We had a fun weekend hosting our first Teacup Agility Trial in our new building! It was a lot of fun! Rachelle was a great judge with fun and challenging courses. Everyone pitched in and helped and we had a wonderful worker raffle organized by Chris Mosley. We had several vendors here on Saturday and a couple on Sunday. The food went over well both days having soup on Saturday and ham and turkey on Sunday.
As of this writing there were three TACHs! Chris and Winn earned their TACH, Dennis and Daisy earned their TACH and Kelly and Sired earned their TACH2. Wow!
Windy and Spring made their Teacup debuts and handled the tight little courses amazingly well. They are both much more adaptable to running collected than we ever imagined. I wasn't able to run Feisty much because her back is sore.
We had a great turnout with the most runs entered we've ever had and we had a number of entries brand new to TDAA and a few brand new to agility trials. Everyone had a great time and it is such a relaxed setting. We are going to look at our calendar and see when we can have some more of these here!
Annelise
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Great lessons!
Once again I am amazed at Suzanne Clothier's gift of observation. I never cease to learn from her and to hone my own observation skills. She really brought home the concept of "ask the dog" who they are. We tend to get caught up in what she refers to as the "frame" of what we already know about the dog and our preconceived notions about what that means. Looking and closely observing the dog without any prior knowledge from the human is an excellent skill to have.
I have always seen and believed in dogs being unique individuals and that "cookie cutter" dog training is not the way to go. My own dogs alone have shown me that, let alone the many others who have come before me for help over the years.
Suzanne is also the master of human analogies that can really help drive home a concept or point she wants to make. This makes her an excellent teacher of the human part of the team. It is important to learn from Suzanne with an open mind and also with a willingness to let go of your prior beliefs and ideas. She may upset you if you chose to go that route or you can thank her for the incredible insight she has shared with you.
This is exactly what happened to me this past weekend in a completely unexpected way. I decided to volunteer one of my dogs for the group exercise of asking the DOG who they are. I brought Tay out for the group. She was her usual happy self and wiggling around to visit everyone. The point of the exercise is to observe the dog and to not seek information from me. Tay didn't stop moving the entire time and she was aware of things in her environment. After several minutes Suzanne came over and observed that she is a dog that we don't get to see all the time but we should notice them more. She noticed immediately her sweet soft eyes. Many of us have seen her "sweet eyes", it is one of the most salient characteristics she has. I don't know of anyone who has met her who hasn't commented on her "sweetness." Well what I learned is that her eyes do lack that intensity and depth that many dogs have. This is so true. What does that mean? Suzanne believes it means that Tay may not be functioning fully cognitively.
Rather than feeling sad for her, I immediately felt relief! Now I had a reason why some things are so especially hard for Tay to learn and other things were incredibly easy. It was a huge "aha" moment for me. What else did Suzanne notice about her? She used the analogy that Tay does "not take notes." Now many of you who have read my posts and my blogs know about the detailed 20 volume set of notes that Feisty has and the shorter more concise notebook series that Sinco has. I have never felt like Tay was a note taker but I did feel that she would generalize some behaviors very easily. Tay at the seminar greeted everyone in the circle the same whether she knew them or not and she would repeatedly cycle through the group.
So for the past several days I've been pondering the kinds of things that Tay learned easily and the kinds of things that she still struggles to learn and I struggle to teach her. She learned the agility obstacles with incredible ease, even weave poles. I waited until she was 15 months old to start weaves. She learned 2on/2off very easily. She learned the cone exercises and hoop exercises I did with her from when she was a puppy. She has an awesome recall. She is awesome with targeting. She generalized agility obstacles with amazing ease and she generalized targeting from a lid on the floor to tape on the wall with amazing ease. She can play "101 things to do with X (fill in box, pedestal, etc.)" with the cue "show me something else." She learned to run and jump in a chair (be careful what you teach your dog!). She loves crate games and is wonderful in a crate anywhere. She has a very good automatic sit in front of any door and will turn toward me automatically when going through almost any door.
What kinds of things have been hard for Tay? Stays... - even though when I tried to video this she did one of the best stays (I was only a couple of feet away). She tends to keep moving her feet constantly on a stay whether in the house, by agility equipment or anywhere else. She has a marginal stay on a mat - it takes a lot of work to maintain. She has trouble with heel position. I teach all of my dogs to "choose to heel" with a clicker and treats and I do it on both sides of me. As I refine for obedience I set a distinct body posture and hand position to cue the heel position as well as the word. She can not orient to my side - she is a bit random and is often out in front curving around me. My other dogs have learned this with relative ease. She does not understand hand signals at all in spite of lots of use of them. She does not appear attentive at all to my body cues. My other dogs are very attentive to subtle changes in my body position - one twitch and I can send them off anywhere. I believe Tay does not understand obstacle names for discrimination. I am starting to believe it is 50/50 for her. It is something I work on with all of my dogs and she has the weakest skills in this regard and requires a lot of work on my part. Suzanne said she would have a hard time with distance. She has a lot of confidence on individual obstacle performance that she can do obstacles at a distance with ease. What she can not do is take direction AND do obstacles at a distance. This is what I'm discovering with her. In training I break things down and in pieces she can get it but when put together she has trouble keeping two ideas/thoughts in her head to be able to change direction or do discriminations at a distance. She will either head to what is in front of her but if she is derailed I can not redirect her at all unlike my other dogs who will redirect. The other thing she has a hard time with when outside in a field is "auto check-in." She can do it in familiar surroundings that are not too distracting if my treats are good enough. At the livestock arena and outside in a field she would not both keep an eye on me and be able to keep sniffing. I work on this with all my dogs when they are puppies and take them to different places. When off leash I will make sharp turns away from them and when they catch up with me they get a treat. Then they can go off sniffing and anytime they check-in they get a treat. My other dogs do this with ease but Tay often has to be called and then she turns on a dime and comes.
I have also in the last three weeks been working on her doing front paw lifts/stretches as part of her rehab. I knew it would be easy to shape it but what I didn't expect was how difficult it is to refine it. I want to try to teach her to do one paw a few times and then switch to the other paw. Even after three weeks she still will offer each paw equally and wildly and can not seem to repeatedly offer the same paw over and over in spite of reinforcement to try to shape that. I am using my hands as the cue. I am considering teaching her to touch an object to see if that will make it clearer to her rather than touching my body part.
For comparison I decided to train my dogs who had not ever been asked to do this trick to review how they do it. Two of the dogs had very strong right paw preference and I had a hard time getting them to offer the left paw (Sinco almost fell over a couple of times trying to do it!) One dog had a strong left paw preference - Feisty ;) Tay does not have nearly such a strong paw preference. Suzanne said that both in dogs and humans that lack of handedness/pawedness is associated with a lack of bilateralization in the brain. This may also be linked to my difficulty in teaching her left and right which I train all my dogs to do.
On Friday afternoon I set up a session to video for Suzanne. I had been trying to come up with different scenarios to show what Tay does. We did one thing which is the start of teaching a dog to find someone or something. I showed her where I was hiding a treat. We went out of the room for 3-5 seconds and came back in and allowed her to search for the treat. She had a really hard time with this and after 45 seconds or so needed help. We repeated this two times each with two different spots. Each time she needed help after a long time. She was wondering around sniffing but seemed to have no recall where the treat was. Then I had someone else hide the treat in one of the two spots and brought her in and she could not find those either without help or after a long time searching. This was interesting so I wanted to see how my other dogs would do with this exercise. I used all the dogs I had who had never been taught any tracking or scent discrimination. Sinco remembered the treats right away and ran to them every time. Amigo the JRT did as well (especially after a potty break). Then I did it with Spring and Tobie. They both did better than Tay but took a bit more time than Amigo or Sinco but caught on pretty quickly. After a break we brought Tay back and tried it again with different treats and she did much better the second time and was more like Tobie and Spring on the second time. Tay is a highly food motivated dog who also if very smell sensitive and uses her nose constantly so one would think she could find a hidden treat easily.
In a few days I am going to try it again with Tay in the same place to see how she does. If she does well then I will move it to a new place.
I have a theory about Tay. I think she can learn behaviors quickly when there is a clear large physical object (stimulus) involved. All of the behaviors she does well involve some object that is pretty visible. The behaviors she struggles with involve body cues from me or no physical objects at all. I knew early on that obedience would not be a good sport for her and clearly that is true - the precision and awareness of my body cues is not a strong suit for her. Agility is a good sport for her.
Tay is very high functioning on the spectrum. But she is here to remind us that there is a spectrum of cognitive functioning in dogs like there is in humans. We have seen ranges in emotional functioning in dogs (i.e. reactive dogs). We often overlook the fact that some dogs may not be able to learn what we want to teach them, may have difficulty learning the way we are teaching them or may not have the innate cognitive ability to do it. I am very glad that I taught Tay with a clicker early on - I think that may have been the smartest thing to do for her. She does not do well with luring - but the clicker is very powerful for her. I have been learning that clicker training works well with autistic children. I don't think Tay has trouble socially, she is very non-reactive and friendly but she does mediate well between people she knows and those she doesn't know. I am busy reading resources that Suzanne has given me to brush up on cognitive psychology.
The good thing for me about Tay is that she is taking me back to my college and grad school psychology studies and now I'm getting caught up on the latest research in the last 20 years since then! It is very exciting for me.
Since this has happened in the last week a number of top trainers have shared similar stories where they thought it was the owner not having a clue about training the dog so the trainer took the dog home to try to work with it. The top trainer also had a hard time with the dog. So remember it is not always the owner's fault when a dog is not understanding a concept. Sometimes it is part of who the dog is.
So when first looking at a training problem - open your mind and ask the dog "who are you?" There may be physical reasons, mental limitations or relationship with the owner problems that are affecting training the dog.
Open your minds as well as your hearts and you will be amazed at what is out there!
Annelise who never ceases to learn from her dogs and her dogs never cease to teach her!
PS For those of you who want some light reading (or listening) - Suzanne and I recommend the Sapolsky lectures available at http://itunes.stanford.edu/ or at http://www.thegreatcourses.com/.
I have always seen and believed in dogs being unique individuals and that "cookie cutter" dog training is not the way to go. My own dogs alone have shown me that, let alone the many others who have come before me for help over the years.
Suzanne is also the master of human analogies that can really help drive home a concept or point she wants to make. This makes her an excellent teacher of the human part of the team. It is important to learn from Suzanne with an open mind and also with a willingness to let go of your prior beliefs and ideas. She may upset you if you chose to go that route or you can thank her for the incredible insight she has shared with you.
This is exactly what happened to me this past weekend in a completely unexpected way. I decided to volunteer one of my dogs for the group exercise of asking the DOG who they are. I brought Tay out for the group. She was her usual happy self and wiggling around to visit everyone. The point of the exercise is to observe the dog and to not seek information from me. Tay didn't stop moving the entire time and she was aware of things in her environment. After several minutes Suzanne came over and observed that she is a dog that we don't get to see all the time but we should notice them more. She noticed immediately her sweet soft eyes. Many of us have seen her "sweet eyes", it is one of the most salient characteristics she has. I don't know of anyone who has met her who hasn't commented on her "sweetness." Well what I learned is that her eyes do lack that intensity and depth that many dogs have. This is so true. What does that mean? Suzanne believes it means that Tay may not be functioning fully cognitively.
Rather than feeling sad for her, I immediately felt relief! Now I had a reason why some things are so especially hard for Tay to learn and other things were incredibly easy. It was a huge "aha" moment for me. What else did Suzanne notice about her? She used the analogy that Tay does "not take notes." Now many of you who have read my posts and my blogs know about the detailed 20 volume set of notes that Feisty has and the shorter more concise notebook series that Sinco has. I have never felt like Tay was a note taker but I did feel that she would generalize some behaviors very easily. Tay at the seminar greeted everyone in the circle the same whether she knew them or not and she would repeatedly cycle through the group.
So for the past several days I've been pondering the kinds of things that Tay learned easily and the kinds of things that she still struggles to learn and I struggle to teach her. She learned the agility obstacles with incredible ease, even weave poles. I waited until she was 15 months old to start weaves. She learned 2on/2off very easily. She learned the cone exercises and hoop exercises I did with her from when she was a puppy. She has an awesome recall. She is awesome with targeting. She generalized agility obstacles with amazing ease and she generalized targeting from a lid on the floor to tape on the wall with amazing ease. She can play "101 things to do with X (fill in box, pedestal, etc.)" with the cue "show me something else." She learned to run and jump in a chair (be careful what you teach your dog!). She loves crate games and is wonderful in a crate anywhere. She has a very good automatic sit in front of any door and will turn toward me automatically when going through almost any door.
What kinds of things have been hard for Tay? Stays... - even though when I tried to video this she did one of the best stays (I was only a couple of feet away). She tends to keep moving her feet constantly on a stay whether in the house, by agility equipment or anywhere else. She has a marginal stay on a mat - it takes a lot of work to maintain. She has trouble with heel position. I teach all of my dogs to "choose to heel" with a clicker and treats and I do it on both sides of me. As I refine for obedience I set a distinct body posture and hand position to cue the heel position as well as the word. She can not orient to my side - she is a bit random and is often out in front curving around me. My other dogs have learned this with relative ease. She does not understand hand signals at all in spite of lots of use of them. She does not appear attentive at all to my body cues. My other dogs are very attentive to subtle changes in my body position - one twitch and I can send them off anywhere. I believe Tay does not understand obstacle names for discrimination. I am starting to believe it is 50/50 for her. It is something I work on with all of my dogs and she has the weakest skills in this regard and requires a lot of work on my part. Suzanne said she would have a hard time with distance. She has a lot of confidence on individual obstacle performance that she can do obstacles at a distance with ease. What she can not do is take direction AND do obstacles at a distance. This is what I'm discovering with her. In training I break things down and in pieces she can get it but when put together she has trouble keeping two ideas/thoughts in her head to be able to change direction or do discriminations at a distance. She will either head to what is in front of her but if she is derailed I can not redirect her at all unlike my other dogs who will redirect. The other thing she has a hard time with when outside in a field is "auto check-in." She can do it in familiar surroundings that are not too distracting if my treats are good enough. At the livestock arena and outside in a field she would not both keep an eye on me and be able to keep sniffing. I work on this with all my dogs when they are puppies and take them to different places. When off leash I will make sharp turns away from them and when they catch up with me they get a treat. Then they can go off sniffing and anytime they check-in they get a treat. My other dogs do this with ease but Tay often has to be called and then she turns on a dime and comes.
I have also in the last three weeks been working on her doing front paw lifts/stretches as part of her rehab. I knew it would be easy to shape it but what I didn't expect was how difficult it is to refine it. I want to try to teach her to do one paw a few times and then switch to the other paw. Even after three weeks she still will offer each paw equally and wildly and can not seem to repeatedly offer the same paw over and over in spite of reinforcement to try to shape that. I am using my hands as the cue. I am considering teaching her to touch an object to see if that will make it clearer to her rather than touching my body part.
For comparison I decided to train my dogs who had not ever been asked to do this trick to review how they do it. Two of the dogs had very strong right paw preference and I had a hard time getting them to offer the left paw (Sinco almost fell over a couple of times trying to do it!) One dog had a strong left paw preference - Feisty ;) Tay does not have nearly such a strong paw preference. Suzanne said that both in dogs and humans that lack of handedness/pawedness is associated with a lack of bilateralization in the brain. This may also be linked to my difficulty in teaching her left and right which I train all my dogs to do.
On Friday afternoon I set up a session to video for Suzanne. I had been trying to come up with different scenarios to show what Tay does. We did one thing which is the start of teaching a dog to find someone or something. I showed her where I was hiding a treat. We went out of the room for 3-5 seconds and came back in and allowed her to search for the treat. She had a really hard time with this and after 45 seconds or so needed help. We repeated this two times each with two different spots. Each time she needed help after a long time. She was wondering around sniffing but seemed to have no recall where the treat was. Then I had someone else hide the treat in one of the two spots and brought her in and she could not find those either without help or after a long time searching. This was interesting so I wanted to see how my other dogs would do with this exercise. I used all the dogs I had who had never been taught any tracking or scent discrimination. Sinco remembered the treats right away and ran to them every time. Amigo the JRT did as well (especially after a potty break). Then I did it with Spring and Tobie. They both did better than Tay but took a bit more time than Amigo or Sinco but caught on pretty quickly. After a break we brought Tay back and tried it again with different treats and she did much better the second time and was more like Tobie and Spring on the second time. Tay is a highly food motivated dog who also if very smell sensitive and uses her nose constantly so one would think she could find a hidden treat easily.
In a few days I am going to try it again with Tay in the same place to see how she does. If she does well then I will move it to a new place.
I have a theory about Tay. I think she can learn behaviors quickly when there is a clear large physical object (stimulus) involved. All of the behaviors she does well involve some object that is pretty visible. The behaviors she struggles with involve body cues from me or no physical objects at all. I knew early on that obedience would not be a good sport for her and clearly that is true - the precision and awareness of my body cues is not a strong suit for her. Agility is a good sport for her.
Tay is very high functioning on the spectrum. But she is here to remind us that there is a spectrum of cognitive functioning in dogs like there is in humans. We have seen ranges in emotional functioning in dogs (i.e. reactive dogs). We often overlook the fact that some dogs may not be able to learn what we want to teach them, may have difficulty learning the way we are teaching them or may not have the innate cognitive ability to do it. I am very glad that I taught Tay with a clicker early on - I think that may have been the smartest thing to do for her. She does not do well with luring - but the clicker is very powerful for her. I have been learning that clicker training works well with autistic children. I don't think Tay has trouble socially, she is very non-reactive and friendly but she does mediate well between people she knows and those she doesn't know. I am busy reading resources that Suzanne has given me to brush up on cognitive psychology.
The good thing for me about Tay is that she is taking me back to my college and grad school psychology studies and now I'm getting caught up on the latest research in the last 20 years since then! It is very exciting for me.
Since this has happened in the last week a number of top trainers have shared similar stories where they thought it was the owner not having a clue about training the dog so the trainer took the dog home to try to work with it. The top trainer also had a hard time with the dog. So remember it is not always the owner's fault when a dog is not understanding a concept. Sometimes it is part of who the dog is.
So when first looking at a training problem - open your mind and ask the dog "who are you?" There may be physical reasons, mental limitations or relationship with the owner problems that are affecting training the dog.
Open your minds as well as your hearts and you will be amazed at what is out there!
Annelise who never ceases to learn from her dogs and her dogs never cease to teach her!
PS For those of you who want some light reading (or listening) - Suzanne and I recommend the Sapolsky lectures available at http://itunes.stanford.edu/ or at http://www.thegreatcourses.com/.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Leysha, run free sweet girl!
Rising Sun Leysha S-NATCH ADCH ATCH APD MX MXJ TN-E TG-E WV-O CDX STDs,d FM HSAs,d
6/22/96 – 3/18/10
Leysha has brought me full circle and yet she took me to a lot of new places. She was born next door to where we live now before I lived here. She was out of an “oops” breeding from a dog I always really liked. She was an easy dog to train but 13 years ago we were still just figuring out how best to train dogs for agility. She taught me a LOT about motivating dogs and about ring stress. She was the first dog of mine to be great in the backyard but at trials she would either not want to leave the start line or she would run out of the ring part way through the course. She helped me learn about doing short courses/sequences at trials to build confidence. It worked well enough for her to win the 20” Open Division at NADAC Championships when she was just two years old. She was very consistent and fast enough for any agility organization. Our last competitive run together was in the Veterans Grand Prix Finals at the 2003 USDAA Nationals where she placed 2nd. It was a wonderful run that I can still see clearly as if it were yesterday (and I haven’t even watched the run on the DVD yet). Yes she was retired at age 7 because she clearly did agility for me and I had always promised her that we would do herding together. We focused on herding and obedience for the next couple of years before her complete retirement from the competitive world.
She got me started in competitive herding – it was what she loved doing best. She did most of it in spite of me – I learned from her how much natural talent in herding is a good thing but also how important foundation skills are for good teamwork in herding. We didn’t have the foundation skills. But we had fun. She loved herding ducks best , and she loved it when we moved to Stacy and had sheep and ducks that she needed to herd and keep in line.
She also did flyball (not the speediest but VERY consistent). She and I did obedience but the stress of Utility competition was too much for her and I retired her before she was able to earn a leg. She loved her retirement. She loved running around the front yard keeping an ever watchful eye on the sheep and ducks.
Leysha was also very willing to help students learn agility handling. She had a sense of humor about it and would stop in her tracks and look at them if they were not at all clear – even if she had a pretty good idea of where they wanted her to go. I think she took perverse pleasure in pointing out handling mistakes.
She and I went to NADAC Championships, AKC Nationals and USDAA Nationals. She was always very good with the many puppies I have had here and was firm but tolerant of them. She didn’t like a lot of out of control playing unless she was involved. Her favorite toy was a jolly ball which she would obsessively play with through the woods and the barn.
She also got to see me into the new school and spent some time there with me and she was able to see me through this latest transformation. After a couple of weeks where she was not doing well after a bad seizure we got her meds stabilized and I got a gift of a couple of weeks where she was bright-eyed, running around supervising the youngsters, getting into the toilet paper rolls, and cleaning out pockets of pants. I treasure those two weeks and spent a lot of time with her and appreciating everything about her. They are never with us long enough but I’m grateful for the time I had with her and all that she has shared with me. She and I have been together many times and I am sure that she and I will be together again sometime.
http://www.agilecanines.com/AgilePack/Leysha.html
6/22/96 – 3/18/10
Leysha has brought me full circle and yet she took me to a lot of new places. She was born next door to where we live now before I lived here. She was out of an “oops” breeding from a dog I always really liked. She was an easy dog to train but 13 years ago we were still just figuring out how best to train dogs for agility. She taught me a LOT about motivating dogs and about ring stress. She was the first dog of mine to be great in the backyard but at trials she would either not want to leave the start line or she would run out of the ring part way through the course. She helped me learn about doing short courses/sequences at trials to build confidence. It worked well enough for her to win the 20” Open Division at NADAC Championships when she was just two years old. She was very consistent and fast enough for any agility organization. Our last competitive run together was in the Veterans Grand Prix Finals at the 2003 USDAA Nationals where she placed 2nd. It was a wonderful run that I can still see clearly as if it were yesterday (and I haven’t even watched the run on the DVD yet). Yes she was retired at age 7 because she clearly did agility for me and I had always promised her that we would do herding together. We focused on herding and obedience for the next couple of years before her complete retirement from the competitive world.
She got me started in competitive herding – it was what she loved doing best. She did most of it in spite of me – I learned from her how much natural talent in herding is a good thing but also how important foundation skills are for good teamwork in herding. We didn’t have the foundation skills. But we had fun. She loved herding ducks best , and she loved it when we moved to Stacy and had sheep and ducks that she needed to herd and keep in line.
She also did flyball (not the speediest but VERY consistent). She and I did obedience but the stress of Utility competition was too much for her and I retired her before she was able to earn a leg. She loved her retirement. She loved running around the front yard keeping an ever watchful eye on the sheep and ducks.
Leysha was also very willing to help students learn agility handling. She had a sense of humor about it and would stop in her tracks and look at them if they were not at all clear – even if she had a pretty good idea of where they wanted her to go. I think she took perverse pleasure in pointing out handling mistakes.
She and I went to NADAC Championships, AKC Nationals and USDAA Nationals. She was always very good with the many puppies I have had here and was firm but tolerant of them. She didn’t like a lot of out of control playing unless she was involved. Her favorite toy was a jolly ball which she would obsessively play with through the woods and the barn.
She also got to see me into the new school and spent some time there with me and she was able to see me through this latest transformation. After a couple of weeks where she was not doing well after a bad seizure we got her meds stabilized and I got a gift of a couple of weeks where she was bright-eyed, running around supervising the youngsters, getting into the toilet paper rolls, and cleaning out pockets of pants. I treasure those two weeks and spent a lot of time with her and appreciating everything about her. They are never with us long enough but I’m grateful for the time I had with her and all that she has shared with me. She and I have been together many times and I am sure that she and I will be together again sometime.
http://www.agilecanines.com/AgilePack/Leysha.html
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Tables, Tables, Tables
We had a great time at the USDAA trial this past weekend. Sinco earned her PD3 title in very short time. She was in PD3 standard for only two trials!
The biggest personal Q was Feisty's awesome table performance on Sunday's Advanced Standard run. The table was very close to the edge of the ring and very close to where a timer, scribe and bar setter were sitting. The bar setter was a tall man who I've worked with in the past for proofing her tables. She is often stressed out by him when doing agility but not when she sees him away from agility. The table was also near the speaker box which had spooked her during her snooker run. I did a lot of desensitization outside of the ring near this area before our standard run. Feisty ran non-stop to the table and got on and laid down immediately with her back to the people. I praised her the entire time on the table and smiled at her. I was thrilled! I thought for a moment about leaving to a party but I remembered the last time I did that I spooked her by being too loud and excited and then she was afraid to do the table near me! So I opted to just be happy while she was there and continue on the course. I've spent a year and a half working on her stress over the table. I have not run her in an AKC Excellent Std class in maybe 9 months or more.
Some folks have asked what I've done to work on this problem, well I've done a LOT of work on it! I decided to not give up on it. The problem started in July of 2008 when at an AKC trial the judge had a loud booming voice and Feisty noticed for the first time a judge's presence while she was on the table. She was visibly distracted and could not focus the rest of the run. She would not go near him when he was judging the JWW class - she knew he was there. So I thought at first it was just an individual judge thing or maybe a male judge thing. But then it generalized to a table problem at trial after trial. She would stop and sniff the table and not get on, she would run away from the table, she would slam on the breaks and refuse to move, she would jump on and then off immediately - you name it she did it.
So I first started by leaving the ring to a big treat party when she got on the table. In the meantime she discovered that judges sometimes laugh when she does her table refusal antics. She loves to make people laugh. So I started to not be able to get her to go on the table at all. I stopped running her in AKC standard classes at that point. I took her to a group class where I could enlist the help of other students to hover around the table and also be major distractions around the course. This was very stressful for her - she had a hard time working through people crowding her on course. She would be fine with people outside the agility ring but not inside it. I had varying degrees of success with this project. I also had my students hang out after class to act as distractions for her.
I used CPE as a good place to train the table because it is the last obstacle in the games so what better way to have a party for getting on the table. Well she was sometimes reluctant to get on the table in CPE. I lost a few Qs because she took too long to get on the table. One time she did get on the table and it was part of the Jackpot class and I was so excited that I scared her with my excitement! That set us back a bit in CPE last summer.
In USDAA Feisty has been pretty good about getting on the table in most cases. There have been a couple of USDAA trials where she balked at it and it took a few seconds to get her to go on it. But this weekend is a major breakthrough for her to get right on the table when so many people were just a couple of feet away from it and it was a male judge in the ring. It was also in a ring where earlier that day and the previous day she experienced some stress. While it is way too early to tell I am thinking positive thoughts for our next AKC trial which will probably be this summer.
I have advised some of my students to reward their dog's table performance by leaving the ring after the table to a party. Mixing up when those rewards come at trials is so important to keeping ring performance fresh and consistent. We too often take our dog's good performance for granted until it deteriorates to the point of losing Qs. This is hard to do but it is SO important to improving a dog's performance in a trial setting. No amount of run throughs or open ring time will be the same as a trial setting.
So we'll see how things go this summer at our next AKC trials.
Annelise
The biggest personal Q was Feisty's awesome table performance on Sunday's Advanced Standard run. The table was very close to the edge of the ring and very close to where a timer, scribe and bar setter were sitting. The bar setter was a tall man who I've worked with in the past for proofing her tables. She is often stressed out by him when doing agility but not when she sees him away from agility. The table was also near the speaker box which had spooked her during her snooker run. I did a lot of desensitization outside of the ring near this area before our standard run. Feisty ran non-stop to the table and got on and laid down immediately with her back to the people. I praised her the entire time on the table and smiled at her. I was thrilled! I thought for a moment about leaving to a party but I remembered the last time I did that I spooked her by being too loud and excited and then she was afraid to do the table near me! So I opted to just be happy while she was there and continue on the course. I've spent a year and a half working on her stress over the table. I have not run her in an AKC Excellent Std class in maybe 9 months or more.
Some folks have asked what I've done to work on this problem, well I've done a LOT of work on it! I decided to not give up on it. The problem started in July of 2008 when at an AKC trial the judge had a loud booming voice and Feisty noticed for the first time a judge's presence while she was on the table. She was visibly distracted and could not focus the rest of the run. She would not go near him when he was judging the JWW class - she knew he was there. So I thought at first it was just an individual judge thing or maybe a male judge thing. But then it generalized to a table problem at trial after trial. She would stop and sniff the table and not get on, she would run away from the table, she would slam on the breaks and refuse to move, she would jump on and then off immediately - you name it she did it.
So I first started by leaving the ring to a big treat party when she got on the table. In the meantime she discovered that judges sometimes laugh when she does her table refusal antics. She loves to make people laugh. So I started to not be able to get her to go on the table at all. I stopped running her in AKC standard classes at that point. I took her to a group class where I could enlist the help of other students to hover around the table and also be major distractions around the course. This was very stressful for her - she had a hard time working through people crowding her on course. She would be fine with people outside the agility ring but not inside it. I had varying degrees of success with this project. I also had my students hang out after class to act as distractions for her.
I used CPE as a good place to train the table because it is the last obstacle in the games so what better way to have a party for getting on the table. Well she was sometimes reluctant to get on the table in CPE. I lost a few Qs because she took too long to get on the table. One time she did get on the table and it was part of the Jackpot class and I was so excited that I scared her with my excitement! That set us back a bit in CPE last summer.
In USDAA Feisty has been pretty good about getting on the table in most cases. There have been a couple of USDAA trials where she balked at it and it took a few seconds to get her to go on it. But this weekend is a major breakthrough for her to get right on the table when so many people were just a couple of feet away from it and it was a male judge in the ring. It was also in a ring where earlier that day and the previous day she experienced some stress. While it is way too early to tell I am thinking positive thoughts for our next AKC trial which will probably be this summer.
I have advised some of my students to reward their dog's table performance by leaving the ring after the table to a party. Mixing up when those rewards come at trials is so important to keeping ring performance fresh and consistent. We too often take our dog's good performance for granted until it deteriorates to the point of losing Qs. This is hard to do but it is SO important to improving a dog's performance in a trial setting. No amount of run throughs or open ring time will be the same as a trial setting.
So we'll see how things go this summer at our next AKC trials.
Annelise
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The "R" word ... again
While having Jedi's retirement discussion was hard this past week because we were not prepared for it but I was really unprepared to hear the "r" word mentioned for Tay. It is hard when we have fun doing this game with our dogs and yet they are doing much more physical work than we are out there.
To have to face the decision to retire a very high energy 4 year old dog who loves agility is something I have not had to do. Amigo's early retirement decision was not so hard because he really didn't seem to like agility (maybe because it always hurt him to do it). I have lost dogs at young ages so I am grateful that Tay is still here with me. I love her spirit - she (and Feisty) are always the first ones to volunteer to go with me. She loves doing things with me, she has boundless energy and she loves learning new things. While she has not been the most consistent agility dog, she is always fun to run because she is happy to be doing something with me.
While I love competitive agility, realistically I know it is not something I will do the rest of my life. I am pretty sure I will always have animals in my life. I don't know what is in store for Tay and me but I will have to find a way to make time for whatever it is. I do know it won't involve things that require lots of stays and self-control :)
Tay has had off and on front end lameness since the end of January. I thought she had pulled a muscle at the seminar. But after 10 days of massage and chiropractic she was still on and off lame on the left and right legs. I decided to take her for x-rays. Having learned my lesson from Spring that this could mean a broken leg, I wanted to be sure that was not the case. I also had her tested for the tick diseases. I was not at all prepared for the findings that showed she is in the early stages of arthritis on both elbows and has irritated lungs (she is asymptomatic). The elbows are due to wear and tear and dogs with straight fronts are very susceptible to this. I try to be careful about when I start jumping my dogs and where I jump them but some dogs are just more vulnerable to developing this condition.
I went to a seminar the day before the trial and I ran all of the dogs there. I was concerned with the surface because it seemed harder and slipperier than I expected. All of my dogs had sore muscles when they had massages at the trial the next day. My dogs usually are not sore unless they injure themselves in some way. So please, please, please think very carefully about where and when you run your dogs in agility. The softness of the surface is just as, if not, more important than the degree of slipperiness. I would definitely not have run an older dog on that surface. You just never know when your dog might have a condition that is going to be aggravated by running on hard surfaces and you never know what injury you could cause by running on that kind of surface. Agility is an athletic sport and the risk of injury is ALWAYS there. I try to stack the deck in my favor to minimize injury as much as possible. I'm now even more adamant than ever that I won't knowingly run my dogs on a hard surface. Sometimes even at outdoor trials the ground can be as hard as concrete.
I guess I have another adventure ahead of me and more things to learn. I just wish I knew what it was I had to learn and if the lessons could be easier...
Annelise
To have to face the decision to retire a very high energy 4 year old dog who loves agility is something I have not had to do. Amigo's early retirement decision was not so hard because he really didn't seem to like agility (maybe because it always hurt him to do it). I have lost dogs at young ages so I am grateful that Tay is still here with me. I love her spirit - she (and Feisty) are always the first ones to volunteer to go with me. She loves doing things with me, she has boundless energy and she loves learning new things. While she has not been the most consistent agility dog, she is always fun to run because she is happy to be doing something with me.
While I love competitive agility, realistically I know it is not something I will do the rest of my life. I am pretty sure I will always have animals in my life. I don't know what is in store for Tay and me but I will have to find a way to make time for whatever it is. I do know it won't involve things that require lots of stays and self-control :)
Tay has had off and on front end lameness since the end of January. I thought she had pulled a muscle at the seminar. But after 10 days of massage and chiropractic she was still on and off lame on the left and right legs. I decided to take her for x-rays. Having learned my lesson from Spring that this could mean a broken leg, I wanted to be sure that was not the case. I also had her tested for the tick diseases. I was not at all prepared for the findings that showed she is in the early stages of arthritis on both elbows and has irritated lungs (she is asymptomatic). The elbows are due to wear and tear and dogs with straight fronts are very susceptible to this. I try to be careful about when I start jumping my dogs and where I jump them but some dogs are just more vulnerable to developing this condition.
I went to a seminar the day before the trial and I ran all of the dogs there. I was concerned with the surface because it seemed harder and slipperier than I expected. All of my dogs had sore muscles when they had massages at the trial the next day. My dogs usually are not sore unless they injure themselves in some way. So please, please, please think very carefully about where and when you run your dogs in agility. The softness of the surface is just as, if not, more important than the degree of slipperiness. I would definitely not have run an older dog on that surface. You just never know when your dog might have a condition that is going to be aggravated by running on hard surfaces and you never know what injury you could cause by running on that kind of surface. Agility is an athletic sport and the risk of injury is ALWAYS there. I try to stack the deck in my favor to minimize injury as much as possible. I'm now even more adamant than ever that I won't knowingly run my dogs on a hard surface. Sometimes even at outdoor trials the ground can be as hard as concrete.
I guess I have another adventure ahead of me and more things to learn. I just wish I knew what it was I had to learn and if the lessons could be easier...
Annelise
Monday, February 8, 2010
Retiring dogs - difficult decisions
Another era in dog agility may be coming to a close. The decision of when to retire a dog is so much easier when we can make the choice ourselves. It is much harder when the dog makes it for us before we are ready to let go of the joy of running agility with our canine partner.
My very first dog and the one who got my hooked on agility died when she was two years old - shortly after we discovered the fun of agility! Then Demi was the next one who went blind just when she was starting to get the hang of agility and being a teammate with me (she didn't come to me until she was a year and a half old and she had no training). The cataract surgery was not enough to help her see to do agility safely in different types of lighting so it wasn't worth the risk of injury. Then Bradish came along and really got me hooked on competitive agility. He loved flyball and agility. I had planned on obedience as his post-agility career. However the years of flyball took their toll on his carpal joints and he was not sound enough to do the jumps required in Obedience Utility or Open so he was retired from that activity before I was ready. Then Nigel was always watched carefully because he was diagnosed with moderate hip dysplasia at 2 years old by two different Orthopedic surgeons (one at the U of M) even though OFA said his hips were "good." He developed Spondylosis as well as severe arthritis in hips and his agility career was very short lived. He didn't like agility much and probably because it was painful to him at times even though he was plenty fast enough when he felt good.
Then the next generation came along. Leysha loved herding and liked agility and obedience. I tried to do obedience earlier in her life than I did with Bradish in the hopes of actually finishing a UD with her. Leysha was retired from agility in 2003 after she gave me the run of a lifetime with a fast clean run at the USDAA Veterans Grand Prix Finals. We took second then. She learned to love agility with a lot of help from me and I wanted to remember her running agility with that run in mind when we were in sync, she was giving me 200% and having a ton of fun. She didn't need to do anymore agility after that - that was my gift to her. She spent much of her retirement doing herding chores around here and earning started sheep and duck titles in AKC. She became too stressed trying to earn a UD so I retired her from that. I was able to work her through her initial stress in agility but doing it again at the age of 9-10 in obedience just didn't seem fair to her. I wanted our obedience runs to be fun together and if she didn't enjoy it then I was not going to try to make her enjoy it. She has loved her retirement life and she is still going strong and runs around the yard eager to help with any barn chore. I love seeing her so happy just doing things around here - she was never that happy to go to an agility trial even though she earned many upper level agility championship titles and won national competitions.
Tobie is the next one in this generation. He came to me at a year and a half. I learned a lot from him, he loved agility and ran fast. He taught me what it is like to train and run a fast dog. He also taught me what it is like to have a reactive dog who is aggressive. I learned a lot about training and managing a reactive dog. He was a lot of work to manage at an agility trial. He also was what I call an adrenaline junkie in that he would get so high he couldn't think when he was running. It would interfere with our teamwork at trials. He would listen and follow direction well in training and even at seminars but at a trial he would become like a drug addict who can't hear or follow directions. He did earn a couple of champion agility titles but it was not fun for me as his teammate to run him at trials. Yes he was very fast but when he was not a team player more than he was it made it not as much fun for me. I retired him when he was 9 years old. I also was concerned that he does get so high in agility that if he did hurt himself he would keep running and as he aged the likelihood of hurting himself increases dramatically. He actually doesn't seem to mind retirement. Due to his dog aggressiveness I can't take him to trials with me and I really can't do many other activities with him. He and I did Rally but he gets high doing that and started barking while waiting his turn and then he can't think clearly. He is a great dog around the house and easy to live with.
Amigo had to be retired from agility at the age of 3. His structure with his front-end was causing repeated tears in his pectoral muscles when jumping. He would have on again and off again lameness. After rehabbing him twice from the injuries I consulted with a few different people and decided that retiring him from agility made the most sense. He is a reminder that structure is really important for agility. If you know your dog has poor structure for agility in some capacity or another you need to take extra care of that area and you need to be prepared that your dog may have to be retired from the sport at a younger age than most dogs. When selecting a dog for agility it is so important to look at structure in terms of longevity in this sport.
Sonic, well most of you know he lived a short life with us. He left me long before I was ready at the age of 6. He was just coming into his prime in agility. He is a constant reminder that they can leave us all too soon at anytime and we need to cherish our time with them all the time.
Pam's Jedi falls into this generation. Her is what Pam writes about her struggle with the decision about when to retire him.
Pam writes: "Jedi is almost 11 years old, and a small sheltie who I expected to be able to play with in agility until he was at least 12 or 13. I thought that in the next year I would move him to 8" jumps in the organizations that have that option, and run with him that way for a few more years. I thought he and I had a lot more opportunities to step to the line together and smile at each other before taking off to play our favorite game. Now it's possible that he and I have had our last agility run together. Two different vets have told me it is time to think about retiring him. Mostly I don't want to think about it. I tell myself to wait until he's had time to heal from his latest episode of limping and pain, and then make a decision. I tell myself how much he loves the game. I tell myself lots of things to try to rationalize how this would be an OK thing to keep doing with him. But in my (broken) heart, I think that he and I have run our last agility course together.
I want to stop doing agility with him before it becomes something he is only doing to make me happy. I want to remember his joy and enthusiasm while running a course, not the little worried look he gets when something goes wrong because he was hurting. I want to remember him running fast with me, not struggling to get around a course. And mostly, I want him as strong and healthy as he can be, so his senior years are as joyful to him as his younger years were. I may have to stretch myself to learn new dog activities that Jedi and I can do together with his aging body, but his wonderful attitude that is about loving to do things with me, not necessarily about loving to do agility.
I'm not ready to make a total commitment to retiring him from agility -- I keep telling myself that maybe he will heal well and I will be able to feel good about continuing to play with him. But I hope I am able to make the right decision at the right time. He deserves that from me for all he is and for all he has done for me for so long." - Pam
As Pam notes too, we are the guardians of our canine partners/friends/family members. It is up to us to decide when it is time to quit/change activities. They can be so stoic and not show how much pain they are in. When I see my dogs doing any one of these things: running slower than usual, running around obstacles, missing weave poles and not seeming as interested in doing agility, I stop to check for physical problems. I don't ever want to knowingly run my dogs when they are in pain. We have the privilege to say "I know you really like this game but it hurts you too much to do it anymore." Agility is a game for athletes and it does take a toll on our dogs. Many dogs will keep playing because they love us and they want to please us so much. I want my dogs to play because THEY love it not because I love it. Knowing your dog is very important and being honest about it. Dogs don't care about titles, placements or national competitions.
Also keep in mind that it is not just the jumps that are hard on our dogs. We can lower their jump heights but tunnels can be slippery, contacts can be hard on their front ends, weaves are very hard on backs and legs and turns can be hard on the body too.
So give your canine partners a hug and kiss and love them for who they are and not just for what they can do on the agility field!
Annelise
My very first dog and the one who got my hooked on agility died when she was two years old - shortly after we discovered the fun of agility! Then Demi was the next one who went blind just when she was starting to get the hang of agility and being a teammate with me (she didn't come to me until she was a year and a half old and she had no training). The cataract surgery was not enough to help her see to do agility safely in different types of lighting so it wasn't worth the risk of injury. Then Bradish came along and really got me hooked on competitive agility. He loved flyball and agility. I had planned on obedience as his post-agility career. However the years of flyball took their toll on his carpal joints and he was not sound enough to do the jumps required in Obedience Utility or Open so he was retired from that activity before I was ready. Then Nigel was always watched carefully because he was diagnosed with moderate hip dysplasia at 2 years old by two different Orthopedic surgeons (one at the U of M) even though OFA said his hips were "good." He developed Spondylosis as well as severe arthritis in hips and his agility career was very short lived. He didn't like agility much and probably because it was painful to him at times even though he was plenty fast enough when he felt good.
Then the next generation came along. Leysha loved herding and liked agility and obedience. I tried to do obedience earlier in her life than I did with Bradish in the hopes of actually finishing a UD with her. Leysha was retired from agility in 2003 after she gave me the run of a lifetime with a fast clean run at the USDAA Veterans Grand Prix Finals. We took second then. She learned to love agility with a lot of help from me and I wanted to remember her running agility with that run in mind when we were in sync, she was giving me 200% and having a ton of fun. She didn't need to do anymore agility after that - that was my gift to her. She spent much of her retirement doing herding chores around here and earning started sheep and duck titles in AKC. She became too stressed trying to earn a UD so I retired her from that. I was able to work her through her initial stress in agility but doing it again at the age of 9-10 in obedience just didn't seem fair to her. I wanted our obedience runs to be fun together and if she didn't enjoy it then I was not going to try to make her enjoy it. She has loved her retirement life and she is still going strong and runs around the yard eager to help with any barn chore. I love seeing her so happy just doing things around here - she was never that happy to go to an agility trial even though she earned many upper level agility championship titles and won national competitions.
Tobie is the next one in this generation. He came to me at a year and a half. I learned a lot from him, he loved agility and ran fast. He taught me what it is like to train and run a fast dog. He also taught me what it is like to have a reactive dog who is aggressive. I learned a lot about training and managing a reactive dog. He was a lot of work to manage at an agility trial. He also was what I call an adrenaline junkie in that he would get so high he couldn't think when he was running. It would interfere with our teamwork at trials. He would listen and follow direction well in training and even at seminars but at a trial he would become like a drug addict who can't hear or follow directions. He did earn a couple of champion agility titles but it was not fun for me as his teammate to run him at trials. Yes he was very fast but when he was not a team player more than he was it made it not as much fun for me. I retired him when he was 9 years old. I also was concerned that he does get so high in agility that if he did hurt himself he would keep running and as he aged the likelihood of hurting himself increases dramatically. He actually doesn't seem to mind retirement. Due to his dog aggressiveness I can't take him to trials with me and I really can't do many other activities with him. He and I did Rally but he gets high doing that and started barking while waiting his turn and then he can't think clearly. He is a great dog around the house and easy to live with.
Amigo had to be retired from agility at the age of 3. His structure with his front-end was causing repeated tears in his pectoral muscles when jumping. He would have on again and off again lameness. After rehabbing him twice from the injuries I consulted with a few different people and decided that retiring him from agility made the most sense. He is a reminder that structure is really important for agility. If you know your dog has poor structure for agility in some capacity or another you need to take extra care of that area and you need to be prepared that your dog may have to be retired from the sport at a younger age than most dogs. When selecting a dog for agility it is so important to look at structure in terms of longevity in this sport.
Sonic, well most of you know he lived a short life with us. He left me long before I was ready at the age of 6. He was just coming into his prime in agility. He is a constant reminder that they can leave us all too soon at anytime and we need to cherish our time with them all the time.
Pam's Jedi falls into this generation. Her is what Pam writes about her struggle with the decision about when to retire him.
Pam writes: "Jedi is almost 11 years old, and a small sheltie who I expected to be able to play with in agility until he was at least 12 or 13. I thought that in the next year I would move him to 8" jumps in the organizations that have that option, and run with him that way for a few more years. I thought he and I had a lot more opportunities to step to the line together and smile at each other before taking off to play our favorite game. Now it's possible that he and I have had our last agility run together. Two different vets have told me it is time to think about retiring him. Mostly I don't want to think about it. I tell myself to wait until he's had time to heal from his latest episode of limping and pain, and then make a decision. I tell myself how much he loves the game. I tell myself lots of things to try to rationalize how this would be an OK thing to keep doing with him. But in my (broken) heart, I think that he and I have run our last agility course together.
I want to stop doing agility with him before it becomes something he is only doing to make me happy. I want to remember his joy and enthusiasm while running a course, not the little worried look he gets when something goes wrong because he was hurting. I want to remember him running fast with me, not struggling to get around a course. And mostly, I want him as strong and healthy as he can be, so his senior years are as joyful to him as his younger years were. I may have to stretch myself to learn new dog activities that Jedi and I can do together with his aging body, but his wonderful attitude that is about loving to do things with me, not necessarily about loving to do agility.
I'm not ready to make a total commitment to retiring him from agility -- I keep telling myself that maybe he will heal well and I will be able to feel good about continuing to play with him. But I hope I am able to make the right decision at the right time. He deserves that from me for all he is and for all he has done for me for so long." - Pam
As Pam notes too, we are the guardians of our canine partners/friends/family members. It is up to us to decide when it is time to quit/change activities. They can be so stoic and not show how much pain they are in. When I see my dogs doing any one of these things: running slower than usual, running around obstacles, missing weave poles and not seeming as interested in doing agility, I stop to check for physical problems. I don't ever want to knowingly run my dogs when they are in pain. We have the privilege to say "I know you really like this game but it hurts you too much to do it anymore." Agility is a game for athletes and it does take a toll on our dogs. Many dogs will keep playing because they love us and they want to please us so much. I want my dogs to play because THEY love it not because I love it. Knowing your dog is very important and being honest about it. Dogs don't care about titles, placements or national competitions.
Also keep in mind that it is not just the jumps that are hard on our dogs. We can lower their jump heights but tunnels can be slippery, contacts can be hard on their front ends, weaves are very hard on backs and legs and turns can be hard on the body too.
So give your canine partners a hug and kiss and love them for who they are and not just for what they can do on the agility field!
Annelise
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Sinco Video
From this past weekend's ASCA trial and courtesy of Linda Heaton here is a link to a video of one of Sinco's runs!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkoH-hMrzQY
Thanks Linda!
Annelise
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkoH-hMrzQY
Thanks Linda!
Annelise
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