Agility Course De-construction

G3-5 KC Olympia Qualifier - A Judge's De-construction

I was recently asked to judge a Kennel Club G3-5 Olympia Qualifier. Judging an agility course is always an interesting exercise, on many levels.

Planning

I'm lucky enough to train with a club that takes it's agility quite seriously (apart from the egg & spoon races of course). The down side of this is I tend to set quite hard courses because I try them, or elements of them, in club and they work because they are being run by talented people and dogs.

I'd spent a lot of time planning this course, and checking it with wiser and more experience heads than mine. I was happy with it and felt it would give people a challenge without being too soul destroying.

The course I'd come up with is below. It was supposed to start with a fairly obvious trap, then move into a trap free, relatively free flowing middle section, followed by a number of traps at the end. It wasn't supposed to be too easy as it was a Qualifier. Unfortunately it caused more problems than I'd anticipated so I thought it might be worthwhile going through it here so people can avoid them in the future. Despite what you might think most judges aren't out to break people, we're just trying to test them. At the end of the day, agility is supposed to be fun :-)

Running the course

When it was actually run on the day I had to make some changes due to the weather. It rained quite heavily as we were laying it out and the cloth on the collapsable tunnel got very wet. So I decided to change it for another piece of equipment. The ideal would have been another rigid tunnel, but I already had two in the course and there was a bit of a shortage at the show, so I decided to use a long jump instead.

2-6 Sequence

2-6 was an obvious trap, but it still caught people unawares.

2-6 Trap

The key to a set piece like this is preparation. The people who got caught out were only trying to turn their dogs away from the tunnel after they'd landed from jump 2. By that time most dogs, especially the faster ones, will already be locked on to the tunnel, so you have a very high chance of losing your dog down it. People sometimes worry about trying to set their dogs for a turn after a jump prior to the dog taking off in case they get a refusal or 5 faults. Key things to think about here - know your dog's commit point. After they've reached that  point they should take the obstacle in front of them even if you give another command. However a better way to tackle this is to have a signal that tells your dog that "something" is going to happen after the obstacle in front of them. For me, this is what we refer to as an air-brake. We all know that we control our dogs with the hand closest to them. However my dogs are trained that if I also raise the other hand as well, above the main hand, it means they should be prepared and not take this obstacle flat out. It makes it very easy to handle a set piece like this as I would stand by 2, release my dog and after they completed 1, raise an air-brake. That will cause my dog to lock it's focus on to me and not the next obvious obstacle.

6-7-8 Sequence

6-7-8 is actually a variation on a sequence I use in club to teach people to rear cross. The training sequence is below.

Rear cross exercise

You normally get people to rear cross 6-7 and then 8-9 as the tunnel helps to pull the dog in. This sequence rarely causes problems. However as I need obstacles elsewhere on the course I decided to abbreviate the sequence by removing jump 8 and moving jump 10 further out. That gave the sequence as it appeared in the course.

6-9 an unexpected trap

This had an unexpected consequence - the sequence, that was supposed to simply be a handling exercise, became a trap. People trying to run the sequence at speed were pushing their dogs into the wrong end of the tunnel. As they sent the dog over 7 they were running forward and trying to "bowl" the dog across in front of them into 8. Unfortunately this left the handler's shoulders pointing straight down the course and not pointing at the tunnel entrance :-( That combined with a tendency to step too far forward, effectively blocking the entrance at 8, sent the dogs into the wrong entrance. If you were going to do that you needed to make sure you didn't step too far forward and make sure that your shoulders were pointed at 8. The other alternative was to front cross after 7 which gave a very safe entry into the tunnel as ably demonstrate by a number of handlers. Sadly some of the dogs who went into the wrong entrance were chastised by their handlers. As a judge your not allowed to comment on a course while it is being run, but my mental notes were that the dogs went exactly where the handler's body language had told them to. We have an adage that we use in our club - if your dog went wrong, remember who trained it. 

9-10 Sequence

The next non-trap on the course was 9-10. This was supposed to be a simple weave entry, and in fact because of the weather had been straighten out slightly. Again this had an unexpected consequence.

Another unexpected trap

It made the speed that the dogs arrived at the weave entry faster, and as a consequence a lot of dogs were missing the entry :-( If you can teach your dog a strong, independent weave command this sort of entry shouldn't cause a problem. Typically I'd give a "weave" command before my dog does the jump at 9. That cues my dog to take the jump and then look for the weaves, because they are actively looking for the weaves I'd expect them to find the entry without difficultly.

Jump 12

The jump at 12, just in case your wondering, was put in there to give me, as the judge, time to get back into position to judge the contacts as the A-Frame. Judges do things like that at times, unfortunately we can't sprint quite as fast as the dogs, so we have to tweak the course at times to give us an edge :-)

13-14 Sequence

13-14 again was an obvious trap. The angle the dogs were coming in gave a straight line to the see-saw not the A-Frame.

Trap at 13-14

This did catch more people than I'd expected. Generally if you have the see-saw and A-Frame setup in competition, the A-Frame wins. It's a visual thing, the A-Frame is a much bigger target. I think most of the issues here were caused by people relaxing a bit and not concentrating to make sure their dog was locked on to the A-Frame.

Jump 15

The jump at 15 was put in there to stop people decapitating themselves on the see-saw.

16-17 Sequence

16-17 was another fairly obviously trap, but it shouldn't have been a strong a one. With the collapsible tunnel there, the dogs would be moving relatively slowly when they exited the tunnel, and wouldn't have had sight of the jump at 20. Dogs also have a tendency to turn towards the side their handler was on when they entered the tunnel, so they would have naturally turned to the right. All of this should have made this a relatively weak trap. Unfortunately because of the unforecast bout of rain, the collapsible tunnel was too wet to use, so I changed it for a long jump.

Trap at 16-17

That meant the dogs were moving a lot fast as they exited the obstacle and they had sight of the jump at 20 even before they took off. Which in turn meant we got a lot more eliminations here than I'd anticipated. In retrospect a wall would probably have been a better substitution as it would have blocked sight of the jump at 20 from the dogs. Having said that a lot of people did negotiate it successfully. Again the key, here was preparation. Making the dog aware that something was going to happen after the long jump went a long way to negating the problem. Failing that, handler anticipation that they were going to have to do something fairly spectacular to get the dog's attention as soon as they landed worked well. The people who were prepared to turn their dogs as soon as they landed generally succeeded. The people who let the dog get in a stride or two first, didn't.  If your in this situation on a course, using your dog's name is almost guaranteed to get the dog to turn it's head. We spend a lot of time teaching a dog it's name, use it to your advantage.

17-18 Sequence

17-18 was another trap.

Trap at 17-18

As the dogs looped round 17, they'd be pointing at the A-Frame as the next straight line obstacle, rather than the see-saw. As I mentioned earlier this was intended as a stronger trap than 13-14 as the A-Frame is larger and tends to suck dogs in as it's a larger visual object. This did take a certain number of people off course, but not as many as you might think. Because 16-17 had become harder, most people had their dog's focus firmly on them by that stage so were able to easily direct them to the see-saw rather than the A-Frame. So we did have a bit of balance there. 16-17 was harder, but that made 17-18 easier.

Finish

From there on it was all quite straight forward to get to the finish line.

Final Thoughts

For a number of reasons this course caused more eliminations than I would have liked and a few less clears. Partly that was changes caused by the weather and partly by things that were not intended to be traps causing problems. Would I do anything different? Probably not, excepting using a wall if I couldn't use the collapsible tunnel. This was a G3-5 qualifier, so all the people running dogs should be experienced handlers and should be able to analyse a course and spot the problem areas. True, you will get inexperienced dogs but I would expect the handlers to be shepherding those dogs quite closely as indeed a number of people were.

Paperless Existence

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.... 

People discovered the home computer. Lots of things were promised, including a brave new world where paper would be a thing of the past, all documents would exist as electronic copies. The filing cabinets would be emptied and would gather dust in this brave new world. The era of the Paperless Office was upon us ...

The Paperless Office (or Home)

That was over a decade ago or more, and the problem was - it wasn't. 

Now I admit, I bought into this dream, though not for the office but for the home. I loved the idea that all my paper work could be held on a computer, instantly available, instantly searchable, in no more space than a pack of cards. Problem was most stuff still arrived at home in paper form. Not a issue in it's self, flatbed scanners were relatively cheap. And there were a couple of programs available to the home user at that time. PaperPort was one and PageManager another. I tried them both, and preferred PageManager. The interface was easier to use and some of it's document handling was better than PaperPort. However at that time all the document management systems used proprietary formats for storing scanned documents so making the right choice was fairly crucial. Bear in mind this was well over a decade ago and PDFs weren't universal at that time. Unfortunately PageManager didn't seem to be actively being developed at the time and PaperPort was, so I decided to go with PaperPort. 

However it turned out that digitising the documents was a huge chore. So big in fact that, although my intentions had been good, I fell behind and eventually gave up. There wasn't actually a single issue that caused the problem, it was multiple things.

The affordable scanners, even faster ones, were all flatbed. While that gave good image and scan quality it was slow. Each page in a document had to be scanned, then the page had to be manually turned over and the and the other side scanned. Even if the document single sided you had to manually scan the first page, take it out, put the next page in, press the scan button on the screen, and repeat. You could get flatbed scanners with document feeders that would automatically turn pages over and feed the next page in. Problem was they were expensive and because of the mechanics of turning pages over, not very reliable. They jammed, or skewed the pages, or in the worse cases, shredded the pages. Not good. 

The second problem was the software itself. It wasn't easy to scan documents, and then they had to tagged with keywords to enable searching. All in all it took 10 or 15 minutes to scan each document. And you couldn't look at the documents outside of the software (remember that proprietary format I mentioned), and even inside the software it took minutes to open up each document if you wanted to look at it.

I gave up. I hate to admit this - I really do - I wanted it to work, but it just took too much and the rewards just didn't justify the effort.

Every so often, in the intervening years, I would try again. But each time the result would be the same, basically the technology and the software didn't really evolve.  Eventually they did start to use PDFs to store the scanned documents but that was about it.

3 Things To Make The Paperless Home A Reality

So fast forward to 2012 and, miraculously, I am rapidly moving to realising my dream of a paperless house. So what has change? Three things -

1. I moved from using MS Windows to using Apple Macs.

2. I bought a dedicated document scanner - a Fujitsu Snapscan S1300.

3. I found some new software - DEVONthink.

The move from Windows to Apple was driven by frustration. I finally got fed up with periodically having to spend a day sorting out problems with computers, and for seemingly no reason. On Friday everything would be working perfectly, on Saturday computers wouldn't talk to each other or the network, or were having a mystery boot failure, or wouldn't talk to the printer, or couldn't find a share, or the XP machines didn't want to talk to the Windows 7 machines etc.

Dedicated document scanners. They've now dropped in price to the point where I could actually afford one. The model I have is a Fujitsu Scansnap S1300 - not the cheapest you can find, but still very reasonable. What makes a document scanner different to a flatbed? Firstly it's optimised for handling paper and feeding it through the scanner page by page automatically. Secondly, and this is a big secondly, it actually has two completely separate scan heads which means it can scan both sides of a page at the same time in a single pass. It saves time and means the scanner doesn't have to have any complex machinery to try and turn the page over as it is scanned. It's simple and reliable. You drop the document in the hopper, press the blue button on the scanner and everything feeds through in a quiet, orderly and efficient manner. Very boring and very reliable.

Having switched to Macs gave me access to new software (and lost me a few favourites - I still haven't found a good replacement for Faststone Image Viewer). One of the new pieces of software I found was DEVONthink - it's everything that a document management system should be. It's quick and easy and intuitive and finding things is a doddle.

Getting the document into DEVONthink is beautiful - I just load it into the hopper of the Scansnap, press the blue button on the scanner and sit back and relax. The document is scanned, and the results passed to DEVONthink which digests the results and cogitates. Then DEVONthink pops up a single dialog asking for the name of the document, any tags you want to use and what creation date you want to give it. Finally you drag and drop it into the appropriate folder to file it. Finished.

And did I mention that is stores the results as PDFs and during it's cogitations it's recognised all the text printed on the document (OCR) and made it searchable as well?

So how long does this this take? Scanning an A4 page (both sides) takes 10 seconds, processing it in DEVONthink takes from 50 secs to 80 secs depending on the amount of text. So the total is somewhere from 1 min to 1:30 min per A4 page. The page that took 80 secs to process, by the way, was cover with loads of small print (T&Cs) and it still managed to make it ALL searchable. It is FAST.

Those two key facts have made the paperless office viable, at least for me. It is fast, and DEVONthink's approach to how the electronic documents are created means I only have to touch the new document once. I can fill in everything needed in one dialog. Speed and ease of use.

So roll on the paperless house, it only took a decade but the dream lives and breaths again!

2x2 Weave Training - Days Ten and Eleven (and Lightbulbs)

A bit of a break in the posting, but what your going to read here is sequential. If you have any doubts about it look at the upload date on the YouTube video.

Monday (Day Ten) OK, with the success of Saturday and weaving 6 poles, Monday was a consolidation day. The first session of the day I had the first and last poles opened up slightly. Enya was running well so I closed the weaves up again. I would say no problem, but that's not quite true. If she came in full power she was skipping. If she came in at a steadier pace she was picking up all the poles perfectly. Also with the poles closed up she's not paddling. These are minor issues to my mind. The big thing is she's gone through the "lightbulb" moment with the weaves.

What do I mean by the "lightbulb" moment? In a lot of the things we teach our dogs to do, especially in agility, there is a moment when your dog clicks to what it is your trying to get them to do. Up until then their just doing things by repetition or giving you a partial behaviour, but they don't understand what it is your asking them to do. For the weaves, virtually all the methods we use to train them rely on a set of parallel poles that are gradually closed up. This applies to channels, V weaves and to 2x2s. The lightbulb moment occurs when your dogs understands that your not asking them to run down between two rows of poles, but  your asking them to weave their body along a single line of poles. That is the lightbulb  moment.

For the mid-afternoon and evening sessions I concentrated on working the arc with the weaves closed up. This allowed me to make sure Enya was still able to get her entries into the weaves even when closed up.

Tuesday (Day Eleven). OK, for the morning session I shifted from three 2x2 weaves to a solid base of 6 poles. Although we've been working with closed up 2x2 poles up until now, there is a subtle difference between those and a solid base. 2x2 poles can move independently of each other even when staked down. A set of poles on a solid base do not behave like that. Fortunately this did not make any difference to Enya's performance.

An interesting thing to observe with Enya's training in 2x2 weaves is the amount of value that have been built into them. The slightest twitch in the direction of the weave poles causes a small, red try-colour blur to run through them :-)

OK, technically this is actually day twelve of training. If you look back through the entries of the blog you'll see that we had a Day Three And A Half when we were sorting out a problem. And we've had two rest days so this is exactly two weeks since we started Susan Garrett's 2x2 Weave Training DVD. The reason for all this finger counting is below:

Yes, my little star did 12 weaves today. You really can do 12 weaves in 12 days. Actually this was almost an accident. I hadn't intended to do 12 weaves today. In the 2x2 method you first master 6 weaves and then you add a second set of 6 weaves 12ft to 15ft away, and then move the two sets together. The problem I hit was Enya was so keen to do the second set that she was skipping poles on the first set in her hurry to get to the second set. During the training we've have managed to build a lot a value into the weaves. As it was the last session of the day I thought, What the heck - let's just put the two sets together and see what happens".

What happened was a bit of magic - Enya did 12 weave poles.

OK, now we've got over the initial euphoria, lets examine this. Two weeks and we've gone from a dog that had never seen a weave pole to a dog that can weave a set of twelve poles. OMG! However there is still a huge amount of work to do. Her weaving actions needs to consolidated, entries need to be checked, obstacles on entry and exit need to be introduced .... but she is weaving :-)

And on that happy note I shall leave you for now, but watch this space for more updates.

2x2 Weave Training - Days Eight and Nine

Friday (Day Eight)

OK, so end of Day Seven (Thursday) I'd had an idea about setting up the 2x2 weaves relative to a baseline rather than to the normal reward line (see 2x2 Weave Training - Days Six and Seven). This doesn't actually change the geometry of the weaves at all, it's mentally just a different way of looking at the layout. So why did I want to try it? Two reasons, firstly it makes adjusting the angle of the weaves to "turn back time" much easier (for me). Secondly, it makes the weaves look normal to me which would hopefully tidy up my body language.

Why is body language important - if your working high on the arc, the difference between your dog making any entry from this side of the weaves (the equivalent to working low on the arc) and wrapping the first pole is body language. Where you stand is virtual identical so they don't really get a positional cue. See below:

So if, for example, your having problems with entries one of the questions you need to ask yourself is, "Is my body language consistent?". Changing to a baseline view of the world made me more comfortable and hence would improve my body language.

So, did it work? Short answer, YES. Enya's behaviour and entries were much better on Day Eight. Even at this stage body language is soooooo important.

By the end of Day Eight I was sufficiently impressed by her progress that I decided to add the third set of 2x2's to the others. I've tended to find that I make a lot of the changes at the end of a day, especially if the dog has been working well. It's just a personal thing - if the dog has been working well, you need to stretch things a little. Doing it in the final session means the dogs have the evening to think about it and the night to sleep on it for the next day.

If you look at Susan Garrett's DVD she does adds the third set while the weaves are a still open (as Enya's are at the moment), if you read the workbook she closes up the two set first and then adds the third. This tells me that this change is a matter of personal preference and how you think your dog is working.

Certainly adding the third set caused Enya no problems at all. She took to it like a duck to water.

Saturday (Day Nine)
This started out as a consolidation day. I worked with 6 weaves (three 2x2 sets) all closed up to competition distance, but still in the 1-7 o'clock position. I worked the entries, and as the day progressed I gradually closed up the weaves. By the time we reached the end of the final session, we were as near as damn it closed so, with a deep breath, I decided to close the weaves up completely and see what happened. You'll note this is at the end of the day again.

This is a big moment for the dog - and this is what happened ...

Six weaves in nine days :-) OMG! What a little STAR she is! And look at the tail - that is a happy tail! She is getting such enjoyment out of this. The biggest problem I have at the moment is when I'm setting her up for an entry for the weaves. Unless I am very careful as soon as her nose is pointed at the weaves she will go and do them. There is an awful lot of value built into the weaves :-)

If you look at her action as she's weaving she's not paddling. However if the weaves are still open, she is starting to paddle. At the moment, with completely closed weaves she has think about it and check the head long blast that is the normal mode of Kilnhurst locomotion. To encourage the paddling motion I'm probably going to do some work with the weaves open as well as practicing with them closed.

As you would expect for something she's only be doing for 9 days, there are some strong points and some weak points. Entries are very strong, precision is weak, she sometimes skips poles - I suspect the later has to do with speed and drive. The knack of course is not to inhibit the speed & drive & enthusiasm, but to encourage the precision :-)

Sunday will be a day of rest - she's done a huge amount this week and she deserves a bit of a break. I certainly don't want to break that happy tail :-)

2x2 Weave Training - Days Six & Seven

Days Six (Wednesday) and Seven (Thursday)

Wednesday (Day Six), OK we started the day with the two sets of 2x2s 5 feet apart at 1-7 o'clock.

Sadly the day did not go well. Enya was missing the entries from the left again. She was bending round the first pole perfectly, but then skipping to the end and going between poles 3 and 4.

Initially I assumed this was cause by her speed. However when she slowed down she was still showing the same behaviour. Another indicator that there was more going on here, was her response to the "No" command (see "No as a command") when she did this. This should have caused Enya to try a new behaviour, instead she kept presenting the same behaviour. This suggests she thought the behaviour was correct.

I suspect in classic 2x2 training, it would be said that I had closed the gap between the two sets of 2x2s too quickly and I hadn't rewarded enough in-between the two sets as I closed the gap.

However I think there's an alternative explanation - I think Enya was offering exactly the behaviour I had trained her for.

Figure 1 above, shows the path I wanted Enya to take. Figure 2 shows what Enya was offering me. Figure 3 shows what I have been teaching Enya on Day One. If you had to describe the path in Figure 3 in words you could say she was to wrap the first pole, and then cut in before the next pole. Doing that would have produce the behaviour I wanted when repeated with another set of 2x2 as shown in Figure 1. However you could also describe path in Figure 3 as, wrap the first pole and then cut in before the last pole in the set. If you do that, then the path in Figure 2 makes perfect sense. She's taken what I've taught her on Day One with two poles and expanded it to four poles. That would explain why she was repeating it despite the use of "No".

So, whatever the explanation, we needed a cure. You're not supposed to make the challenge easier, but you do need to introduce a change to get the behaviour you desire. Roll on Day Seven.

Thursday (Day Seven). To start with I reduced the spacing on the 2x2 sets to 4ft, but re-opened the sets to nearer 2-8 o'clock. From the right hand side I was getting the behaviour I wanted. From the left I was still getting the skipping behaviour I'd seen the day before. Enya was actually deliberately widening her path to skip round pole 2 even when it was moved from the 1-7 o'clock to the 2-8 o'clock position. This further reinforced the idea that she felt this the behaviour was the correct on as she was actually avoiding cutting in-between poles 1 & 2, even when it was made easier. So as a temporary measure I moved the second set of 2x2s off the the reward line to the left. This meant that as Enya arced round she wouldn't see the second set  unless she cut in-between poles 1 & 2. That had the desired effect, Enya started cutting in between 1 & 2 again, and then doing 3 & 4. Once you have the correct behaviour you can reward and reinforce it and I was able to move back to the normal configuration.

Because I was only getting the problematic behaviour from the left of the weaves I wondered if my body language could have contribute to the problem. The angling of the 2x2 sets on the reward line was not something I felt comfortable with. Your always fiddling with the two sets of poles to make sure the angles are the same, and the reward line is not consistent with the line you'd use for a normal set of weaves.

On Thursday night I suddenly realised there was a different way you could think of the layout of the 2x2 weaves. The actually geometry is identical, all that changes is the way you think of it.

Figure 1, below, shows the normal way of looking at 2x2 weave geometry. Figure 2 shows an alternative way of looking at it. The actual layout is identical - all I did was rotate the image in Figure 1 by 20 degrees or so. However it gave me a view of the weaves I was far, far more comfortable with. The baseline in orange is the same line as you'd normally see with a standard set of weaves. In this view it was immediately obvious to me that sets one and two are always parallel to each other.

It also makes adjusting the angle between the first and second sets of 2x2s far easier (at least for me). As the arrows show in Figure 3 all you do is move the second set towards or away from the base line. The only thing you need to be aware of, is that in this orientation the baseline stays still, but your reward line will move when you adjust the angles between the sets of 2x2s.

Tune again for the results of this change of mind set - did it help me or hinder? Was it a great idea or a disaster ?

2x2 Weave Training - Days Four & Five

Days Four & Five - Moving the Two Sets of 2x2s & Turning Back Time


In case anyone is wondering about Sunday by the way - we had a day off. We're were out and about on Sunday, so there wasn't going to be time to devote to Enya's training properly. I decided it was probably better to give her a day off. Certainly when your training something this intensely, i.e. 3 times a days, even if it is only for 5 mins each session, it does no harm at all to give your dog a break every so often. Just like people they will come back refreshed and with their enthusiasm levels topped up.

Sunday

Anyway Days Four & Five (Monday and Tuesday) - These are about moving the locations your training in about so your dog gets used to working in different locations. This we did most successfully. And they're about closing the gap between the two sets of 2x2s down from 8ft to 4ft, and changing the time from 2-8pm to 1-7pm - this will all make perfect sense if you're familiar with Susan Garrett's 2x2 training method. If you aren't, it will all seem really weird, but be assured I don't train my dog for 6 hours a day :-) Anyway, this was slightly less successful as we're not at 4ft just yet, currently we're working at about 5ft between the sets.

Monday (Day Four) we closed the gap, you can sort of get an idea of what happened if you read the previous blog entry on using No as a command.

Tuesday (Day Five) we could only do two sessions, morning and evening. Due to a re-arranged meeting, lunch was a very hurried affair with just time to walk the dogs and check the horses. The final session on Day Five was interesting because Enya was trying to hammer through the weaves at top speed and as a consequences she kept missing the entry on one or other of the two sets. Typically collie behaviour - "I must do everything at 120%". The misses were being caused because I was reducing the distance between the two sets, and the closer you get the more they have to dig in and turn to get the entries. I resisted the temptation to make it easier and instead used the toy to reward in-between the sets. This encourages her to dig in and to slow up just a bit. It's a bit of a balancing act, you want the speed but you also need them to have sufficient control to make it work.

Needless to say with this we have been working the arc, though I have to remind myself to do the easier entries as well as I have a tendency to try work high on the arc all the time. Challenging I know, but in reality most of her entries in competition are not going to be from there, they're more likely to be from straight on, especially in the lower grades. Now that would be a novelty - having to explain to people why you dog can get any entry from +/- 90degrees but misses the easier entries, LOL!

So, very successful with good progress and we're going to be starting Day Six with the 2x2 sets about 5ft apart and 1-7pm

"No" as a command

Most people think of "No" as something you shout at a dog to stop it doing something, a negative.

But if it's used properly, "No" can be a very positive aid in training your dog. It can speed up the training cycle immensely by blocking undesired behaviours. I had to think about the word I used there quite carefully. I didn't want to say bad or inappropriate behaviours, as what I'm talking about are just behaviours that you just don't want at a particular place and time. At other times they may be perfect. It's a bit like what's the difference between a weed and a flower? A weed is just a flower that's growing in the wrong place. Similarly a "sit" is a great behaviour from a dog greeting people, but not what you want when you teaching a dog to roll-over.

Our dogs are trained using positive, reward-based methods. The exact reward depends on the dog. Kira, our Labrador, will do anything for food. Enya, our collie, on the other hand has been known to politely take food and then spit it out - but will do anything for a thrown ball.

So where does "No" a seeming negative come into this? When your teaching a dog a new command, sometimes they will get it right, in which case they get the reward. Somethings they get it wrong, in which case they don't get the reward and we encourage them to try again until they get it right and we can reward them. This rapidly builds a characteristic of dogs that have been trained by positive reinforcement - if they are unsure about what you are asking them what to do they "offer" behaviours that they think might get them the reward. It's not uncommon in a reward based class, to see a puppy offer it's entire repertoire of actions in rapid succession to get the reward.

So what we do, is use "No" as a marker to indicate the behaviours that are not going to get the reward - this lets the dog know that it should "offer" us a different behaviour immediately. It speeds up the process. If I was trying to teach a stand and my dog does a sit, I would say "No" and wait. OK, the dog knows a sit isn't going to hack it, so it doesn't stay in the sit hopefully staring at the treat, it tries a down. Another "No". OK the dog now knows that I'm not after a sit or a down so it has to try something new. The dog stands up - Bingo! Reward time. OK, this is slightly contrived example and I wouldn't actually teach a stand like that, but you get the idea. I haven't had to wait for ages while the dog stays hopefully in a sit until they finally give up, and the dog hasn't got frustrated.

So how do you teach it? Just as I've indicated above. In your training sessions if your dog gives you a behaviour that isn't the one you want, mark it with a "No" and wait. Then reward the correct behaviour. Your dog will rapidly pick up that "No" means "try something else".

My reason for blogging about this now?

I did a training session on weaves with Enya this morning on 2x2s. We're on two sets, so she has to go through the first set, then the second set, in the right order and the right direction.

First time, she missed the first set out - "no". She didn't wait for the toy/reward, but immediately arced around for a second run. This time she got the first set but missed the second - "no". Again that immediate arc around and re-try. Third time she again got the first but missed the second - "no". Fourth time round she nailed it! Ball - reward - play!

This whole process took less than 30 seconds. So in less than 30 seconds we went from failure to success. Enya wasn't bored, wasn't frustrated, worked really well and was throughly reward, and all because I can say "no" to my dog :-)

Some pointers:

Don't use No in a harsh way. When I'm training my dogs, "No" is used in a very soft, everyday voice. The same voice as I would say "sit" or "weave" in. Don't use "No' in a telling-off voice. If you find you can't do that, just use a different word. People I know use "Opps" or "Cheater" as alternatives.

Always reward your dog at the end. If you've offered a reward to the dog you must give it to them. If all goes pear-shaped, get the dog to do something very simple like a "sit" or a "down" and reward that.

If you find your having to say "No" more than two or three times in a row you've almost certainly made the challenge your offering your dog too hard. Re-think it and try again, remember the training maxim: Always set your dog up to succeed.

If everything is going wrong and your starting to get frustrated, and your "No" is becoming harsh. STOP IMMEDIATELY! You will do yourself and your dog no good if you try and train in this state of mind, and you will de-value your "No" command. Have a break. Have a cup of tea. Do something else. Once your back in a positive frame of mind, try again.