's lightning fast at finding that, so I'm encouraged for the container search part of the trial. I think his weakest element is interior searching, so we'll be working hard on that one for the next week. Poppy's  nose work trial is at the end of October. Wish us luck! I'll be writing about our experience soon. 

The nose work dogs resting up for their big trial debuts

 

Weaves 102x2 (or 6)

So two days ago I wrote a blog post with video clips detailing all the steps I've taken in Hokey's weave training starting from the very beginning all the way up to the point where I was ready to add the 3rd set of 2x2s for a total of 6 weave poles. Then the WORST happened! It snowed.

Okay...so it wasn't the worst thing in the world. Despite my lamenting the ceaseless winter, it actually melted quickly and I was out there the very next day (yesterday) to resume our training. And that meant adding the 3rd set of 2x2s.

I introduced the new set by placing it a few feet in front of the set of 4 poles. Then I ran her through a couple of times from both sides. Gradually I moved the new set closer and closer to the other 4 poles.

Eventually I joined the new set with the old set of 4 poles and that's when the magic happened. Suddenly I had a dog that was weaving 6 poles!

So now that I have a weaving dog, what's next? Well, I want her to have independent obstacle performance regardless of my position or motion (or lack thereof). So we will continue to do some exercises with me sending her from various locations. For example, one thing I'm working on for independence is to send her ahead of me. We struggled a little with this at first; she would do the first 3 or 4 weaves then stop and look at me because she was unsure. Most dogs, particularly green ones, find lack of handler motion a bit perplexing. But being deaf, Hokey is probably a little more reliant than the average dog on my motion and/or keeping me in visual range. But we worked through it. Here she is sending ahead of me to complete the weaves. The fact that she is willing to go on ahead of me to complete them is a huge step. The confidence will come.

I will continue to do some Around-the-Clock exercises to work on difficult angles of entry, as seen here:

I will also be introducing motion and handling into the picture at this stage. Once Hokey is confidently performing 6 weaves independently with and without motion and consistently hitting her entries from all angles of approach, I will introduce a 2nd set of 6 poles and work up to the full set of 12.

Weaves 101 (or 2x2)

Searching for spring

I had put off training Hokey's weaves for several months because of winter. In my opinion, to properly train weaves and progress quickly, you need to be able to work a little bit each day. Winter brings cold temps and the possibility of varying amounts of snow and, since I don't have the space in my house to set up 6 weaves, never mind a full set of 12, I decided to put it off until early March thinking I'd be safe weather-wise by then. After all, last year by mid-March, it was 80 degrees and I was mowing my yard. Looking out my window today on the 25th, with the snow coming down and a couple of inches already on the ground, I'm questioning the wisdom of my decision. However, I've already invested a little over 2 1/2 weeks into the process. Hopefully this will melt quickly and not affect our momentum and the progress we've achieved thus far. And I guess if I can't be out there training, I can at least write about it.

I had great success using the 2x2 method of weave training with Poppy a couple of years ago, so decided to use it again to train Hokey. However, with Poppy, I had used the "older" method where the 2x2s are set at angles and gradually moved to the straight position -- like channel weaves. This time, I decided to use Mary Ellen Barry's 2x2 method instead. An article outlining her method was published in the April 2009 issue of Clean Run and can be found, here, on the KineticDog website. This method puts the emphasis on teaching correct entries from multiple angles of approach. The sequence of screen capture snapshots below show Hokey approaching and entering the weaves from a sharp angle that requires her to wrap around the 1st pole, thereby demonstrating her understanding of what constitutes a correct entry even at this early stage in her training:

I wanted to document our progress, not only for the sake of this blog, but should I be in the position to be training another dog sometime in the future, it will be there to help guide me through the steps again. I suspect Hokey's progress, although not slow by any means, may be slightly slower than the average dog due to her deafness. I don't really want her looking at me as I want her focus to be on driving forward. Yet she is unable to receive any kind of auditory feedback, so she must rely on learning more by trial and error than a dog that can hear would. She does have a fairly low threshold for frustration though, often expressed with a loud snort, which requires us to take a break and do something else.

I believe I started Hokey with step 1 on March 6th or 7th and I did not document this step with video. It simply consists of shaping the dog to pass through the poles of a set of 2x2s by standing at one end and tossing treats for the dog whenever it passes through the 2 poles. Direction doesn't matter at this point. You simply want the dog to understand the value of passing between the 2 poles. However, you want to move quickly to the next step once the behavior has been established.

Step 2 begins by establishing direction - i.e. the dog learns that from now on the correct way to enter the weaves is with its left shoulder passing the 1st pole. At this point you always want to have your dog approaching the 2x2s from one direction; you do not want to turn around and come at them again from the direction you just came (i.e. "back weave"). Because of cold rainy weather, I began the 1st couple of steps in my basement, which is plenty big enough for the first couple of steps, but unfortunately appears to have been last decorated circa 1978.

Once direction is well-established and your dog is consistently hitting the entry you can move on to part B of step 2 which teaches your dog to wrap around the 1st pole at increasingly sharper angles of approach by gradually moving the 2x2s from a straight on approach to a perpendicular approach. Here is Hokey demonstrating this step:

Once the dog is successfully hitting the entry to the 2x2s at the above stage, you can start to move on to the Around-the-Clock work. The first stage consists of you and your dog moving around the set of 2x2s as if they were set with the 1st pole pointing toward 6 on a clock and the last pole pointing toward 12. You and your dog work all angles of approach in an arc from 6 - 11 clockwise and 6 - 1 counterclockwise. At this point you always have your dog by your side and may do a restrain and release.

The next step is to work Around-the-Clock positions where you are stationary but releasing the dog from various positions that don't require any actual handling. The following video shows me working Hokey on both sides from ONE of these positions. I had trouble with my spare camera battery dying on me, so was not able to capture some of the other positions, but the Clean Run article mentioned above shows the positions to work on.  

Once the dog is hitting the entry well from the various positions, it's time to add another set of 2x2s. To do this, first place the 2nd set in line a few feet from the 1st. Send the dog through the first set and reward immediately after. Then send the dog through the second set.

Quickly fade the reward between the two sets then reward the dog for  performing both sets together. Even though the dog is performing both sets at once, they should still be considered two separate obstacles, so you are actually moving with your dog to the 2nd set instead of remaining stationary.

Once the dog is moving through both sets of 2x2s, start all of your Around-the-Clock work again both with the dog at your side and then releasing from various positions.

Next, gradually start to move the 2nd set closer to the first and repeat the steps above.

Eventually the 2 sets of 2x2s come together and you start to see something that looks like weaving! Continue to work the various positions like here:

And here:

So that's where Hokey's training stands as of now. I believe I am ready to introduce the 3rd set of 2x2s into the mix so we will have 6 poles. That is, IF it stops snowing and it all melts away.