Next weekend is the Hawkeye Kennel Club trials in Iowa City (which got cancelled last year due to the floods) and after that, it’s a no-man’s land of about two months without any local obedience trials before there are tons of great trials beginning in late August through November. I really love having a couple of summer months with nothing to focus on but training, no pressure to have our skills “ring ready” for a specific weekend. So the following article is really timely and I wanted to share it with you.
It was written by Laura Romanik and passed along to me via e-mail from friend and long distance obedience training partner Renee. It has a lot of EXCELLENT points and although it’s aimed at folks who do obedience, with a little tweaking it applies equally to agility or probably any other performance sport you enjoy with your dog.
“If you would like to take advantage of the fall show season, NOW is the time to start planning and preparing. You cannot expect to slouch over most of the summer, and then in late August suddenly start training on a regular schedule and frantically looking for matches, and get the results you want.
“Right now you need to finish training the skills your dog will need for your fall goals. It’s OK to have a couple of holes or weaknesses at this point, but you better know what they are and have a plan for what you will do at each training session to improve those areas. You should also map out your opportunities to train in situations that will simulate a real trial, whether that be the above mentioned matches or group training get togethers. Put them on your calendar . . .
(This is one of my favorite paragraphs.)
“When you get to these matches and training opportunities, TRAIN, don’t just run through. It does you absolutely no good to go to a fun match and stand there and do nothing while your dog makes mistakes, even if he would have still qualified. All you are doing is increasing his understanding that at home or in one or two familiar training locations you will correct his mistakes but everywhere else all bets are off. One of the main reasons for going to train in other places is to teach your dog to generalize the need to put forth the same effort you ask for at home to everywhere else.
“This doesn’t mean you always have to use a harsh physical correction. Initially your response to a mistake in a new place should be the same as what you used to give at home for the same mistake when your dog was earlier in the learning process. In other words, always back up a step or two on your dog’s skills in new places. You might need to make the exercise easier. But don’t just ignore performance that is less than what you’d really like to see in the ring. If it is slightly disappointing but qualifying in a new place when you aren’t under the stress of a real trial worrying about legs or qualifying, it will be more disappointing or not qualifying when you do add that stress.
“Last weekend in Kalamazoo, they had ring rental time each day after the trial. I sat and watched even some top handlers ignore errors, presumably because what the dog did during the ring rental time was better than what it had done earlier in the trial. I’m guessing the dog did better because the handler was more relaxed, and projected more confidence because she knew she could correct if needed. So the dog did better but still showed hints of the earlier error. The handler missed a great opportunity to define the error to the dog and enforce completely correct performance in the same ring she was going to show in the next day. The next day, under the stress of a real trial and with no additional training that the error is wrong, the error was magnified again.
“Worse yet, is the people that go out of their way with their own handling to prevent an error, rather than let the dog make the mistake and fix it. Some of these things might be smart handling in a real ring in order to save a qualifier or points, but most of them are penny wise and pound foolish in training. For example, in the ring you might see that your dog is about to anticipate the finish command and so throw your signal hand out as soon as the judge has “F…” out of her mouth. But every time you do that in training or at a run through, you are reinforcing the dog’s tendency to make that very mistake. You are reinforcing to the dog that the judge’s order is his cue to finish. Another example is the handler that waits or gives extra little body language when the dog hesitates or fails to complete a command. Say the dog is doing a drop on recall, and when told to down it stops and sits. In this situation I see many handlers wait to see if the dog will decide to complete the drop, or even cock their heads or tense their shoulders and lean forward slightly.
“In the real ring, if the judge decides it was an extra cue, the dog may fail even if it does eventually go down. Even if you get away with it (and granted in the “A” classes it is more likely that you will), every time this happens the dog becomes less likely in the future to drop on the command alone and eventually he’ll start waiting for more and more of a body cue too. It’s basically the same thing as giving a dog the same command multiple times because he didn’t respond to the first one. You eventually teach the dog that responding to the first command is optional, and that if he really doesn’t want to do it right now he can just wait for an additional, or stronger, or repeated command to finally do it.
“So, get thee out to the fun matches, have fun, and TRAIN your dog!”
Laura Romanik and the Radiant Shelties
Melinda, Thanks for posting this. It is really timely since I plan to go to a fun match in Omaha this weekend. I was thinking I would treat it like a trial so I could see where we were at, but after reading this I can see that would be a mistake. Instead, I'll treat it like a training session and see if we can improve our performance.
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