Agility Training

Morey and I were both excited to get back to agility after our holiday break. One perk about living in Texas is that we have class outside pretty much all year- it's actually more common to cancel class for heat than cold! That means that some Saturday mornings the humans are all bundled up but the cold never seems to bother the dogs. In fact, they really seem to like running in the chilly weather!

Our club is hosting an agility trial in February so we have been training and preparing for that during our classes. We are working on skills like handling your dog from a distance, discriminating between two obstacles that are close to each other and approaching obstacles from different directions. I have been challenged to go back to some of my basic dog training skills, like working on the 3 Ds.

For those who aren't familiar with the 3 Ds, they are duration, distance and distraction. You introduce these elements one at a time once a dog is familiar with a concept. For example, if you teach your dog to "sit" you then have to work on duration (length of time the dog will hold the sit), distraction (having your dog sit even when distractions are happening) and distance (dog will sit even if you are in different positions). Location is sometimes included along with the 3 Ds since you need your dog to "sit" in a variety of locations, not just in your living room. You only introduce one of these elements at a time during a training session, so if you are working on duration you want to make sure there aren't any distractions going on at the same time. It's easy to get overly ambitious and try to combine more than one but that is usually not going to set your dog up for success.

Morey's most challenging obstacle right now is the weave poles. Unbeknownst to me, I was always on the right of Morey as I trained this obstacle. I realized this when I approached on the left side and Morey just stood there looking at me. He knew what he was supposed to do when I was on his right side but to him, me being on his left was totally different. This challenged me to be more diligent about how I am training obstacles and to make sure I am training for a variety of different settings, locations, etc.

Agility classes are helping to refresh my memory and sharpen my training skills!