Positive Pet Training: Dog Sports

I have to admit to being a sporadic participant in the Positive Pet Training blog hop. I don't always have something to say on the topic for the month, though I am always interested in reading the posts others put up. This month's topic, though, is as perfect as a topic could be. Dog sports. I think that is the overwhelming theme of my blog, to be honest.

Me and Koira in the summer of 2013

Training dog sports in non-positive methods doesn't make sense to me. I do dog sports in order to have fun with my dogs in a structured way. Titles achieved are a mark of our progress, and as such, the same title can mean hugely different things for different dogs. Ptera, for example, has her FDCh-G title in flyball, achieved after a mere 6 months of playing flyball. I am absurdly proud of her for this. Koira, on the other hand, earned that same title three and a half years after her debut tournament.

Koira's turn in early 2013. She was enthused about the sport, but I was struggling with training her turn

As proud as I am of Ptera, it doesn't compare to how I felt when Koira earned that title. The journey it took to get that far was a long and winding path. Koira sat out of flyball for months at a time to give her brain a break and because she just didn't seem into it. I loved flyball and continued to play with Pallo in the meantime, bringing Koira back into the sport every so often when I had new ideas of how to get her engaged. I finally seemed to figure out the right combination of training for her, with the help of many, many flyball people, teammates and otherwise.

Koira in the early fall of 2013. Something clicked that year.

The first hurdle with Koira was getting her into flyball. She has always enjoyed doing things with me; the trick was to get her to enjoy doing something that involved running away from me. We tried a ton of different tricks, including putting a tunnel in instead of the jumps, working on different toys and treats, and probably a million other things I have long since forgotten. When she just didn't feel like it, we took breaks, sometimes months long, from practice and tournaments. Eventually, Koira started finding the game fun. I found the right combination of motivators for her, and figured out how I needed to interact with her at flyball for it to be fun for her.

Excited and ready to go in 2014

I can actually still remember the moment I felt like it all kind of clicked into place for us. We were in California at a U-Fli tournament, and I believe I had Koira running in Singles while Pallo ran on a team lineup with Gold Coast Flyers. I ended up just running Koira in her warm up and then pulling her from racing because her turn was terrible. A few awesome people offered to help me with her after racing on Saturday because I was despairing of Koira ever being ready to run. At this point, we were over the hurdle of getting Koira to love flyball and enjoy playing. But we still hadn't figured out the right training for her turn to end up safe enough for her to run in tournaments. Generous people brought out dogs to demonstrate a few drills, watched me run those with Koira, corrected me, gave me notes and feedback, and were just all around amazing and helpful. And those people gave me the tools I needed to work with Koira in a way that we could be successful in flyball.

Focused on her tug like a pro in 2014

Koira was pulled from flyball competition for months after that. Instead of running lineups and doing our same old thing, we worked new drills and changed things up. And while Koira will never, ever in her career have the most amazing turn ever, and occasionally still has horrible cringeworthy turns, she did develop a safe turn that even managed to be gorgeous occasionally.

Having fun, 2014

I have had plenty of people ask me why I kept trying to get Koira to play flyball, both when we were working on motivation, and when we were working on her box turn after that. I've had the occasional person say that I am horrible to keep playing this game with a dog who didn't enjoy it (back at the beginning). But it was never that Koira didn't have fun during training, it was that she didn't really find the activity itself rewarding. I could have easily given up, found something else for us to do together, and said that was that. But I knew that if I found the right way to show her it was fun, Koira would love the sport. I was developing as a dog trainer, and Koira was the dog I made all my mistakes with. As a consequence, she taught me more than any other dog I have had the pleasure of working with, and likely more than any other dog ever will (though I fully expect to learn from every dog I work with).

Box turn in 2016. It isn't always this good, but sometimes it is, and I am always amazed and thrilled

The lessons I learned from my journey with Koira aren't all easy to put into words. But the most important ones are easy.

• Have fun with your dog. If your dog isn't having fun, stop and reassess. Either find a way to make it fun, or stop doing it until you can, whether that means stopping for the day, the month, the year, or for life. 
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• Play with your dog. Play in as many different ways as possible. By making more things fun, and introducing new things in fun, playful ways, you can pretty much talk your dog into loving almost anything. 
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• Develop trust with your dog. Trust that you will keep them safe, of course, but also trust that if you tell them something is awesome, they believe you. Sometimes that means being really careful of how you introduce something new, and of how you use it. 

A deep trust with a history of fun and play is more valuable than just about anything else. You don't need to do dog sports to have this, but you do have to interact with your dog and spend time doing things together consistently and on an ongoing basis. Dog sports help develop this sort of bond, because the amount of time needed for training forces the opportunity to spend time together having fun. And for many people in the dog sport world, earning titles, or Qs, or a Pronounced, or whatever other markers of achievement your sport of choice awards, simply marks the journey you've been on, and shows you how far you've come together. For one person, a Flyball Dog title, the first you earn, is no big deal. For someone else, it may mark the successful achievement of a goal years in the making.

Interact. Have fun. Make sure you are both having fun.

At the end of the day, dog sports are a way for us to have fun with our dogs. They give us ways to challenge ourselves, an excuse to spend time working with our dogs, and often a great feeling of achievement when goals are met. And our dogs should enjoy the process as much as we do.

Training Tuesday: Training Tools

Dog training tools abound. There are literally hundreds, or thousands, of tools to use when training your dog. The Positive Pet Training blog hop this month is focusing on sharing a few training tools, but it is so hard to choose what to share.

I'm going to share potentially the most controversial tool first: a muzzle.

Ptera wearing Koira's muzzle as a full-face-mask.

A lot of people don't think muzzles have any place in positive training. Others think that only "bad dogs" wear muzzles. And neither of those things are true. Muzzles can certainly be used wrong, but there is nothing about them that is inherently against positive training. Properly introducing a dog to wearing a muzzle, being mindful of the situations in which they are asked to wear the muzzle, and making sure to be your dog's advocate can make muzzles a super positive experience. The number one thing that I like the most about using a muzzle is that other people tend to give more space to a muzzled dog, more so even than when you as the handler tell them your dog needs space, or any color of leash or ribbon tied to the leash. Part of this is taking advantage of the above preconception that "bad dogs" wear muzzles, so people try to avoid those "bad dogs" and part is that people see a dog wearing a muzzle as serious, while an owner saying their dog needs space doesn't appear as important. If my dog can comfortably wear a muzzle, and by doing so, she gains the space she needs to feel comfortable while out on walks, then that is what we will use a muzzle for. Of course, muzzles are useful in many other ways as well. I could do an entire post about it. Lets just say that muzzles are awesome and leave it at that.

The other training tools we are using right now are for an online class we are taking.

Two platforms and a gate

The class is to teach dogs positions (front, heel, offside heel, behind, etc), and it uses a few tools to help explain the criteria to the dog along the way.

Our platforms are super ugly, but they totally work

The platforms are made of foam and taped together into a height of about 2-3 inches or so. Mine are homemade and ugly because I am cheap, but they work just fine. The platform is not the position the dog is supposed to take. Rather, the dog learns that whenever the platform is on the ground, they should go stand on it. Placing it in relation to the human so that the dog is in "front" or "heel" gets the dog used to the picture of where they are going to be. The cue is introduced and solidified by switching between multiple platforms before the platforms are ever faded away.

Ptera standing awkwardly on a platform with the gate around her- just for fun

The gate is used both with and without the platforms as a non-aversive pressure to help the dog understand proper positioning. An example would be using it alongside the handler, far enough away for the dog to comfortably be next to the handler, to help the dog understand how to stand straight when coming into heel, rather than swinging their butt wide.

Along with these tools, we use two of the most important tools a trainer can have- a good working relationship with your dog, and plenty of rewards. I develop a relationship with my dogs by asking them to work, and by making work fun. My dogs respond by enthusiastically working with me, asking for more when we are done, and having fun with me. If either of us isn't having fun, that is when we need to stop and take a break (or, well, it is one step past where we should have taken a break!). Rewards for my dogs include a lot of things: treats of all kinds; tug toys; throwing a ball or toy; wrestling/personal play; and praise. Each of those has a long history of reinforcement as a reward.

Muzzles, gates, and platforms are just a few of the tools I use when training specific things. Rewards and a personal relationship are things that I use every time I train my dogs.

What kinds of things do you use while training? What tools do you think are the most essential?