Active Side
The following exercises are designed to train your dog to recognize the specific cues that indicate the active side:
· Eye contact
· An open shoulder
· Hand signals
Teaching your Dog to Back Up
The following exercises begin with easy ways to teach the back-up behavior and then progress to more complicated techniques that will improve your dog’s core strength and allow you to use the behavior in competition.
Click & Treat
Most people have trained their dogs to understand that the clicker signals an appropriate or desired behavior is in progress, and they use it in this way to communicate with their dogs. But, if used correctly, this is only a small piece of the clicker’s power.
Teaching a “Close”
Close means to disregard all handler motion and simply fall into position. This is one of few cues that requires my dogs to disregard my motion. You can have a blast using it while running Snooker!
Come to Heel, Part 1
As agility courses become more technical and dogs’ yards per second increase, specific skills are becoming increasingly necessary to successfully communicate course direction to our dogs. Possibly the most important of those skills is “come to heel.”
Come to Heel, Part 2
The exercises this month build on those in last month’s article and are more difficult than typical heel work. They are designed to provide your dog with a good transition from walking at heel to running agility courses.
Environmental Enrichment
Regardless of the breed, most of us select dogs that are energetic and driven, two traits that often clash with being a happy household pet. To ensure the welfare of our agility dogs, we must consciously employ methods designed to meet their behavioral needs.
Lie Down on the Run
The excitement of running a fast dog on a challenging agility course is addictive! However, if you are running a dog with speed but no control, the thrill of running agility gradually turns to frustration as your dog takes the wide path, has difficulty with contacts and start-line behaviors, and is generally unpredictable.
Playing without Tugging
I have seen many students struggling with dogs that do not want to tug, dogs that will not tug in public, and dogs that are just not motivated by tugging. The following exercises are fun to play with any dog but are particularly relevant for dogs that are not wild about tugging.
Training Multiple Dogs at Once
Initially when planning this article, I intended to write about training agility dogs to lie down and wait their turn while playing agility. But after seeing how quickly Happy went from a highly distractible puppy to a focused agility dog, I thought other people who struggle with inattention at trials might find Happy’s solution helpful in their quest to train appropriate trial behavior.
Training the Tunnel
Haphazard tunnel training can cause three main problems: 1) It can create “tunnel suckers;” 2) It does not teach our dogs when we want extension or collection when exiting a tunnel; and 3) It does not teach our dogs independence in finding the tunnel entry, or where to look for their handler at the exit of the tunnel.
