Day 3: Sunday, Oct. 8
Have more than one dog that wants to work? Or a dog that doesn’t want to wait its turn at class?
This lab will cover how to manage working multiple dogs at the same time by using perch stays. Not only will your dogs learn to wait for their turn, but they’ll learn impulse control, patience and commitment to their stay!
Having a problem with an Obedience exercise or part of an Obedience exercise? Want to improve a known skill for obedience?
In this session, Denise will address any Obedience handling or training issues that you might have.
Most dogs learn their end-of-run routine “on the job” at the competition. While this does work for many teams, it’s a slow process and odds are, you won’t see all the benefits a trained end-of-run routine can provide. This working session is for you if:
– Your dog gets faster toward the end of the run
– Your dog gets confused if the middle of the course is near the exit gate
– Your dog avoids getting their leash on at the end
– Your dog watches/tries to visit the next dog on the line
– Your dog struggles to perform unless rewards are visible
In this session, teams will begin building a solid end-of-run routine that rewards each individual dog for their effort on the agility course, taking into account what kind of energy they should have at the end of the run and what reinforcer they’d enjoy swapping to after work.
Participants will learn how to attach that to the coursework itself in order to build speed throughout the entire course and how to swap from the intensity of work to the less intense but just as enjoyable reward contingency.
Working teams should be comfortable taking their dog’s leash off and have a few behaviors/obstacles that can be completed without reinforcement present. Behaviors can be tricks and don’t necessarily have to be obstacles.
Interesting smells, dropped food crumbs, open treat containers, and toys — these can all be very challenging for our dog to ignore.
We can try to block our dog’s access to these items, or we can use a cue to call our dog back to work, but wouldn’t it be better if our dog just continued to work in the presence of open treat containers, dropped food, interesting smells, and toys on the ground?
In this session we outline a systematic approach that will have your dog heeling past an open treat container or favorite toy in no time.
The key to success is helping our dog to make a choice to ignore these items. When our dog DECIDES to ignore something, the outcome is very different to when we ASK them to ignore something. This is because choosing to ignore an item is empowering and allows their full mental focus to be shifted elsewhere, whereas being asked to ignore something may result in our dog’s visual focus returning to us and the task, but there may still be conflicting emotions and split focus/attention within the processing in the brain.
In this session we outline the steps needed to have our dog choose to ignore interesting smells, food, and toys whilst working.
Working spots: There are no pre-requisite skills for working participants, but having an established loose leash walking or heeling behavior will be beneficial.
NOTE: The contents of this session is targeted towards dogs that compete (in-person or virtual) and/or dogs that participate in training sessions/classes. This is not a protocol aimed at teaching dogs to ignore dropped food whilst out on a sniffy walks or when on “free time” in their yard at home.
Pre requisite: online or physical toy class
There will be no lecture, only working one on one with Shade on the toy subject/step of your choice. We will divide up the time available and get the dogs out for working as many times as possible. If you have all the toy steps, structure, we can also work on behaviors within the toy game.
It’s a fact of life that things happen suddenly, and for your dog, even the more experienced and well socialized, those sudden events can sometimes be distressing!
Whether your dog is often pulled off center by events around them or it’s only occasional, when it happens to your dog, they need your help to recover.
It’s a great idea to have a plan in place before that happens, so you and your dog both have something to rely on! The startle to recovery framework involves simple, non-scary practice events, and parties that’ll convince your dog she won the lottery! Come see how to turn surprises into surprise parties!
Each dog sport has a foundation skill framework that builds reliable performance. But what about the glue that holds that sport-specific framework in place?
In this session, you will learn glue skills that can help accelerate learning opportunities (training, classes, seminars, and trials) for your dog. These skills are essential for your dog if competition is the ultimate goal. But they are also beneficial as general life skills for your dog. Without glue skills, dogs can develop unwanted habits, which interferes with their learning. Furthermore, once habits are established, they can be more challenging to change. Once you train glue skills with your dog, you will never return to training without them in your future dogs!
This session is for teams who have taken the Ring Confidence class at any level. Let’s keep working on trial prep to help your dog feel confident and happy in a trial environment! You know the pieces your dog still needs to work on, such as people pressure, transitioning with focus between exercises, or happy setups!
There will not be a lecture. Each team will get to run through their current sticking points and get feedback on how to support their dog. The goal is to help the dog feel confident in meeting these challenges! The sport focus should be obedience/rally as there will not be agility equipment available.
“How do I get my dog to stop… (fill in the blank here… marking on pee, going after food, sniffing for critters, etc)?” is a common request among nosework students. But often our very attempt to fix these issues backfires, and the behaviors we don’t want grow more persistent. This is because tackling distraction problems head-on frequently sets dogs up to practice the habit of losing focus—and, as we all know, practice makes perfect!
Come learn new ways to make distractions less relevant via antecedent arrangements, finely splitting environmental criteria, speed drills, and motivation games.
Are you always behind? Do you need to work on trusting your dog to do their job so you can move onto the next obstacle? In this session, we will work on plans to not get behind so we can direct our dogs around the course efficiently.
Are there skills that you need to teach your dog that will help you not be so far behind? We will identify those things that keep you from staying ahead of your dog.
Heelwork-to-Music combines all that you love about heeling, with your enjoyment of music!
It showcases the precision, connection and teamwork you strive for with transition freestyle behaviors and sequences that help maintain position, increase flow and ease of movement for your dog while having fun and moving to music! Come learn about this fun sport!
Why use different marker cues? What is the point and how does it affect behavior skills?
Join Shade for some quick lecture as she covers more advanced marker cues and why you might use different marker cues to teach different behaviors. (dogs in crates in crating area for this part!)
Then, we’ll get the dogs out, practice a simple behavior they already know. Second time, come with a behavior skill you want to teach and based on the lecture before hand, we’ll explore what marker cue you should use.
We spend a lot of time preparing our dog for competitions, but mostly we don’t match that with our own personal preparation.
All dog sports require at least some participation from the human. In some sports our primary role is as our dog’s coach and support crew, but in many sports we are also their teammate, performing alongside them throughout.
When we prepare our dog for competition, we help them to develop the technical skills needed, the mental stamina needed, the ability to remain focused in potentially stimulating environments, the ability to remain confident and accurate under “pressure,” and the ability to maintain their arousal in the optimal zone for the duration of each performance. However, it can be easy to forget that we need this exact same skillset in order to be both successful and to be a productive teammate.
Our skills for managing our own thoughts, emotions, and behavior become even more critical if our dog is less robust, less experienced, has had previous negative competition experiences, or is prone to non-beneficial arousal shifts.
It is very easy to inadvertently send our team into a downward spiral of unsuccessful and unenjoyable performances in instances where either end of the leash has not been adequately prepared, or when gaps in preparation have not been rapidly identified or have not been adequately resolved.
In this session we will look at the human end of the leash and the role we can play in preventing unenjoyable competition experiences for us and our dog, as well as the steps we can take to turn around a downward trajectory of unsuccessful and unenjoyable competition performances.
This isn’t about winning, it is about having an enjoyable competition experience ourselves, and providing an enjoyable competition experience for our dog. This is where winning starts. Successful performances (winning, placing, fast times, high scores, titles, etc.) aren’t achieved by focusing on those end results, they are a bi-product of both teammates being adequately prepared, confident, and in control of their own thoughts, emotions, and actions throughout the competition performance.
This session is a lecture only (no practical) but please bring a pen a paper to get the most out of the session.
How your dog enters the ring can tell you a lot about how the run will go. The rewards are gone, the distractions are front and center, and you’re feeling nervous about how this will all play out. Without a well-rehearsed routine, it can feel like you’re never sure what dog you’re going to have upon entering the ring. Will they be fast? Will they hold their startline? Will they stay with me on the course? These are all questions we can find lingering in our heads when we don’t have a way to directly ask the dog!
Building a predictable routine that you and your dog can rely on is the same as asking them those questions, and will produce more consistent behaviors and give you reliable information about your dog’s mindset.
In this session, teams will work on:
– Teaching a choice-based ring entry
– Attaching anticipatory feelings (increased arousal) to the leash removal
– Changing the reinforcement contingency of the startline setup from food to work
– Chaining the pieces together for use in competition contexts
All agility teams will benefit from learning how to give our dogs a choice with regard to competing and how to reduce reinforcement effectively with the use of routines and sequences of behaviors.
Working participants should feel comfortable taking their dog’s leash off in the working space and have a trained setup behavior. A lead-out is not necessary for this session but is recommended (can be just a few steps).
Yep. You’ve got the heeling basics AND…you need help! Maybe removing pocket hand or simply fixing a pesky little heeling issue. Need some attention to your heeling challenge? This is your lab!
Note: If you’re brand new to heeling, the Pocket Hand Heeling Lab is the place for you!
We spend a lot of time teaching our dogs to retrieve items to us and to hold onto items, and then when we want them to take an object away from us and drop it in the middle of nowhere our dogs are understandably confused.
In this Drop It Like It’s Hot hands-on workshop I will teach you how to train your dog that taking an object away from you and dropping it on cue is just as rewarding as giving you an object.
It is a step by step process that will teach your dog on cue:
- “Drop it Like It’s Hot”
- With the handler at a distance
- And then return to the handler having left the object behind
Prerequisites: your dog must be able to pick up an object off the floor
Supplies
- Small floor target (a fit paws silicon paw target is a good example; we we likely have a few available if you do not have one with you)
- Food your dog will do backflips for
- Clicker or other marker, a whistle or a duck caller
- 5 or 6 objects your dog likes to put in their mouth
In this lab, we talk about how to build reliable toy play through the use of food reinforcement. If your dog loves to play but struggles in new spaces, plays keep away once they get the toy or doesn’t show interest in playing, this is a beneficial lab to take.
We will be using food as reinforcement, so dogs who have medium to high food drive will do best in this lab.
You’ve trained hard, have your heeling all set, your dog is engaged … uh oh. Where’d that judge come from? Why is she following us? Lots of dogs are proximity sensitive and aren’t comfortable with being directly approached, followed or crowded by strangers (especially strangers with clipboards and hats!). Some dogs want to rush to greet anyone within a 10 foot radius!
In this lab, we’ll go over things you can do to help your dog be comfortable with these “strange” judge behaviors and not feel the need to keep an eye on them, and help those greeters learn that judges are boring, and you are best!
Does your dog get easily distracted during agility? Are you not exactly sure how to train distractions without overwhelming your dog? This session is for you!
We will work on layering challenges, how to work on thresholds, and what to do in different scenarios.
In both training and trialing, dogs frequently encounter hides in boxes, on chairs, or under tables. Dogs also quickly learn to focus on objects that look like training aids, such as tins or tubes, and smells associated with training aids, such as putty. If too regimented, even your movements or positioning can inadvertently pull your dog’s focus away from the all important odor cue. Over time, repetition of these set patterns can create expectations about where to look for odor, resulting in, at best, inefficient searching, and at worst, fringe or false alerts.
In this session we’ll be using fun, mind-bending hide placements to help clarify for the dogs that only following odor to source matters—no matter what the picture is. Dogs should already be on odor.
We’ve all heard the term! And many of us strive to apply it. So why is it so hard? And is it really all that important? When you see the lightbulb go on for your dog and it suddenly makes sense to them, you start to realize just how important a skill it is.
Clean handling is more than just separating your marker from your reward or making sure you have enough treats. It is a communication system that can reduce confusion, alleviate frustration and lead to a more enjoyable and productive training experience. In this session you will learn how to create changes in your training that will increase trust and overall success in your sessions. It’s up to us to make sure it all makes sense to our dogs!
There are many different strategies for training duration behaviors.
In this session, you will learn the situations where event markers can be used and the circumstances when you should avoid them. You will also learn to train and use several event markers effective for duration behaviors.
Join our FDSA team of presenters and staff for one final conference-wise session reviewing camp, announcing the details for next year, and bringing the conference full circle!