A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

I hate to speak too soon, but it looks like as of today, springtime may have finally arrived. In anticipation of warmer temps that have been MIA for the past several weeks, the dogs and I have been swinging into full gear. Hence, the hodgepodge that follows.

Hocus Pocus - Agility Training

1. Weave training: Hokey's weave training has continued to move forward. The day after my last blog post, she actually had her first real test: her first exposure to a set of 24" weaves (the 2x2s I've been using, as well as my own set of weave poles, are older & narrower) in a different location. As you can see, she had no problem generalizing the behavior.

A few days after that, I decided to add a 2nd set of 6, for a total of 12. I introduced it the same way I introduced the 3rd set of 2x2s to the 4 poles - I set them a few feet apart and gradually moved them together. Hokey picked it up quickly and within a few minutes was weaving 12 poles! Here she is on that first day of 12 poles:

From here, I will continue to do some around-the-clock entry work with the set of 6 poles and incorporate handling/motion into the mix with sets of both 6 and 12 as well as building the weaves into sequencing.

2. Sequencing: And speaking of sequencing, we've been doing more of that recently. Here is a short clip showing some examples, including the first one where she does a serpentine-backside-threadle combo.

I thought it would be interesting to have both Hokey and Poppy run a short sequence to compare. They both do a great job considering Hokey had only been truly weaving for a couple of days before this and Poppy rarely does agility anymore. You can see the difference between the green and velcro dog vs. the experienced one who is confident with distance.

3. Contact Training: Hokey and I have been working on all 3 contact obstacles. Living in the city with only a small yard, I don't have any contact equipment of my own, so I try to make the most of my once-a-week training sessions that give me access to the equipment. I don't have any recent video of her teeter training, but we've been working on her end behavior, which, due to her weighing 12 lbs or less, will be a 4-on-run-to-the-end-and-ride-it-down behavior. I do this by propping up the "down end" of the teeter with a short jump standard so that the "up end" then becomes the "down end".  I then place her parallel to the teeter end and let her hop up sideways and ride it down a few inches. I start with just a small drop and gradually increasing the drop, by placing foam tiles under the end and removing 3 or so at a time, until there are none. After working the end behavior from both sides, I drop the teeter low and, with the help of an assistant, do some restrained recalls running the entire length of the board, while holding the end behavior we'd just practiced.

Hokey's running A-Frame is slowly coming along. Since I was having some issues with her scrambling between the apex and the box, I lowered the frame more so that I could set some bars on each side of the frame to help her stride rather than scramble.

After a couple of weeks of that, this past week I set it a little higher and removed the jump bars (except the one I lay at the apex). At the end of our session, I decided to see what would happen if Hokey approached the frame with some momentum rather than a sit/stay. This is the result:

For the first time, she gave me a 2-hit descent (2nd example in clip), which was wonderful. However, I've decided not to be picky about that. I'm fine with her giving me a 3 hit descent as long as she is moving forward at a good clip and not scrambling between the apex and the box and also hitting the yellow well. In fact, when she gives the 2-hit here, she isn't hitting as deeply into the box as she tends to when she does a 3-hit descent, so I actually prefer the look of things at 3.

Because I've been concentrating on the A-frame and teeter, I haven't had much time to incorporate the dogwalk into our training. I really need to get a 12' plank to practice running her across at home (if I can figure out how to get a 12' board to my yard from Lowes or Home Depot) and also build her a little arch hoop to run through to encourage her to run all the way down to the end instead of leaping. Here is what little I've done with restraining her and letting her run down the plank to a reward.

Hocus Pocus - Conditioning:


I decided that Hokey needs more conditioning in certain muscles that she will be using when descending the A-frame and dogwalk and riding the teeter down as it drops. I decided to use stairs for a couple of different exercises in order to help with this. One exercise will involve her walking backwards up a few stairs. I decided to train her the same way I trained Ollie and Poppy to reach back with their hind legs to walk up various objects backwards (see previous post Back Up That Booty for details). Since Hokey is small and the stairs are relatively high, I felt I needed to start with something a little lower. Here she is backing up onto a box:

I used the box to transition her to the stairs, by placing it in front of the bottom stair, then having her back up onto the box, then onto the bottom stair. Then I removed the box and had her just backing onto the bottom stair.

Then I added a second stair to the mix. This is a little trickier because she actually has to move her front end up and back first and then move her rear end. She does have a tendency to curl her body instead of keeping it straight, but she's getting better.

And finally, I started to add a third stair:

Now that the weather is starting to get warmer, I'm able to get her out for walks more often. This helps build both her muscles and her stamina. There are also a couple of places in my neighborhood that have concrete steps. We stop and do our backing up exercise as part of our travels. The lesson seems to have transferred well to other locations.

Poppy & Ollie - Nose work:

Poppy howls for nose work

After a month-long hiatus, nose work class has started back up. Now that they have both passed their ORT, Ollie and Poppy are preparing for their first nose work trial at some future point yet to be determined. With the weather getting warmer, we are now able to more comfortably practice exterior searches and vehicle searches. Here is a clip of Ollie practicing a couple of exterior searches. The tin contains 3 Qtips of birch odor.

And Poppy as well.

A friend gave me a couple of plastic vials for exterior search practice. Because they are

somewhat pointy on the bottom, you can place a Qtip inside, close the lid and drive it down into the ground anywhere in the yard, then open the top back up so that it is hardly visible. Today was the first day I tried using them and both dogs did amazingly well at finding them even though I only had one swab of odor in the container and it was windy out. I also taped the vial to things like the branches of my lilac bush, lawn furniture, and weave poles, so the dogs would get practice searching for odor at different heights and not just at ground level.

FUN!

I will wrap this up with a quick video of Hokey and I after one of our backyard agility training sessions. I hope it makes you smile. Always remember to play with your dog and share joy together! That's what it's all about.

Time to put this blog post to bed.

3-2-1 Contact Training (with Serps & Pinwheels too)

 Hokey's agility training has been coming along. While (im)patiently waiting for spring to arrive, I've recently been able to get access to a nice building and equipment to practice on once a week. And it's only ~10 minutes from my house. Deb Goodhart rents the building about once a month to give lessons, so we've been doing that as well. I'm so appreciative to finally have an opportunity to do some training that doesn't involve traveling to the ends of the earth!

I put together a couple of clips of just a few things I was working on during our practice sessions. The first shows us doing some rear cross on the tunnel work, learning to drive through the chute and just fooling around running a little sequence -- a "real" one.

The following week, I worked her on some serps. It was only the 2nd time she'd done real serps. The first had been about a week before in my backyard. We still need a little work on timing and teamwork and her ability to consistently read the serp RTH when I add motion, but I thought she did stunningly overall considering how green she is. I also show a bit of a rear cross exercise at the end of this. Rear crosses are something we are still working hard at and still need a lot of work, but I was happy with what she did here. It's coming along. I was doing some exercises with her in my backyard this evening and after a small initial struggle, she started to really pick it up well. We'll continue to work at it.

Hokey has had a couple of initial introductory sessions on the teeter now, with the ends set on tables. During the first session, we just let her run back and forth to get treats at either end. Then we dropped one of the tables so that one end had about a 12" drop. She was unfazed. She couldn't seem to turn around fast enough to run to the other end to get her treat, even if it meant jumping up on the end and riding it down first. Of course, being deaf, the banging noise is out of the picture for her. But the motion doesn't seem to worry her.

Here is the end of our second session on the teeter. I am not teaching her any "end behavior" yet, however I am trying to train her to pause on the table at the end of the teeter as I move ahead. Since she is relatively fearless and tends to be at the "less" end of the self-preservation scale, teaching her to use her brakes now is probably a good idea. So here she is playing her favorite teeter ping-pong game:

She's been working the A-frame grid well for some time now, although admittedly I haven't been able to do it consistently during the winter months. But every time we do work it, she's been working well. So I decided it was time to introduce the actual A-frame into the equation. We've played the "mountain climbing game" on one side of the frame a couple of times to build up her hamstrings and teach her that she's able to control her decent. And she's run over it a couple of times at full height on the way to something else of her own accord (deaf dogs simply don't listen to "Don't do that until you've been trained how" and the "uh-uh-uh" as they forge ahead with their own agenda). But for a true introduction, we lowered it and I put my PVC box on. The first couple of times up and down, she was pretty tentative and unsure, like here:

So we decided to set up the ground grid next to the frame to remind her of what it is all about and give her muscle memory a boost.

That was all fine and good, so I switched back to the frame. Or at least I tried to. Suddenly, she was all "Frame? What frame? I don't see any huge, looming piece of wood directly in front of me". Even when Deb tried a restrained recall, she did a run-around.

Then she finally took the plunge up and over, proceeding to leap completely over the contact zone and box. But...she did a great job tackling the frame.

So now we were ready to put it together. As you can see, Hokey hasn't made the connection and generalized the striding from the ground grid to the frame yet. She's still getting used to the idea of running up and down it at this point. I know she's capable of opening up her stride more and she needs to learn to leap over the top rather than scrambling over and down until pouncing through the box, as she's mostly doing here. She may need a jump bar or something clamped to the top in order to help aid her in transferring the striding she learned on the ground grid to the frame. We'll see. But this isn't too bad considering it's the first time working the frame for this wee little pup.

We also worked some pinwheel exercises in my lesson this week. Since we are new to sequencing and with Hokey still being VERY green, her obstacle commitment is not always there and she apparently still needs quite a bit of support. I'm sure this will lessen as she gains experience and confidence. Here we are doing a straight pinwheel. Without a lot of support, she is pulling off jumps instead of committing:

Here we are doing the exercise without the send to the middle pinwheel jump, so that she understands that where I place my body relative to the plane of jumps tells her whether to take the pinwheel jump or not. Not taking the pinwheel jump isn't a problem, but she is so sensitive to my pulling motion that she almost misses the 3rd jump without me giving her a little extra push back out to it.

 Next, adding a front cross between jumps 4 and 5 after the pinwheel. I spent too long supporting her pinwheel jump and was late for my cross the first time through. The second time was much better. Of course, part of training a new dog, especially when you start to put it together and run some sequences, means learning how to come together to work as a team.

Then we did the pinwheel with blind crosses. The first run was pretty nice. I was a little too early on my cross in the 2nd run. The 3rd was much better timing-wise, even though she ended up dropping the bar.

Our last blind cross ended up being pretty nice though. Bonus: she doesn't even look at the off-course trap jump set up near the 3rd and 4th jumps:

We haven't started any training for the dogwalk and haven't even been able to resume the groundwork for that was put on hold for the winter. (confession: in another don't-try-to-tell-a-deaf-dog-no moment, she has been up on the full height dog walk of her own accord a couple of times. Like I said, she is fearless. I have been VERY conscious of keeping her away from the full-height teeter however).

I plan on starting 2x2 weave training sometime in March.

So that's the update on Hocus Pocus training. More to come soon as the warmer weather allows us more training opportunities!