Puppy?

We're in the middle of descision making :-) There miiight be a puppy arriving here soon! It's Sigurd's turn to have a dog, and it is time for a bird hunting dog. We have a cabin in between the mountains and forrests of Telemark, which is surrounded by a good bird terrain. Sigurd grew up hunting there with his family's Swedish Lapphund (Svensk Lapphund), but in my opinion they have too much, too long, too "shed-able" furr (google it' you'll see!).

The hunting form is quite special, the dog searches for birds, then follow them to the tree they decide to sit in, and stay under that tree barking until the hunter gets close enough for a shot. The ideal dog for this kind of hunting would be a Finnish Spitz (Finsk Spets), but they are too much of a hunter and too little of everything else to fit into our family.

Sooo... The breed we are looking at is related to both of these, they were bred for herding reindeer: Lapponian Herder (Lapsk Vallhund). This is the puppy we're going to Sweden to meet next week. If we decide to take her home, her name will be "Bris" (breeze) since we already have a "Storm" and an Orkan (Hurricane). Aaah! We melted when we saw the pictures...

New trick: shake it!

Gah... I'm pretty sure Lene will win this one too... Today is all lectures and working, and pretty much the whole weekend is going to be filled with work, so I don't know how much time (and energy!) I'll find to work on this trick. And besides that, I'm not really sure how I'll shape it. Simply provoking shaking with water in his ears or something seems a bit cruel, not to mention confusing for him :-p
Any ideas?

Crawling on the floor

This video is on how I taught Orkan to crawl for our little dog trick contest. Lene and Susi finished this trick waaay before us, so we lost this round...
Byt hey, the reason we do this trick contest is to get better at shaping and to teach our dogs body awareness, and that comes whether losing or winning. A win-win contest in other words :-D

Winter = skiing!

There hasn't been much dog training lately with the exams and all, but now I'm back on track.
Today we went for a long skiing trip in the forest with some friends. Had a great time :-)
That was the physical dog training, tonight I want to try to finish the crawling on the floor trick with Orkan. It's about time, since Lene finished it about a week ago! Slow me... Hee hee.

Exams comming up

Just to let you know I'm alive... My nose is stuck in a book though, and there's not much dog training going on. Just sick amounts of coffee and tired eyes...

Silence :-)

My sound solution works! Yey!
The yelling is now much less frequent, and if he happens to forget and I "fall asleep", he quickly lies down on the floor, waiting patiently for me to "come back to life". It feels indescribably good to finally have found a solution to that problem!

Nina wrote an interesting piece on being more clear on what we want when shaping. She sort of summed up some of my thoughts around this, and it also related to this sound solution thing. Worth reading!

Second time sequencing

Worked on a bit of lateral distance, general understanding of blind cross body line (blindbyttescipperke-monster! in norwegian), and some push through front crosses. I still think my handling really sucks big time, but it looks a bit better than last time, doesn't it? I hate posting videos of my own crappy training, but I want to be honest about my level and discoveries. Should I?

Jumping technique, second time

Trick: paw on nose

For this new trick I use the command "there's something on your nose". It took us two sessions to figure it out, the way to do it was to put a very small piece of duct tape on his nose, and have very high value rewards, so he didn't focus too much on the tape. That way it was a lot easier to fade the tape, since he was more aware of the behaviour than getting rid of the tape (due to good treats).
I'm not all pleased with it yet, I want better stimulus control, but I think this'll do for our little competition, won't it, Lene? Since it's all about being first (to avoid paying for the next cup of coffee) I decided to post it as soon as I had anything that matched the criteria :-)

Today's fun in the snow

Both dogs had a lot of fun in the brand new snow that's suddenly all over the place!
It almost looked like Storm had missed the snow ever since last winter :-)
Hide!Snow in the face. What to do?
Shake!What happened to that shaken ear???
Fetching snowballs. Favourite sport!
Sinking ship! The snow is about 50 cm deep right outside our house. Storm is 37 cm tall...
Orkan has never seen this kind of amounts of snow before (he was born in february almost one year ago). As soon as he got over the fact that it's cold, he loved it:He had his moments of shaking too:Something is definately awkward about getting snow in your ear :-)
He has grown up to a pretty little pooch! Think I'll send this one to his breeder :-D

Update...

Update: Now I hate the snow, because there's so much of it, I can't get my car out (have tried for an hour) and I can't get to that lecture, and the exams is one week away so I really didn't want to miss it... And I don't like (can't say hate, in case he reads this) the fact that my neighboor, who's responsible for plowing the snow around here, didn't bother to drive his tractor the last 5 meters of our driveway. Working with a showel for an hour, I still can't get the car out, and it would have taken him 10 seconds extra to do that job properly... Gah!

Winter has finally arrived!

When I went to bed last night, my world was wrapped in a blizzard. We couldn't really see anything out the windows. I hate snow that prevents me from training agility, makes the roads slippery and can't really be used for anything, since there's not enough of it to go skiing. This winter has been like that so far.
This morning it had all changed! Our whole little world is padded in a thick layer of skiing material. To me, this is a completely different kind of snow, since I can finally use it for something other than irritation. I went skiing before class this morning!
I bet Orkan is losing a bit of weight, struggling thorugh 50 cm of snow :-)

Sound solution?

I think I have finally cracked the nut about Orkan's ear-splitting yells when he gets overly frustrated by extinction!

I sat down on the kitchen floor, like I usually do when shaping, and in an attempt to make sure I really didn't ever click when he's not silent, I tried something new. When it got too difficult in his opinion (failing two or three times in a row) and the reward seemed long gone, he broke into yelling like I expected. This time I closed my eyes and put my forhead on my knees. Every time he had a silent moment, I started counting to myself. I think it took about 10 minutes of yelling before he finally calmed down, lying quietly on the floor... I clicked, and kept working. Next time, it took a lot shorter before he calmed down. And after that, the yelling has been less frequent. I think we're on to something!

I think the big difference, and the genious thing about this, is that now he can actually see a physical change in me (going "dead", not able to contact me no matter how hard he tries) whenever he makes noise. I have used timeouts in the crate, but that only resulted in the puppy running to his crate whenever he got frustrated. I don't think I managed to get the message across about it being the yelling I didn't want. Waiting him out has been the only thing that worked, and it hasn't been very effective. He has learned that going quiet might get him a reward, but I don't think he has understood that he could just as well not have started to yell. The reward disappearing could in his opinion be because he didn't offer whatever sitting or something I wanted, not related to the yelling. Now we have a visible consequence of making noise, and the opportunity to earn a reward doesn't re-appear until he's actually calm!

I hope to be back in a few days with a video and a big smile :-)

Gah...

I just spent most of my night out in the cold (about minus ten celsius) with the police, taking pictures of footsteps, serching with dogs, sequring DNA and finger prints.
What the **** do people brake into cars for? Don't they realize they gain almost nothing, but create costs for far more?
Sigh...

Burned puppy?

Orkan always seems to be where anything happens. This morning that wasn't a good thing. He was where a warm pot of coffee fell. Warm puppy...
+ =
I immediately grabbed him and threw him in the kitchen sink, pouring cold water on him. Good thing he has thick furr, I think the only part of him that really got in touch with the coffee was his right side ear. He seems ok now, but we'll have to wait and see if the skin turns red and starts hurting. Glad I had the reflex of getting him into cold water as fast as I could...

What scares me is how easy that kind of thing can happen! And what if he was a child, not a dog? Children didn't have all that water resistant furr, last time I checked...
Unpleasant thought!

Camcorder!

Yey! I just placed an order for a new video camera! It's water- and shock-proof, which should suit me well. Hee hee! So in 2-5 days there will be no more cell-phone videos in my blog!

First time sequencing!

Orkan had his first time sequencing the other day. All in all I was really pleased, the one jump and circle work has given him a good understanding of the basics of the handling system, and his attitude and speed is a lot of fun! After a bit of sequencing it's easy to see what we have to work on. One of the things is I have to pay attention to is my footwork! My handling is very rusty since I haven't really done any in more than a year (Storm had to retire because of his back injury and Orkan has been too young). I actually doubted if I should post this video at all, my handling really sucked in some of the repetitions... Here are a few clips from the training:

Working on heel position

I have finally been putting some work into heel position. The left side proves a bit harder than the right side, as always, I think it's due to the fact that I usually have treats in my right pocket and leave the left pocket clean for cell phone, keys etc. We have come a long way in just a few sessions. What's left now is adding cues (I think I'll just clap my hand to my thigh on the side I want him on), fading the box and perfecting the position a bit, including sitting down. This video is from a session some days ago. The goal for that session was to have him understand the difference of the right and the left hand side:

Learning to love failing

My criteria levels have been changing lately. I realize I used to make it pretty easy for the dog, any change in criteria would be slight and very understandable. I guess I thought they weren't smart enough to get it if I challenged them more. Thus, Storm (my grown up dog) evovlved into an intelligent, but not very hard working dog. Training took time, but we got there.

With Orkan (my puppy) it's a different story. He's very intelligent and very impatient, so every bit of training has happened faster. He has already taught me a lot about training, so I'm looking forward to what I hope will be a long life of learning together with him!

When the dog understands what you want, you raise your criteria to get closer to the final behavior, right? How fast? And how big are the gaps between the stages supposed to be? I've found that the answer is usually "faster and bigger than you think". The dog might get confused at first, when your'e no longer satisfied with what you just rewarded, but I think one of the things that characterizes really successful dog trainers (in shaping that is, let's not confuse with luring etc), is that they make progress faster than us mortals. And they have dogs who keep working even when the reward disapperars for a while.

Of course progression comes from a number of things, such as timing, understanding what really goes on in the dog's brain when learning, foundation trainig etc. (that could be a long list!), not just challenging criteria. But it's part of it.

Then what if the dog fails to meet the criteria? Within certain limits that's a piece of valuable information transfer. If the dog understands the situation (through good foundation training and gradually increasing difficulties) he'll keep working, because he knows he's on the right track since you just rewarded something similar. Then give the whole jackpot when he finally gets it! In fact, failing is one of the things I'm learning to love. Instead of just giving the dog info on what's right, some info on what's not right will narrow his search area for the perfect behavior down to a minimum.

We want something like 25% mistakes! If the dog has succeeded on the last seven tries, it's time to make it more challenging! For example when weave training, if the dog succeded on all the entries you have asked him to do, give him an extremely difficult one. If he succeeds, that's great! That means your dog has a very good understanding of the behavior. It also means you didn't need to spend all that time working on easy entries. That's a valuable piece of information for you... If he fails, keep working. Info on what is not the right entry will also be a valuable lesson to him. We want them to know that regardless the situation, there's only one option entrywise, don't we?

Go out, make your dog work, and have fun training!

What separates me from the best?

This is my reply to Susan Garret's question: What separates you from the best agility competitors in the world? I tried to find the positive things, focusing on opportunities rather than what I'm doing wrong and the equipment and training area I don't have. Writing that was an interesting experience, seeking insight in my own future:

,,

I would love to answer “time” to this question. That thought leaves room for a lot of hope! I truly hope that is an answer I will be able to look back at and nod…

Time, not so much in terms of finding time for dog training between studies, work and family, even though I find that challenging.

It’s more about the time it will take me to discover the knowledge and skills that would make me a truly great dog trainer, together with learning to dare take the risks and jump the gaps characteristic of the most successful competitors I know.

I feel lucky to be young, and hope I have many years of learning ahead of me. Still, being young is part of what limits my knowledge, in the sense that I haven’t lived long enough to have read all those books, met all those people and loved all those dogs that I hope to meet through my journey…

Susan - I am very grateful for those who write books and blogs that help me build the knowledge I’m striving for! Thank you ,,

Goals for 2009!

I've been reading blogs with goals for the coming year, and felt a bit small...

I actually decided not to post any goals in my blog, because, frankly, they are nothing to brag about. Then I read someone saying that the setting goals has been a good motivator in their training, so what the heck. I'll post something a bit more ambitious than I feel comfortable with, and then I'll work really hard to avoid the humiliation of not reaching my goals. Ok?

So... Here we go:

Storm: no competition goals, but I really hope we can figure out a way to make him feel well more permanently. As it is now, he needs to see his specialist every two weeks, if not, the back pain comes back. IF he's in no pain, I hope to work on a bit of handling (with bumps only, no jumping), and to keep his obedience in shape. I want him to be on a level that we could compete in obedience, even though I'm probably not going to do it. I would also love to start training some freestyle with him! He knows a lot of trics, and if his back is good all year, I'll keep it my goal to compete in freestyle before the year is over. Freestyle is fun, but less straining for his back than agility...

Orkan: we have just started handling and jumping technique training. No weaving, contacts or anything yet. My goal for this year is getting ready for competition. And I don't mean that I want to drag him around a course - I want to be on a level where we have chances of winning before we start trialing. That means a lot of work! In addition, I want to keep him as slim as he is now (he's always been a bit fat...) and work on a lot of muscle. Swimming, hiking, biking, skiing, and a lot of trick and body awareness training on the rainy days :-)

Myself: First of all I want to find out what's wrong with me (I've been very tired for some time but the doctors don't have any good answers so far), and when that's done, and hopefully fixed, I want to get my muscle and general fitness back! I want to be able to go jogging for half an hour without fainting after a minute, and not even being totally worn out when I come back! That will do some good in the agility ring. Running is always a plus :-) And so is having getting up from the couch to do some training. So, for me, it's mostly physical training. Most of all I want to enjoy the next year with my dogs, without too much frustration and fixation on goals. Having great fun! It's want our life to be a pleasant journey, not a stressful one...

Yep, that's it! In a year, you can all point your fingers at me, laughing, since I never got close to any of these. Hee hee... The one I'm most sceptical about, is getting Orkan ready for competition. It seems to be sooo far away! At least it's something to work towards :-D

Shanti - fetch training

Yesterday's brain work for Shanti was obedience retrieving (retrieving a dumbbell on cue, holding it until told to drop). I doubt she's ever done that before, because she tried a lot of different behaviors.

I started by rewarding interest for the dumbbell (my item of choice was a random, hard plastic thingie of suitable size for her jaws, probably 15 cm long). She started offering biting it quite fast, but she was more or less over the place, so I decided to add another criteria: she had to sit quietly. That proved difficult! Every time she pawed at it or stood up etc, I simply removed it. After some failing she decided to offer anything BUT sitting, and if she occasionally sat, she wouldn't even look at the dumbbell...

I waited her out, assuming she was willing to work for a while for the tasty treats in my hand, but after two solid minutes of doing everything I didn't want, I started doubting my strategy. Then, suddenly, she sat quietly, I held the dumbbell in front of her, she bit, and held hard. Suddenly...

I was just about to take a break and try to figure out some other way to get that message across...
What a lesson in not making it easier when they fail!
I sort of wish I could do the same thing with Orkan, he would benefit a lot from learning not to give up even when he fails. He has the same gut on working hard for treats for a long time, but right now I'm trying to get rid of his yelling at me, and pushing him on the criteria wouldn't make that better....

I'll keep working on that retrieving with Shanti the next days. It would be neat if she learns at least one thing in the three weeks she's here! But I must admit that I focus more on the social stuff, like food aggression. She shared a toy with Orkan the other day. That was neat!

TV-training?

Orkan suddenly figured out how the TV works! It's not a flat object any more, the sounds correlate with cats, dogs, birds and people! His discovery happened during a nature photography documentary, so by "accident" he got completely hooked on the kind of birds we go hunting for here (orrfugl). Sigurd saw hope in the end of the tunnel, that maybe I'd decide to let him train Orkan for hunting anyway, since he apparently showed such potential in front of the TV, but I think it's a long shot...
Anyway, Orkan is now officialy declared a couch potato, his eyes fixed at the screen... Yikes!

My new blog :-)

Welcome!

This is my brand new blog! My loyal readers will already have noticed that it looks a lot like my old blog, and you're right. It's not supposed to be that different, only language-wise. I have finally taken the step to only blog the dog training in english. There might be some occasional norwegian posts appearing every now and then, if you're curious, jam it into babelfish or something. But it's most likely to be some frustration on norwegian politics, so you might just as well decide to save yourself the hustle of it :-)

This blog consists of posts from a couple of different blogs I've had through time, and thanks to google's ingeniuity I was able to copy everything, and the posts, with pictures, comments and all, even appear in time order! That was fun! (it's called export/import blogs in your settings)

If you're new to my blog, click the "about me" tab. That should give you a peek into my life. I might be reachable at ingerid.klaveness@gmail.com too...

I would be really happy if you posted some comments on what you like (and don't like), so I can improve. Thanks for reading!

I love foundation training!

…that is: I love the foundation after it’s trained

The other day I was helping my father in law with his puppy. He’s had dogs before, but the last one lasted almost fourteen years, so it’s a long time since he has dealt with a puppy. In addition he’s got a quite challenging puppy, so he’s very happy to get advice. One of the things I want to show him is that a lot has happened with training over the years. To demonstrate how efficient shaping can be, I picked up my own youngster, who is ten months now, and decided to teach retrieving for competition retrieving. Boy, was that a fun session!

I finally realized what a good foundation I have been working on with this dog. Everything worked perfectly on the first try! After ten minutes, he picked up a rolled up newspaper, came back, waited for my signal, and then dropped it in my hand. When I taught my other dog the same thing it took a week… All we need is a bit of proofing and perfection, and it’s an exercise ready for competition. Not that I probably will bother to do the last bits of it, since I’m not too interested in obedience competition, we did this only to demonstrate methods. My father in law was really impressed and, frankly, so was I!

The method I’m using is basicly chaining the behavior backwards. That means starting with rewarding interest, biting and then holding the item. I then proof the holding to the point where I can dangle a treat in front of the dog’s nose and he knows if he drops that thing the treat will disappear, so he waits for my signal (which is first a yes, then swapped for a “release”). I then add the criteria of the dog sitting before getting to drop the item. When that’s done, retrieving from a distance is usually not an issue. It’s so much fun already, that none of my dogs so far has had any trouble running to get it. Last thing is the dog sitting, me trhowing, dog waiting and then running to get it. That’s easy if you have a good sit command and the dog understands not to go before you release (Orkan knows that form throwing toys and running to get them, and agility starts). Then you switch the release word with “retrieve” or whatever you say in english, and the thing is done!

What I realized during my session with Orkan is that he has such great understanding of how training works! With Storm I had to work for a while on biting and holding, but Orkan already has an understanding of biting stuff that I hold in front of him, because of the shaping I’ve done with tug toys. It was a bit harder for him to keep holding it when I let go, but that was solved by another thing he knows from before. When I close my hand with the treat in it, he’s wrong and needs to change his behavior or improve his position. When I open it, he’s right, but needs to freeze until I tell him he can get it, or I give it to him. That way I could easily give him the message that the holding was right, and he needed to keep doing it in order to get the reward. Easy! When I dropped the newspaper on the floor, he had an easy time picking it up, but when I threw it further away, he first stayed where it had landed, patiently holding it. That was also an easy thing to solve, I simply showed him my open hand, which he knows from nose touch contact training, and he came running. I wouldn’t use that nose-touch more than a few times, since he has already learned to put toys in my hand that way, and then he doesn’t need to wait for a release command before dropping the toy, in contrast to the sitting down and waiting. But it came in handy that one time to put him on the right track of coming back to me! I also used the crate games to have him wait while I throw and give him the command, since his sit is not perfect yet

Training is so much fun when it works!

Agility shirts!

My stepmother just got home from three months in the states (she grew up in NY but lives i Norway with my dad) and she got me the coolest sweatshirt and t-shirt ever! One says “weave woes” and has a crazy weaving cartoon dog all over, and the other has a happy little pooch on the see-saw. Yey! Nobody in Norway has anything like that. Agility is not big enough here to create a market for stuff like it, and we probably don’t think far enough to go online to find it. Hee hee

Jumping technique seminar notes

These are my notes from a jumping techique seminar for agility dogs, the instructor was Vappu Alatalo. Hope you find it interesting!

Background and general stuff

• Susan Salo’s jumping technique system is based on the goal of teaching the dog to jump independently of the handler, regardless of what we do (not regardless of handling, but we don’t want to have to tell them when to take off etc). Aka “the job of jumping”

• It’s very important that the dog learns to jump on all kinds of surfaces, gravel, mats, grass etc, all kinds of surfaces we expect to ask the dog to jump on in competitions.

• Good jumping promotes speed to, but most importantly: the dog’s health. We all know numbers of dogs who had to retire early because of arthritis, calcifications, etc

• Bad structure of the dog is not as bad as it could have been, as long as the dog learns how to use their body. But dogs with different things like very short bags, poor angulation etc, have a harder time learning how to use their body in the best way. Their backs tend to stiffen up.

• The exercises are set for the dog to try, feel and learn what feels right. The right thing is supposed to feel good, the wrong things to feel awkward.

• Re-training for experienced dogs with a patterned jumpng style is like folding your hands the wrong way.

• No speed into the exercises sets the dog up for sucess, it makes him work better.

• When you give the dog a new exercise he should try different ways to deal with it. If the dog doesn’t, he’s likely to be scared or stressed, or dogs in retraining tend to have the same patterned way to deal with things. Then reduce the height.

• To jump well the dogs need good core muscles, which most dogs don’t have. The bones in the shoulder are not connected, there’s just muscle and ligaments holding it together. to train core muscles: different exercises with statick balance or extremely slow movement.

• After training jumping technique you should walk the dog in a nice trot (quite slow) for 30 minutes. That helps them to be fresh the next day.

• No correction for refusals or dropped bars! This is a message to us about the level being too high. Reduce the difficulty and try again.

• When the dog is not heard in the grid (feet on the ground should make as little sound as possible) he is well balanced. Loud banging shows too much weight on the front legs.

• After at least a year of jumping technique training you can start adding difficulty to the grids by walking towards them, running, coming at an angle etc.

• Reward the dog for thinking!

• All kinds of balancing work is good for core muscles

• Sitting ON the hind legs, not on the butt or sitting crooked, mean the dog already have the weight back. The spring is loaded, and the dog is set up for success.

• All the grids are rewarded by something in the end. Handler doesn’t move (thtat’s really advanced).

• Never put jumping and sequencing together until the dog is good at both. Work handling with the bumps until then. Bumps just equal an extended stride, and don’t produce flat, bad style in the same way as low jumps would have.

• Evaluating distance applies to all kinds of obstacles. Put them in the end of the distance grid, even weaves, contacts etc.

• Importance: 1- fun. 2 - solve problems on their own

• Training easy things is putting money in the bank. Hard stuff, like difficult exercises or trialing, is taking money out. You need to keep making deposits!

• Good jumping? Look for movement in the dog’s back. It should flex upwards.

• Bumps make any learning easier. Remember to do it all on different surfaces!

• For some dogs, height intervienes with the technique.

Skill set needed for the jumping dog

1 - Correct path

• Short, fast, safe => cost efficient

• The handler needs to tell early enough. In sequencing, the absolutely latest point to give the dog info about where to go is one stride before take-off. Usually they need this info 3-5 obstacles before. Try to give them the big picture, 3-5 obstacles being one line. Greg Derrets handling system takes care of this.

• As long as the dog is healty and well taught, they should always turn close to the wing. V-shaping (pushing the dog out to create a better turn later on) should never be done, as long as it’s not for health reasons. When the dog is trained right, he should be able to figure out the best path himself, without our shaping of his line.

2 - Distance evaluation

• Implies both real distance and the ground surface

• The dog needs to know their own limits by technmique, strength, balance etc

• the dog is able to save time by eliminating extra strides when not neccecary, a large dog can for example bounce a 5 meter distance when well trained.

• When the dog knows all the aspects and they have the confidence, they save the right number of strides. We don’t.

• Distance exercises are very important for young dogs, they develop all along and new limits are set.

3 - Correct take-off place

• This is the place where the dog makes the weight shift etc to take off

• The jump should be in the middle of the dog’s jump arc.

• Huge oxer: the dog needs to go closer to take off in order to make the whole thing

• Normally the dog finds it nicely.

• How trained? Manipulate with distance grids

• Fear of jumping? (pain) or afraid of height can screw up the take off place descisions

4 - Weight transfer

• This is very, very important!

• Dogs that are trotting or staidng has 60-80% of their weight on the front legs. They are front heavy creatures! Made worse for those with big ears etc etc.

• If the dog looks at you, this gets a lot worse

• In the air the dog should keep its weight ofer the spring that gave the push into the air (legs, mostly hind)

• Skill comes from muscle, function (body), anxiety, take your time.

• Oxers make the dog load their weight to the hind

• Banging to the ground (hearing the landing) means the dog is poorly balanced. Injury risk!

• Exercises that look difficult (the dog’s perception, not ours, f.ex. prolonged crosses, not height!) makes the dog shift their weight better, since they think they need to perform to make it.

• After a weekend of triallyng all dogs are out of balance. Sequencing makes flat, bad jumping. All dogs need re-balancing every week at least.

• Injuries to the hind legs or lower back will ruin the weight shift.

• The back needs to be rounded in the air! This is harder for square dogs with short backs.

5 - Angle of elevation

• Steep angle means the dog needs a lot of weight shift. They need to figure that out, vice versa more flat jumping.

• No legs, ears etc should be sticking out of the immaginairy tube around the dog when jumping.

6 - Height

• Constant heiht on the jumps leads to no thinking and then patterning. Bad!

• Always vary the height in sequences with 10-20 cm lower and 10 cm higher than the ideal height for your dog’s size.

• Jump low the first year of jumping, but have the high bar there every now and then, to make them think and not go into flat jumping patterns.

• Height introduction for young dogs until approximately two years: only occasional high ones.

• The only way to really go wrong with all the exercises is to add height.

• All new stuff, also height, should be introduced as the end of a distance grid.

7 - Rebalancing

• If the back is convectual, shaped as a downward arc, the dog has pushed off with the front paws, and the landing will be loud

• The back should be curved upwards!

• Re-balancing promotes both speed and safety, since it reduces the strain on the dog, especially the front shoulders, and it enables the dog to push off forwards with full force directly after the landing.

• If the first step is made to save the nose from crashing into the ground, the push will be really crappy

• The dog needs to land head up, rising its head after the jump apex (top of the arc), and do the weight shift in the landing, then pushing forward immediately.

• Good rebalancing comes for free when everything else is in place, so it can be seen as a kind of symptom of other stuff.

Exercises

• One jump
  Normal jump or an oxer. Bump in front, 4 ft away for small dogs. If the jump is high, move the bump away up to 6 ft, 9 for large dogs. The dog sits close to the jump. One step, bump, then bar. Spider is a kind of one jump exercise, designed to help the dog jump right. During the weekend Vappu used normal bars lying on the jump towards where the dog is coming from as some kind of the same effect, the dog lifts his feet at the v-shaped bars and then makes a take-off between them. Hard to explain, see for yourself…

• Basic grid
  Work for collection. 4-5 jumps wit bump in front. 4 ft distance for small dogs, bump 2 ft away. 6 for L dogs (3 for startbump). Jump height: 20-25 for L dogs, 10 for small. Usually same height, but jump 2 and 4 can be higher than 1, 3 and 5. Or some bumps, some jumps, but always bump, low, high, low, high and so on. Variations: move the jumps sideways to both sides so the dog needs to think a bit more, or turn them a bit, every second one each way. Bars can be crossed, or leaning to the side, or they can be slight oxers. Slice is also a kind of basic grid, only the jups are turned sideways to the same side.

• Progressive grid
  Distance is bigger for every jump. Teaches extension. Vary this and basic grid. BG is difficult after progressive. Extension requires muscle. Landing/take-off should be in the middle between the jumps, that means the dog has understood his limits and requirements. Heights like basic grid.

• Distance evaluation grid
  Startbump, then three jumps like in a basic grid. Then distance to the last jump between 6 and 18 feet for small dogs, 9-21 for large. The dog has to decide weather to add an extra stride before the last jump. Bump can be added to help this descision, but not closer to any of the jumps than 4 (6) feet, so 8 (12) feet is the minimum distance you can add a bump in. Change the disthance with one foot for every repetition, either longer or shorter. This makes the dog think.

• Height exercise
  Use a distance grid, then add height to the last jump. Start with a bump, then a bar over the bump, then just the bar. This can be done with any obstacle, use distance grids whenever indroducing something new, like oxer, length jumps etc.

• Slice
  Like a basic grid, only each jump is moved a little to the side, so that the whole thing is shifted sideways, or seen in another way, it’s a straight line with the bumps turned a bit. It’s important to do this grid to both sides, and that means changing it. Doing it backwards doesn’t matter. The dog should use a left or right gallop depending on which way you’re training. Look for static patterns. Make the angle more steep when the dog gets better at it. Slices go before bend work. All bumps!

• Bend work
  Advanced and extremely hard work for the dogs. The handler is standing still in the turn, not moving the feet. Do this grid three time one way, then three times the other, then time each way to see if there’s any improvement, that’s the dog has learned something. Then in the end do the number 2 and 3 jumps as a straight line to straighten out the dog again. If the dog has a hard time turning close you can lift the far end of the bar to make it more obvious.

Core muscle training

• Core muscles are not seen, they’re inside the dog. The core muscles on the pelvis, the back and stomack, and the shoulders are important to be able to jump correctly. Many dogs lack enough of these muscles, and will compensate by for example stiffeing their back.

• They are strengthened by balance exercises, static exercises and very slow moving, like walking only one leg at a time.

• One exercise is to gently push at the dog with your fingers, different places. Put the hind legs on some books to work the front and vice versa. The dog leans back on your fingers to keep his blance. Start with two repetitions every other day, then work gradually up to 30 reps every other day.

• Another exervise is to lift the dog’s paws, one at a time. The dog then moves his weight to the other legs. After some time you can start lifting two legs at a time, diagonally.

• When you have been working these exercises for a while, you can let the dog stand on a soft pillow, that makes the balancing harder.

• Stretching neck: bent the dog’s neck to the side, using a treat by the dog’s front shoulder. Dog sitting. Move the treat down to the paws, the head following.

• Rounding spine: teach or lure the dog to put his nose between his front legs, stretching his back.

• Walking slowly in tiny circles (no fast spinning!) is also good for the back. Alternatively you can teach the dog to touch his hind hip wit his nose.

• Hip core muscles can be trained by teaching the dog to sit between your legs, with their legs under his butt, the sit down. Or by backing in between two boxes (narrow) and then sit, stand, sit, stand between them.

Shanti - miniature pinscher

Shanti, my vet’s dog is staying with us for three weeks, while her owners are in Chile. She is a very nice dog, quite well behaved, and as long as she has a coat on she happily joins us for our walks in the woods. I’m planning to work a little on some issues she has while she’s here.

The first one is nervousness. Like most pinschers she has a tendency to bark at anything that might be a little scary. We noticed that a lot the first day she was at our place, she ran to the door or window whenever she thought she might have heard a sound, trying to scare whatever to go away. After she settled in a bit it got better, but still I want to see if I can help make her a more confident dog. Mostly the method is about counterconditioning. Scary things = treats. This way I hope to give her some happy expectations whenever she gets nervous, and have her turn to me instead of barking her head off, trying to make it go away. I went to a park in a city with her, and it seemed to work very well. Whenever we met a distraction I got her attention and she kept seeking me to see if I could provide something better than the scary man, dog, etc. I used the same kind of strategy with one of my own dogs, but that was more in benefit of contact training. He learned that he wasn’t going to get to run after that dog anyway, so he might just as well behave and look in my direction - something nice might happen.

Another issue is her food aggression. It applies to any kind of situation with a resource that might just turn out to be valuable to her. Like when my boyfriend dropped an id-card on the floor the other day. My dogs certainly defend themselves if someone tries to steal a very tasty treat from them (that i do understand!) but they don’t try to kill anyone within three feet of anything of any kind of value. She is obviously not very used to living with other dogs, which is understandable enoug since she lives only with her human famliy.

One of the things she is getting used to is that in our house there is always boring cow-skin bones all over the place. If she tries to defend one, my dogs will just walk away and find another - it’s not a high value bone to them since there are others in the next room. This seems to work out fine, she can live with a bone in the room and still relax. Improvement! Today she even played with Orkan and an old sock, they had a great time without too much teeth and barking.

She is also working on sitting with my dogs in front of me, being fed when behaving nicely. A bit difficult for her when one of the other dogs move, like when they perform a trick, but so far we’ve had no accidents. When she acts out she just gets to leave the situation, no treats for her. I’m going to train some crate games with at least Shanti and Orkan, maybe even with Storm, to work on releasing only one dog at the time. My dogs are very good at “misunderstanding” release cues when I release the other, something Susan Garrett’s post on “table trading” gave me a bit of inspiration on. This will provide a training situation suitable for the treat acceptance. If she acts out, she’ll have to go back in her crate, simply like a time-out.

We also try to get rid of her barking to achieve just about anything. Like when we stop the car she is convinced that the only way to get out of the crate is to bark. Hard nut for her to crack, that we leave her alone ’till she’s calm and quiet

It might not sound like it, but Shanti is really a very nice dog! If she had a bit more furr and ability to move in snow, I might just have stolen her… Hee hee! Thanks to Laxmi and Sveinung for giving me the opportunity to learn a lot about this little girl and dog training for some weeks. Hope you’re enjoying your vacation!

Loud training

Orkan has always had a tendency to flip into loud, squeaky, unpleasant noise when he gets stressed enough during training. When he was a puppy, that sound was there almost constantly, he yelled at me to make me give him my food, to get me out of the shower, or just to make me less boring. Of course, he didn’t achieve anything by that yelling, and we gradually got more or less rid of it.

But it still sometimes occurs during shaping sessions, when the reward is really high quality (food in his case) and the criteria is a little difficult, making the reward frequency a bit low. Apparently, his stress level gets too high for him to handle, and he bursts out in loud, high pitched ear-splitting yells.

Simply waiting has helped, and it happens less frequently now, but it’s kind of hard not to say or do anything when that sound is distroying your hearing, if you see? This has made me (more or less by accident) avoid the situations when he starts yelling, by keeping the reward frequency high. And still, when he’s almost one year old, it still happens sometimes. So I figured he needs some awareness of his own stress levels. His little brain rooms a lot of stress, so he might need that awareness for later occasions

My solution is to give him time-outs (go to your crate, and lay there for a little while. Along with this I give him a verbal marker, in english it would be somthing like “oups”. I think the verbal marker is important in this kind of training, since time-outs don’t give him a specific message on what he did wrong. He also gets a second of time to do something different while my descision about giving him the time-out is being put into action. The first session I saw the potential of him associating stretching (a trick he has learned) with the time-out, since the yelling tendend to happen when he jumped out of a stretch.

Now, it seems to work. I am very happy about that! I still keep his reward frequency high, but now it’s not to avoid stress, it’s rather because he is an extremely fast thinker, doer and learner. When things don’t happen in time, he learns something else, or gets a bit confused. It’s time to start pushing it a bit, to provoke his frustration. Dog training is fun when it works!

Søt :-)

Agility-genser og t-skjorte!

Stemoren min kom nettopp hjem etter å ha vært i statene tre måneder. Hun hadde funnet t-skjorte og hettegenser med agilityhund på! Søt tegneserie-hund som hopper slalåm og sklir på vippa. Søøøt! Beste gaven jeg kunne fått tror jeg. Hihi ;-)