Agility Action

Morey and I recently returned to our Agility Class after taking a break for the holidays. I was worried Morey might have forgotten some of the things we had previously learned but he jumped back in like we hadn't missed a week. Last week he went through 13 obstacles in a row which was a new record!


While Morey has an advantage in some ways because of his service dog training in other ways it makes it more of a challenge. For example, sometimes you want your dog to cross behind you to walk on your other side but Morey is used to sticking to one side (unless cued to move to the other side). He is also used to hand targeting so when I try to use my hand to signal a direction to go he just thinks he needs to follow my hand so he can touch it. We're working through some of these challenges and it's making us both pay close attention to each other.


One of my challenges is naming each obstacle. I want to be careful that I'm not confusing Morey's cues for work with his agility cues. I've actually gone back to ICAN's cue sheet to read the exact definition of each cue to make sure I'm not giving Morey conflicting cues. While I can change the meaning of the cues he initially learned, I want to be intentional about making changes and make sure I am not setting Morey up for confusion or failure later on.


For example, Morey has been trained that "Jump" means jump up onto something. For agility I want him to jump over and through things so I'm deciding how to indicate to Morey the difference between these. I don't want to tell him to "jump" while we're out working expecting him to jump up onto something and instead he jumps over it. I think I've settled on "over" as jumping over something and since the tire is the only thing he has to jump through I think I will just name that "tire". We'll keep "jump" the same since that is a cue I often use in daily life.

Morey doesn't know all the cues for each obstacle yet but when he does he will have increased his vocabulary by quite a bit!