Gimme a "T"

 

T is for tunnel.

Several months ago I wrote about how, due to her deafness, Hokey was really struggling with reading rear crosses when heading into a tunnel. She would lock onto the tunnel entrance and "tunnel vision" would take over; my motion would become irrelevant. Once inside the tunnel, our visual contact would be broken and since she does not have the ability to pick up auditory clues, she would have no idea where I was and would repeatedly end up turning in the incorrect direction when exiting the tunnel. 

Since then, Hokey has become more experienced with the information being given to her through my handling. I've also worked on getting her to look for me as she exits the tunnel. Last weekend I took her to a little group training session/informal class at a place we've never been and one of the compliments I received on her training is that she was looking for me at the exit of the tunnel to tell her where to go next. I was curious to see how far she'd actually come in the past few months, so a couple of days ago I set up an exercise with a jump on either side of a slightly curved tunnel in order to see how well she could predict which way to turn as she exited the tunnel. I kept it simple at first.

Then I mixed it up just a little bit in order to see if she could still follow the information I was giving her regarding which direction to turn when exiting the tunnel.

 

  

I was still curious if Hokey's ability to read a rear cross on a straight tunnel (i.e. "puppy cannon") had improved, so I set that up today. It still needs some work. We did have a few instances of "missed communication". I noticed these were more apt to happen during a more straight on approach to the tunnel then if we had a more angled approach.

But overall, she is making progress. Months ago, she almost never turned the correct way out of a straight tunnel when I executed a rear cross. Even repeating it several times didn't seem to clue her in. Now her "hits" definitely exceed her misses. Here she is turning the correct way several times.

I finished off with the big exam - an exercise that mixed things up between rear crosses and non-rear crosses. She did excellent!

T is for Teeter
In my last blog post, I explained the process I was using to train the teeter, but didn't have any video clips to demonstrate. I've rectified that.

We play two different teeter games. The first is the "bang game" where I line Hokey up parallel with the slightly elevated end of the teeter and have her hop on. This teaches her how to use her body to push the end down and stay balanced. It also teaches her the 4-on end behavior I'll be looking for. We work on her staying in position until I release her. In most dogs, the "bang game" also helps to acclimate them to the noise the teeter makes when it hits the ground, but since Hokey is deaf, maybe calling it the "push it down" game would be more appropriate.

Next, I work on getting her to run across a low teeter, encouraging speed, but also getting her to stick her 4-on end behavior no matter what my motion is until I release her. In previous weeks, I had someone else restrain and release her. This past week I restrained her then raced her to the end where she would stop, but I would keep going. Here she is on a very low set teeter.

And then one set a little higher:

It appears she has a pretty good grasp of the end behavior criteria because the one time she overshot and came off the end, she tried to fix herself without any prompting on my part.

And here is Hokey running a little mini-course that incorporates all of the contact obstacles. Her A-Frame and teeter are coming along nicely. I haven't spent much time training the dog walk yet, so we still need to tackle that more seriously.

T is for Table that needs to be Trained
I also need to spend some time training the "down on the table" behavior in the hopes of getting a faster down and better duration. The table is often considered a bit of a no-brainer obstacle that doesn't need much training time compared to other obstacles, but when you have a dog that doesn't like to go into the down position in the first place, it's something that requires some dedicated training time. Out of all the many things I've trained this dog to do over the past several months, I would have to say that "down" was the thing I struggled with the most. Even now, she displays some resistance to going into the down position and has a tendency to slightly rise back up with her elbows hovering just above the ground - you can see both of these habits on display in the above video. She loves jumping on the table itself. But going and staying down? That's another matter. I've tried to find ways of making "down" into a fun and highly rewarding game for her, but so far I've struck out.

So that's my Terrific Testimony on Training Three T obsTacles.

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! 

Laying More Bricks in the Foundation

Sometimes I feel like I'm in training overload. There are so many things I'm working on right now. but so little daylight for me to be able to train outside. I never feel like there are enough hours in the day and that I can't do it all justice. Here are just a few of the things I've been working on as far as Hokey's foundation training goes, in no particular order:

1. Running Contacts. The dogwalk training has kind of been put on the backburner simply because by the time I get home from work, there just isn't enough daylight for me to set up and work on it. In the meantime, I've been questioning if a running dogwalk is going to be the right behavior for Hokey. Being that consistency in striding is key, I'm not so sure if her habit of naturally adding an occasional leaping motion into the middle of her full out run might interfere. However, I will continue to train the foundation for a running until I'm ready to make a decision because, no matter what contact behavior I decide on, I still want her learning to drive with speed to the end of the walk.

With the dogwalk on hold, I have, however, gone back to work harder on the foundation for the Aframe running contact. Hokey is working the box on the ground consistently well. Here is a video showing me setting her up so there is a direct line between her and I, with the box offset from that line. She shows that she understands what she's supposed to do by leaving the line in order to bounce through the box instead of coming directly to me when I release her. Also shown is that she is able to drive ahead of me independently (although I'd still like to see little more forward drive in her behavior) when I'm well behind and several feet lateral from the box.

I've also started to apply the grid to the box. She's working it pretty well although it's not a ingrained behavior yet (we just started, so that's expected). Sometimes when I first set it up, she loses sight of the box behavior and does the 2 jumps and then comes to me instead of driving forward through the entire grid. I've found that if I start off relatively close to the box and then increase my distance, it seems to help remind her that she needs to bounce through the box. I noticed in reviewing the video below that when I added the grid, she is also looking at me a little more instead of driving forward into her reward zone. I may need to be just a little quicker with throwing my reward. Right now I'm only working the first (forward) position on both sides in conjunction with the grid. Once she's moving forward consistently and seems to understand her job, I'll start working the other positions. Here she is doing a nice job with the grid:

2. Line Setting. I started working on some foundational "line" exercises to teach her to stay in her lane/path while I'm in mine. Here we set up on two parallel paths both heading forward. I have a dish set up in the middle of her path that contains one very small treat. I do a restrained release so that she drives ahead of me to the dish, staying in her lane. When I catch up and pass her, I get her attention with a toy so that she breaks from the dish ASAP and chases me while both of us stay in our individual lanes. I do need to be a little more aware of not veering into her lane or pulling her off into mine. It's harder to keep track of in my yard than it is in the training building where we go for lessons. In the building, there are mats to help clearly define our separate lanes. We'll be adding challenges to this exercise as we move forward with our training.

3. One Jump Exercises. I started doing some one jump work with Hokey to teach her to use her body properly when jumping. It is used to teach her proper form when turning tightly over a jump by training her to keep her head down into the turn. I am also teaching her to keep her feet up so that she doesn't tick or knock the bar. Sometimes my timing isn't the best and sometimes my treat placement isn't great, mostly because they bounce, but for the most part, she's doing well with this.

4. J-turn for a change of direction. I'm training a turning cue so that, when she's facing me, Hokey passes my side and turns away from me to change direction so that we are then on parallel paths. Here we are working on the flat, around an obstacle, and over a jump. Note that, because I just started training this, my arm movement is highly exaggerated at this point. As her understanding of the cue increases, I should gradually be able to keep my arm much closer to my body.

5. Pinwheel. Starting with a close-set pinwheel of jumps, I'm am training Hokey to drive into a pinwheel and carry through all 3 jumps independently. My path is to run up the middle on a straight line toward the standard of the center jump. As soon as I see her commit to the 2nd jump, I move back down the center line in the opposite direction (I am not happy with the last example in the follow clip as I paused instead of moving when I should have).

6. Sends. Because deaf dogs have a tendency to be velcro and not easily amenable to working at a distance, I wanted to make sure I was working on sends right from the very start. As mentioned in my "Living Room Agility Training" blog post, I often use the dining room table to practice sends with all my dogs. I just trained Hokey on dining room sends a few days ago. Here we are having a blast with it. This will come in handy when it's 20 degrees outside with a foot of snow on the ground.

We can use patio furniture in the yard to do something similar:

 Since she tends to like to drive into my tunnel, I also put that to use in working sends:

7. Backside Cues. If we end up running in USDAA trials, Hokey is going to have to learn how to read my cues to do a backside approach. We just started this and she's already picking up on it really well. I mix it up with front approaches so that she doesn't get locked into a particular pattern. The key is my foot position - notice the difference in where my sending foot is pointing when I send her to the backside as opposed to the times when I'm sending her for a front approach and asking her to wrap back to me. As for my arm movement - it's too exaggerated and distracting. I need to work on that.

8. Tunnel Rear Cross. This is something I'm really struggling with. I have had some trouble with Hokey pulling off the tunnel, entering and then turning around to come back out, or showing hesitation/drop in drive when I work on this. Putting a toy several feet from the far end of the tunnel for her to drive to usually helps with that aspect of things. However, as shown in the 2nd half of the following clip, she still has a long way to go as far as learning to read the rear cross. It is simply not clicking thus far. Her deafness doesn't help because I can't help her with a verbal clue to let her know where I am once we've lost visual contact. I've been thinking about how I can use the placement of the toy to help her learn to read the cross. I also need to think about my own timing and placement of the cross to, hopefully, make it more clear to her where I'm going. It's hard, because if her head is already in the tunnel and, especially if she's driving to the toy, she might not notice my cross at all. If I cross too soon, it might cause her to pull off or turn around and come back out  of the the same way she went in. I'll have to play with it and try to come up with a solution.

So that's the update. I can't wait for the daylight to lengthen again in order to give me more training time during the week. However, with January and February on the horizon, even with enough daylight, there may be snowy and cold weather ahead. I sure am looking forward to spring!

On the way?

Wake me when winter is over!