So, where on earth do I start. This is the first time I have discussed publically the fact I am attempting to train Detour running contacts. I think I have shied away from telling people as I really do not think I have a good chance of successfully training them and I so hate to fail publically. Also I like to discuss them with fellow competitors without bias. However, a failure doesn’t make you any less of a dog trainer, in fact I think we need to try new things, succeed and fail to truly keep moving forwards.
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| Detour having a rest after a training session |
I decided to try training these for a few reasons. Firstly I have successfully trained two dogs stopped contacts with nose target method, they are fast and accurate and at four years old Hoax has never missed a contact. So why change? Honestly… I am a bit bored of doing what I have always done. New challenges motivate me so why not try it, there really isn’t anything to lose. I know that I can always retrain Detour to a stop if I want to. Secondly, I didn’t think D with all his sensitivity would be keen on shoving his nose on the floor and being lifted/ manhandled on contacts, I also thought he was liable to be ‘too’ thoughtful with his targets and not have that mad drive to throw himself down the plank. I guessed if we could create a smooth running action instead that it would be much more motivational. Leading onto the final reason, health. A smooth running contact has to be physically less impact on a dogs joints than coming to a sharp stop (especially on the AFrame). The force on a dogs carpus and shoulder joints must be huge. If you get a chance have a peek at this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naV09_uRpmI which is a smooth running AFrame and compare it to this nose target one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWBLbydx8nE&feature=related
So, having made that choice where do you start. Well Sylvia Trkman has a training system on her website for it but here’s how it has gone for me.
Firstly we had to get Detour running a flat plank to his toy without jumping. At twelve months old however he would ‘bounce’ along the ground to finally pounce on the toy, none of which is suitable to obtains that flat smooth running action. At this point he would still jump off the end of a flat plank on the ground. You wouldn’t expect them to, but try it sometime, you will see that naturally they want to launch off the end.
Because of Detours action to a toy I switched to food in a bowl as a target at the end. If he jumped at the end of the plank I would say “Uh oh” to mark the incorrect performance and call him off the food bowl, sometimes he would get the food but I wouldn’t worry just wouldnt praise him at all. He wouldn’t run at full speed to the bowl but at least he started to get the idea. For a good contact with no jumping I would run up and praise and give him extra food in the bowl. For a quick, great contact I would go crazy with praise. I knew that the speed over the contact was an issue, I needed him running at full pelt so now he understood to try not to jump, we went back to the toy.
All was looking good until I started to raise the plank, we then started to get jumping again. I watched him carefully and saw that he didn’t seem to know hw to collect his body to hit the end of the plank, his front feet would hit the contact high and where his back feet should hit the middle of the contact he actually got off balance and would do a little ‘skip’ with his back legs then extending and ending up jumping.
I made the decision to take him away from his contacts totally for a few weeks and work on proprioception instead. He worked on reversing, balance ball, wobble board etc until he seemed to have greatly improved.
Back to training and he is going well, we have had setbacks (ear infection affected balance and we got jumping again). He is now running a slightly raised plank and I want to make sure he has got this before we move it higher.
Training running contacts has huge ups and downs, one day you think you have cracked it, the next it looks as though you have never trained the dog. You have to be good at analysing and working through problems and with very few dogs successfully trained on them in this country you don’t have a lot of references. You also need access to a plank, space to do it and the chance to do them little and often, there is a rare day gone by when I haven’t trained them. It certainly isn’t something I would recommend to just anyone. After all this work I suspect we still may not ever get there and all this, will just be chalked up to experience… but you never know… it just might work!
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