Fine-tuning your agility partnership is a whole lot of fun. I like to approach this in two ways:
Firstly, I assess the level of training you have provided your dog so far – identifying areas where you can help your dog by building on specific behaviours, and helping you to carry this out in a way that suits your individual dog.
Secondly, I assess your handling – i.e. your ability to communicate with your dog as a handler consistently, understandably, and early enough to allow your dog to respond to the information you provide him with at top speed as you both tackle a course.
Of course, dogs have different personalities and varying levels of physical ability. But it is almost always possible to improve on problems you may have via improved training or handling.
My two mantras are:
1. Don't Blame Your Dog
2. Always Train with a Reward
1 - Don't Blame Your Dog
Blaming your dog is only negative. First of all, your dog will pick up on your frustration and anger whether you shout at him, give him a frosty stare or seize him roughly by the collar. As well as making the agility experience miserable for both of you, this will over time demotivate him. Even if you have a very self-driven dog, eventually your attitude may cause your dog to hesitate or gather between obstacles, losing time.
But what is more, blaming your dog is totally unhelpful. If your dog really is spiteful and wilful and deliberately went up the dog walk when you indicated the tunnel just to upset you, then what is the point of training? Your dog was born with some mental and physical characteristics but your dog wasn’t born knowing what agility is – for example, what the poles-on-metal humans designed were for… if he doesn’t get his weave entry right you either haven’t explained the entry criteria to him properly or else you gave him the information to do the weaves too late and he couldn’t decelerate in time.
Adopting the attitude of not blaming your dog is so liberating. Now your problems are solve-able because they are your responsibility - you just need to improve your training or step up your handling.
2 - Always Train with a Reward
The more experienced you and your dog have become at dog agility, the easier it can be to forget to use a reward during training. But rewarding your dog is not just your way of praising him; it is the vital way in which you communicate with your dog. Using a reward which your dog is motivated to receive allows you to teach your dog to work out what pattern of behaviour he needs to perform to be rewarded.
Whenever you use a reward (for example, a tug toy) you first need to identify what criteria your dog needs to meet to get the reward. For example, if your dog has a tendency to knock poles it can help to break exercises down into short jump combinations, and only reward when all the poles stay up. Once you have used the reward to communicate to your dog what he is being rewarded for (in this instance, poles staying up) the exercises can become increasingly complicated, with the reward still coming on the same basis.
The most important point to remember is to be consistent and unbending in your reward criteria. For example, if during a 4 minute training session the reward has been established as available when the poles stay up, and then a pole comes down but your dog does a great, tight turn - choosing to reward your dog at this point in the same way as you have been doing for keeping the poles up will confuse what the reward is communicating to your dog.
Rewards help you teach your dog new combinations and exercises, but they also help you reinforce and improve sequences your dog has previously learned.
