Dogwalk Re-Training - ~4 weeks in

We've been working on the dogwalk for nearly 4 weeks now. A few observations.  Again, all of the videos are being posted here - Dogwalk Re-Train.

1. I'm going to do a 2on/2off.  I had initially planned to do running, but I don't know if I'll ever fully trust the criteria, and as a result may ultimately slow Murray down.  So I think 2on/2off may be faster for him, even though I can almost always beat him to the bottom of the dogwalk.

2. Training is fun!  It definitely helps getting me to not hit the snooze button multiple times, as I usually try to do.  And gets me excited to do something productive with the little man when I get home after a day of work.

3.  Don't piss off the neighbors.  Apparently they are not a big fan of early morning training sessions.  So we're working on foundations indoors in the morning, and ramp work in the evening.

4.  Love your dog, enjoy the process.  I love how hard The Murr tries, and he is more and more accepting of my imperfections.  Such a fun set of games we get to play with one another and I love watching his problem solving ability flourish and his enthusiasm grow.

5. Record keeping is great, but shouldn't get you down.  I thought I saw improvement and went with it.  Then I watched a week's worth of video to see that we were hovering around the 40% success rate for a week... followed by a spike to over 80%.  By keeping track of statistics without calculating them, I was able to stay motivated about our training without feeling discouraged by a low success rate.

You Know You're A Crazy Dog Lady When...

On Halloween, a mere few days into our new training regime, my in-laws came to our house for dinner. My husband's family has a Pizza Friday tradition - one that only resurrects itself while in the auspices of his parents.  If we go visit them, I know that we will be eating pizza come Friday.  Likewise, Jon insisted that we order pizza.

We moved only a few months ago, so our normal go-tos have shifted.  Since we live in a big city, the 3 mile move changes our restaurant radius quite staggeringly.  And pizza is one of those things that we have not found a replacement for (yet).  We don't have the same pizza options as my New York hometown, where we could sneeze and find a great slice, but we can also do better than Domino's.  

I knew that Blaze Pizza was nearby and passable, so I opted to go there.  That way everyone could get whatever permutation of pizza they wanted without having to satisfy another person's dietary restrictions or aversions.  

So why am I writing about getting pizza?

Because of this:

As we all sat around the table eating pizza, I looked at the two-piece box.  Or, more specifically, the lid.  It's low-lipped - perfect for my lowriding pup.  So while everyone else was chowing down, I was grabbing the lids to stockpile for our training exercises.

Yes, I believe this defines me as the crazy dog lady.  Apparently I'm not the only one who's repurposing food packaging for dog uses - I have since learned that El Pollo Loco tortilla bags are great for dog waste!

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There are other little details that I had to work out while figuring out our training regime.  Namely how to honestly assess where I was at, and what to feed The Murr.  Because I'm doing contact training for the first time, I was not confident in my eye.  So I needed to figure out when we are actually meeting criteria versus when I think we are - and also keep record.  Hello tripod.

Being able to tape our sessions is extremely helpful.  I can watch each session and then keep track of hits versus misses.  It also makes me accountable for sticking to my schedule.  Even better, a friend of mine is also planning to start a re-train, so she's watching the videos too to see the process.  I made a playlist of our training (here), and set my YouTube Capture to automatically load our daily videos into the training playlist.  

And then there's the food.  Murray is a mere 10 pounds, and eats about 4 ounces of food per day.  Plus, he eats a raw diet since his teeth get all yucky on kibble.  Given the number of repetitions necessary, I was concerned that we would have to go to really low value treats so as to not overfeed.  Then, while perusing my local pet store, I found this food - OC Raw Dog.

Their "meaty rox" are pretty small and (when frozen or semi-frozen) can break into smaller pieces.  Easy to use for a full training session with The Murr despite his low food intake.  I liked the ingredients in here, and it's made pretty close to here.  Yes, it's more expensive than my normal combination of chicken necks & Small Batch, but it's high value to the Murr and can be used as both a treat and a meal.  

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So that's where we're at.  We have the supplies, and I'm a crazy dog lady.  Undisputed.

Picking the Right Method for Human and Dog

I last left off with my decision to complete a re-train Murr's dogwalk, and had come to a good "trial stopping point" to commit to the training.  Next, was finding the right method for our team.   Way back before I started agility, I'm sure that the method you trained was the one that your instructor knew.  Now, with the interwebz, online courses, books, DVDs, and instructors who have become household names, there are more decisions.  I feel like if I'm committing to a training method I need to be on-board with it from day one.

The first major split in the decision tree is stopped versus running.  I don't think that a stopped contact is necessarily the slower of the two - a true 2on/2off is incredibly fast and drivey into that bottom position.  But I can usually get ahead of Murray, and had no compelling reason to switch from a "non-stopped dogwalk" to a stopped 2o/2o.  So running it is.

Next, has been deciding on the method of instruction.  There are plenty of big names in the agility world offering their contact training instruction - some of which can be conducted through online classrooms.  The "big 3" I've been made aware of are Silvia Trkman, Dawn Weaver, and Daisy Peel.  I quickly wrote off Silvia's because (a) my friend warned me about the amount of repetitions required and (b) after watching "Ready, Steady, Go" I had a hard time digesting her information in small fragments.  That seems to be the "catch" to me - I need little building blocks, but ones that are clear in direction; an amorphous approach was not going to cut it for me.  My instructor generally teaches Daisy's method, and walked me through the steps.  I have several friends who have developed great running dogwalks with their dogs through Daisy's method - and at Cynosport the best dogwalk I saw was from one of Daisy's students... I mean, it was literally jaw-dropping amazing.  However, the more I got to understand the process, the less I felt like it was the right approach for me.  I don't think my eye is trained enough to see the split-stride, and my personality is such that I am soft - I'm more likely to over-reward my dog and with something like the SS, I thought I'd wind up frustrated when I couldn't train my eye to see a black-and-white criterion.

The criteria for Dawn's method, on the other hand, seemed more black-and-white in the manner it was presented to me.  I enjoyed learning the A-frame through the "bounce box" method (Rachel Sanders) because there was a physical piece of criterion in play (dog goes into PVC box, dog comes out of PVC box).  Starting with foot targets, to me, seemed less abstract, and was therefore the better fit.

I'm not far along enough to know if this truly is the best method for Murray & me.  Likewise, I am doing this training locally, rather than directly from Dawn through her online classsroom, so it's more likely that I'm going to be training based on an application of Dawn's method (which I prefer, since my instructor knows me well and can therefore help adjust to our team).  Finally, it's very likely that various approaches would work for us, and that the other methods that I mentioned are just as effective - there are several exhibitors I know who have used any permutation of the above training methods with great success.  This method, when the various options were presented, just felt like the one that I could comprehend best and could most clearly communicate to my dog.

I started the re-train on October 25, and got a tri-pod to start recording our training sessions on October 29.  We are doing two short sessions (for breakfast & dinner) daily.  In my next post I'll give a Week 1 summary and provide some videos.

If It Ain't Broke...

Like most other novice (or rather any) handlers out there, I have training gaps with The Murr.  Some training gaps are easy to plug, others more difficult.  Sometimes a band-aid will suffice, other times major surgery needs to be performed.  And it's up to the handler if they want to deal with the training issue in the first place.  Sometimes it's a combination of cost versus benefit.  For example, if one's goal is to make the world team, the dog is fast enough to be competitive at that level, and the gap is that he's a bar knocker, most people will put in the effort to improving the dog's jumping to clear the bars.  On the other hand, if one's goal is to earn a MACH, the dog is fairly slow, and the gap is that the dog doesn't have a super-drivey teeter, not as many people would spend the time and effort to retrain the contact.

To an extent, I'm in the latter of those two scenarios with Murray's dogwalk.

I never trained a dogwalk with Murray.  His criteria, to date, has been "go up, go across, go down."  When we started in class, he was very slow.  And when you are literally walking across the dogwalk and are about 13 or 14" long, it's difficult to miss the yellow.  His A-frame was taught from the ground up, and is the contact that I'm most proud of with him.  The teeter was his archnemesis for a while, and he's been reinforced so heavily on it, that he is starting to show drive towards it.  Meanwhile, he's always *liked* the dogwalk, he just doesn't know what the judges think he should be doing on it!  So we do get the occasional launch.

I may not have criteria, but I sure love the dogwalk!

Occasional is the imperative, here.  His "hit" rate in trials is well above 90%.  I feel confident in saying that he's NQ'd more frequently for missing a weave pole than he has for missing a dogwalk contact.  His lack of a perfect dogwalk is not the one thing keeping him from being a Nationals finalist, or winning his class at an AKC show, or any other competitive check-marks; with a perfect dogwalk, he still lacks the speed to be a truly competitive dog.  So in many regards we could get through the rest of his agility career with his current dogwalk (and the babysitting that comes along with it) and he'd likely retire with the same accolades as he would with a stellar, trained dogwalk.

But there's also the emotional element to it.  The two times that Murray has been called on his A-frame, I shook it off like it was no big deal.  In fact, I had no idea he missed his contact until someone informed me that they saw a judge's hand go up.  When Murr misses a weave pole, or pops out at 10, it doesn't bother me in the slightest.  I know that he knows how to do them; I trust him enough to let him find his entries, run ahead, cross or whatever else may need to be done, so the occasional missed pole is just that.  But when he misses a dogwalk contact I shudder.  Because I know that it's a training gap rearing its ugly head, and that - in reality - it's destined to happen.  It's not some freak occurance like an off-stride on the occasional A-frame, but rather the consequence of not teaching my dog how to properly run the contact.

The dogwalk issue came to a head at the USDAA Regionals in April, when Murr missed 3 of his 4 dogwalks over the course of the weekend.  Granted, the first one was the result of my manic behavior in Team Gamblers, and the subsequent ones were due to me being so worried that I was essentially pushing him off of the contacts.  But it was the first time that it seemed like a real problem, and something that needed to be addressed.  Not for any true extrinsic reasons, but more to keep the stress away from the handler.

After Regionals, I spoke with my instructor about training his dogwalk contact.  I'm fortunate in that I train with people who respect me enough to be honest and upfront. And the honest truth was that in order to retrain the dogwalk, I would need to withdraw from trialing for at least a few months.  At the same time, both my instructor and I acknowledged that in order to be able to qualify for AKC Nationals - one of my goals for the year - starting a re-train in May would create a direct conflict.  So I held off, putting band-aids on the dogwalk to get through the NAC qualifying, with few "major issues" flaring up.

With any extrinsic goals that I had set now complete, post-Cynosport was the time to start the re-train.  I've committed to reducing the trialing substantially (only doing a few dogwalks in USDAA Tourney classes to finish the Qs we'll need for next year), and have committed to putting in the time - and patience - it truly takes to train a polished behavior.  That's the tougher part... I'm not the most patient individual and I'm treading new water with this type of training.  The first thing I asked of my instructor, though, was to identify the different methods to training a dogwalk - from Step 1 to the end - so that we could determine the best approach for our little team...