|
|
|
AGILITY IS FUN FOR THE DOG!
Le Hammer
This is the first of a series of articles about the fun we can have with our dogs in the sport of agility. I hope to cover a lot of topics – from the judge’s perspective, as a competitor, a trainer, as a beginner or competing at the top level. Maybe we can also try to look at agility from the dog’s perspective.
What strikes me most about agility is the fun the dogs
are having. I have been involved in all sorts of dog sports – showing,
obedience, flyball, utility gundog work, and retrieving trials. My dogs have
never had more fun than when competing in agility (although the gundog work
came close.) And an amazing bond is built between dog and handler. Such
close team work is involved in completing a clear round – the handler must
rely on the dog to negotiate all those obstacles correctly, and the dog must
rely on the handler to tell him which obstacle is next. If only it were as
easy as that sounds!!! The teamwork that develops in a top agility pair does not come automatically. It must be built up by a training system that teaches the dog to enjoy his part of the teamwork. There is no way you can force a dog to run up, across and down narrow planks at full speed and hit a small coloured section on the bottom of the down plank. There is no way you can force a dog to zig-zag between a series of poles if he does not want to do it. And if you want a dog to negotiate these obstacles at top speed, he has to trust that his best efforts and enthusiasm will be encouraged and rewarded. That reward could be a fun game of tug or fetch, food (a popular reward with my own dogs) or the opportunity to do some more fun agility.
But not every agility run goes clear. When it doesn’t,
more often than not, it is the handler who gets it wrong. If we show any of
our disappointment to our canine team member, he will think he has misread
our signals, and think it was his mistake. This creates uncertainty for our
dogs, and this uncertainty will undermine the teamwork. Your canine team
mate may not be quite so confident in future runs. There will be a little
bit of hesitancy, a little bit of doubt – a slightly slower run or a
misunderstood signal. The team is not functioning as well as it can.
So our training is based on “turning our dog on”. He learns to try things – to work out what actions gain rewards, and which ones don’t. He does not worry about doing things wrong – because he does not get into trouble. But he also learns that if he repeats that wrong action, he is wasting time – he could be trying to do something right and that will gain him something he wants. These principles apply to the very basics of agility training when our dogs are just learning to do the obstacles. Top agility trainers like to see their dogs develop this ability to think. We encourage our dogs to try new things – if they try something that we like, we reward it. For example, if our dog voluntarily jumps on a table, we will give them a reward on the table. If the dog tries something that we don’t like, we just ignore it and try to set up a situation that encourages the dog to do what we do like. If the dog walks under the table, we ignore it. If the dog keeps walking under the table, we could make the table lower to make it more difficult to walk under. But if we reprimand our dog for walking under the table, it is likely that our dog will be reluctant to approach the table at all. It will be more difficult to train our dog to race to the table at full speed because he will be uncertain about whether the table is a good place to be or not. If our dog still does not seem interested in jumping on the table, we can break the exercise down into something easier again. We may reward the dog for just walking toward the table. Then, to encourage the dog to take interest in the top of the table, we can place the reward there. This is very different to luring the dog onto the table. In the first instance, we reward the dog walking to the table, but increase his interest in being on the table by placing the food there. The dog has initiated the sequence of events by moving toward the table in the first place. He has made us put the food there.
Luring the dog onto the table occurs when we show the
food to the dog to make him interested in doing anything at all. If we had
not shown him the food, he would not be interested in doing anything for us.
We do not lure, or bribe the dog to jump on the table, by placing some food
on the table and then send him to the food. All this teaches him is that it
is a good idea to run to the food. We cannot have food in the ring, so this
will not help our training. Some trainers will place food on the table a
couple of times to give the dog an idea of what they want the dog to do. But
only once or twice. Then comes the huge leap in understanding when the dog
realizes that he can make you produce a piece of food out of your pocket if
he runs away from you and leaps on the table – the dog can actually make you
run over to reward him. The dog is now in control of the rewards, and will
start trying to do things to make you pull food out of your pocket again.
Our dog has clued in on the game by now. He has learned he has to try to do something to get us to give him the reward. The table was a good place this time. So even though the food is not there, this time he jumps on the table to see if that will make us bring him his treat. And it does. Next time we may make it a bit more difficult by starting further away from the table, or by gradually increasing the height up to the dog’s competition height, by starting the dog from different positions compared to our own position or by placing other distractions around. We can also give a jackpot reward for a more enthusiastic or quicker performance, and withhold our reward for a sluggish or slower performance. We eventually put a “name” or command on the action. Then we only reward the dog for jumping on the table when we give our command. If he jumps on the table at other times he doesn’t get into trouble, but he does not get rewarded for it. In the end we have a dog that drives to the table at full speed, when commanded, with full enthusiasm. And the dog just loves to do the table. We teach each of the obstacles this way – there are many techniques to help our dogs be successful, and that information can be found in books or at training clubs. That’s not the reason for this article. I just wanted to explain why our dogs love their sport so much.
Our dogs love agility because it is fun. Certainly they get rewarded highly for their performance, but it is more than that – they love to bounce through the weave poles, they gain self confidence when they learn to negotiate a narrow plank, they enjoy cooperating with their human partner and they love to soar through the air as they fly over the jumps. Just look at the look on the dogs’ faces when you watch them. They are wearing big smiles and their tails never stop wagging.
Agility is fun!
PHOTO CREDITS Photo 1 Photo2 Photo 3 Photo 4 Photo 5 Photo 6 Photo 7
|
