This class assumes a beginner’s background in Control Unleashed patterns, either from Leslie McDevitt’s books, or from the CU Pattern Games class last term taught by Julie Daniels CCUI, or from another CU foundation class. In this class we’ll take a deeper dive into Control Unleashed solutions for dogs with big feelings. Whether your dog is an extrovert or an introvert, whether they need support at home or out and about, CU can help!
Our beloved TA, Kimberly Palermo CCUI, will be in the study group to answer questions and review video. She's been with Julie's CU classes from the beginning. The Julie/Kim team facilitates lots of discussion and welcomes all sorts of participation!
We’ll use the foundation games you’ve already learned. We’ll also learn more CU patterns from Leslie’s most recent book, Reactive to Relaxed. And the newest CU games that have not yet appeared in a book. Two versions of Requested Approach Training, more work with default behaviors, Voluntary Sharing, LATTE, teaching Leave It, teaching your dog to choose Which Treat or Which Direction, etc. We'll strengthen your Down and Chill mat work under more distracting circumstances. We'll incorporate taking turns (and you don't even need a second dog!). The class will help you combine games and sequence them effectively for your own dog. The Gold students will have a chance to work on individual behavior modification projects, so the class is partly "handler's choice." It will be a busy classroom with a wide variety of interests in play and a lot of interesting discussion!
CU training plays well with other methods such as Cookie Jar Games and Empowerment training. We'll integrate CU patterns with current practices that are already working for you. Pattern combinations and sequences will be practiced, especially the Sudden Change Skill Set. Your dog’s big feelings might be loud on the outside or loud on the inside. Your dog might be attracted to the world or avoidant. That’s all OK. This is the class for putting together an individualized CU program for your dog.
Teaching Approach
This is a hands on training class. A lot of small food treats are used, and treats are more convenient than toys for most of this training. Kibble is ideal. In Control Unleashed patterns, the details of timing and reward placement are important. Some of the patterns are similar but each one has its own order of events. The reasons for doing things in a certain way are explained and always open for discussion. My Discussion Forum tends to be active and engaged. I invite Silver students to participate with short videos in certain discussion threads.
Julie Daniels (she/her) won her first award for writing in the fourth grade, and she was training dogs long before that. Today Julie Daniels is one of the foremost names in dog agility in the United States. She was one of the early champions of the sport and helped many clubs throughout the country...(Click here for full bio and to view Julie's upcoming courses)
WEEK 1 - Review and progress the Arrival Skill Set out and about; Look At That (LAT) - the View from your window; Advanced CU mat work; How to have your dog's back when they are Down and Chill
WEEK 2 - LATTE and DECAF; Adding Take A Breath (TAB) to active patterns; Chair Game in tandem with helpers; Default positions; More about Trust exercises
WEEK 3 - Voluntary Sharing; Passive vs Active Start Buttons; Turn Recall into a pattern game; Superbowls with distractions and triggers; Intro to Sudden Environmental Change (SEC); Safety first and what that looks like
WEEK 4 - Using the 1-2-3 game with Circle Method LLW; Adding activities and reporting elements to Give Me A Break (GMAB); Using Passive and Active Stationing; Using heightened arousal and self modulation in reinforcement procedures
WEEK 5 - Requested Approach Training (RAT) in both directions using Empowerment and Tolerance techniques; Teaching an errorless 'Leave It'; Putting together your Sudden Change Skill Set
WEEK 6 - Which Treat?; Which Direction?; Active, Passive and Defensive leash handling; Personal Projects in the Big Wide World
This class assumes some CU background and will be about applying already trained Control Unleashed concepts in real life. We'll be taking the patterns out and about or working with distractions at home. This class will put to use everything you have learned from Leslie's CU books or in my foundation CU class.
Using Chair Game to build a Home Base for Exploration, by Julie Daniels
Every rep of Chair Game begins and ends at the chair, which becomes your Home Base for this game of exploring the environment. It's a movement game, it's a start button game, it's a game of looking around and processing the environment. There are a lot of moving parts to the Chair Game pattern!
This is our foundation Chair Game. I'm reviewing this with you because I really want you to do it my way. I add a handler action to the game as soon as you put down each treat on a target. I want you to turn your feet to point toward the chair. In this video, the Chair is a white plastic stool. It just needs to be a raised target that your dog can reach. If your dog is very small then use a chair with a cookie bowl tucked partway underneath it. Big and small dogs alike use the chair as a visual Home Base. Big dogs eat home base cookies from the chair itself and small dogs eat their home base cookies out of the bowl under the chair.
Here's a refresher video where I'm coaching my student to turn her feet toward the chair as soon as she puts a treat on a target. I'm using TAGteach methodology to "tag" my student for the correct action of "feet pointing to chair." As I explained in my foundation CU class, I want this action because it reminds the dog that the next move will be back to Home Base. The dogs see other targets and they see the environment, but the handler's position cues them that they will turn around and go back to the chair. That pattern is comforting in such a busy game. Every time they approach something it's temporary; they'll be leaving soon to go back to their Home Base. Here's the foundation pattern:
Kazi Chair Game in outdoor pen with classmate working outside the fence
After your dog has the concept of Chair Game as a Home Base game, there is much you can do to expand your dog's exploration or activity in the training area. In this next video there are a couple of examples. Chilli the BMD is ready to work outside the fenced area. We've added a jump between his chair and his target to make agility part of his pattern. Inside the fenced area, Dash the BC is working on observing the activity without stressing or reacting.
In Chair Game the handler and dog return to home base together. You'll hear me remind Dash's mom about that. This is a start button game. We want the dog to look at the distraction and then look at the handler's face when they want to go back to the chair for another cookie. The dog does not get cookies from hand. There are two different chair styles here. Chilli's mom will stand beside him at the chair and Dash's mom goes behind the chair, which is also how she uses the chair in GMAB. But the dogs are getting their cookies from the chair, not from the handler's hand. The dog has a relationship with their chair and it becomes a safety zone. There is just enough independence in this game to help your dog feel empowered about exploring a new space or observing a new distraction close up. As soon as they've had enough they ask to go back to the chair for a Home Base cookie. It's really 'comfort food!'
Dash watches Chilli from parallel Chair Game stations
I hope you appreciate in this video that Dash is able to look and watch Chilli's activity without losing his mind or his confidence. He has a double barrier to help him feel protected and he has his mom with him. When he wants to go back to the chair he has to remember to use his start button and they return to Home Base together. From there he can use his start button to say when he's ready to go out towards the other dog again. The start button is a big part of this game.
Notice also that I do not have the two dogs working side by side. They are working in parallel, but they are offset from each other to tone down the distraction level a bit. Chilli is ready to be outside the fence but we added a leash for good measure. The antecedent arrangements considered the skills and the needs of both dogs. Chair Game is a very good choice for introducing dogs to the distraction of other dogs in motion, but you do need to make an individualized plan.
How to wean from a full fence? I use X-pens to make a line between the two dogs. Expandable gates are wonderful. I also have a row of birch trees in another training area, and I add an X-pen to the tree line. I have also draped a tarp over this fence to create a visual barrier. And when I want to create a partial visual block but not a full block, I can use the chair itself for that purpose. Then when the dogs are ready I turn the chair sideways to allow for full observation after the pattern is established. We always begin the pattern before we start making things more difficult! We insert challenges into a pattern while the dogs are already pleasantly engaged and feeling relaxed.
This next video and the last picture tell the story of how I helped my students gradually let their dogs see each other. They each took a turn playing Chair Game in the pen with the other dog Down and Chill on a station at a workable distance from the pen. I worked the game with the chair away from the fence and then turned the game around so the chair was against the fence. But I used a solid chair that the dogs could not see through. They already know what the other is doing. When they were fine with the chair against the fence I made the call to turn the chair sideways, and the result is the final picture of the lecture.
Kazi playing Chair Game Superbowls with chair blocking view of Dash
And after the dogs are cool with it all? We can progress Chair Game to look like this:
This picture looks like a BIG WIN to me! This is what we want to see, the dog at her Home Base chair, feeling safe and looking around, processing a formerly scary scene with her tail relaxed and her face soft and curious. We are on our way!
Notice the expandable gate and the lattice jump wing? Those are very useful partial visual blocks. We all have different props if we look around. We need to help our CU dogs see distractions in a muted way. This is a good week for searching them out! You'll need to be able to soften a view so you don't overload your dog with the social scene.
How do you think you can make use of Chair Game with your dog at this time? What is your goal for the future? Let's talk about this one!
A sampling of what prior students have said about this course ...
This course has made a real difference for my reactive dog and me. Julie's expertise and guidance through course lectures helped me implement Control Unleashed (CU) techniques which I was not able to fully do by just reading the books. The supportive class community allowed me to see how other students applied CU to their dogs and helped me with my dog. Very happy I enrolled in this course.
I have been hoping for an opportunity to have guidance and support in working with my dog in the big wide world out there, carefully setting up scenarios for my dog to be successful. With many on-line classes, you're not really ready to introduce live scenarios until the very end of the course. In this course, we could safely set up or "play in" live scenarios safely from early in the course. I felt I got a lot of experience with support and supervision!
As a bronze student I felt totally supported. Kimberley Palermo was an awesome TA. Her explanations, suggestions, and generosity of time were very appreciated. Julie Daniels is an expert communicator/teacher. She’s kind and generous and supportive. The list goes on. I will be watching for her courses. Thanks for everything. I hate that this is over!
Julie brings a wealth of knowledge and experience that conveys a strong sense of confidence in her approach. She has a great eye for looking at videos. She is humble yet confident in her expertise. She able to be positive and encouraging while at the same time able to point out a shortcoming or an error in thinking or technique to help the handlers improve. I really appreciated her Muse meditations and so glad that she recruited Kimberly Palermo to be her TA again. I really, really hope that this class is offered in the FDSA curriculum every year as Julie is able, I would like to take it again!
This is one of the best FDSA courses I've taken. Julie gives such awesome feedback that I get a pick-me-up every time I read her +R to the gold students. Even though I've deeply studied CU, it's really helpful to see it applied in real time with a variety of dogs and handlers. And Julie provides great ideas and feedback on antecedent arrangements to set teams up for success. This class has my highest recommendation.
Julie is one of the most special instructors I have ever had the pleasure to work with. She deals with each team based on what they need. I loved reading through all the gold and discussion threads. The learning from this class was invaluable.
Even at the bronze level, this course far exceeds expectations. Watching the progress made by Gold and Silver students was mesmerizing. Julie customizes her analyses and recommendations for each dog/handler team in such a way that serious progress happens in just a few short weeks. I can't recommend this course highly enough.
Registration
There are no scheduled sessions for this class at this time. We update our schedule frequently, so please
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Julie Daniels has recently been diagnosed with a tick borne disease that has required her to step back for the remainder of the term to focus on her health. Kimberly Palermo (CCUI) will be taking over instruction and homework feedback for this class as of August 9th.
Kim has served as Julie’s teaching assistant for this class for multiple terms and has lots of experience with both Julie’s material and with teaching and training in her own right as a certified professional dog trainer and certified control unleashed instructor. You can read her full bio here.
Lecture material will continue to be that written and created by Julie, and Julie will be available on a more limited basis to support Kim as needed.
If you have any additional questions please contact help@fenziacademy.com prior to registering.
Instructor: Julie Daniels
