Have a dog that struggles to think clearly in or around the agility ring? Want to be proactive, so your dog can always keep his head? In this episode Bronagh and I talk about how to create that "thinking brain" even when exciting, overwhelming or intimidating things are happening around our dogs!

 Transcript

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today I have Bronnagh Daly here to talk about Control Unleashed for agility. Hi, Bronagh. Welcome back to the podcast.

Bronagh Daly: Hi, thanks for having me back.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. To start us off, do you want to just remind folks a little bit about you, a little bit about your dogs, maybe what you're working on? Yeah. So I have two dogs currently that are at like opposite stages of their agility careers. I have one, Razzle, who is essentially retired, and then I have Wild, who is nine months now. So he's learning some of the agility foundation stuff and having a great time with that.

And I am also myself a Control Unleashed instructor, and I've been doing agility since I was like 15 or 16 and then teaching it for, I don't know, some amount of years, not that many years, but some amount of years I can never remember.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Speaking of Control Unleashed, so I think people often, like, think about Control Unleashed kind of as a tool specifically for dogs that are reactive. Maybe. Can you talk a little bit about kind of your perspective on the wider range of dogs who might benefit from working through some of the program?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah. So that definitely is a faction of Control Unleashed that's definitely useful for reactive dogs, for sure. But I would say it's, you know, all of my large majority of the students that I work with in person who I do Control Unleashed for agility with, I would say they just have a lot of feelings about agility itself and not necessarily would fall into the category of reactive.

So I'd say it's really also just useful for dogs who can benefit from clarity and benefit from having a really good thinking brain and learning how to have a really good thinking brain while doing things that are exciting. Because a lot of the dogs who can benefit from this type of thing often just think agility is like really, really cool or, you know, or even like think parts of agility are cool, but other parts of it maybe are a little weird or something like that, or maybe are just young and excited and like, you know, aren't as adapt at thinking while doing fun things because, you know, we, that's a skill that we definitely have to teach dogs is how to think while also, you know, be happy and excited.

So I'd say all of those things Control Unleashed can be useful for kind of when it comes to sports as well. Just learning how to think and think well while doing your sports.

Melissa Breau: So you mentioned excited in there. And obviously reactions come from excitement or frustration or whatever. Are there other emotions that kind of you're thinking about when you say the big feelings piece?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, so I would say definitely dogs can also have like stressy feelings, for sure.

That can definitely be one. Or dogs who are kind of like overwhelmed potentially. Dogs who are just kind of sensitive in general to certain environments or maybe certain kind of aspects of learning. That's definitely a big one as well. So there can be kind of a range of feelings. Doesn't just have to be exciting. And there can even often I would find with dogs, if specifically in the agility context there can be kind of like a mix of feelings.

The dogs maybe like to do the thing. Hopefully they like to do the thing. That's why we're doing it. But they like to do the thing. But maybe there are certain aspects that they struggle with. Like a lot of people staring at them. Like that can be really weird. Or maybe other dogs who are really excited in their environment make them nervous or, you know, the environment itself is very stressful and overwhelming because people are running around and warming up their own dogs and yelling and being really excited and, you know, doing all kinds of things. So definitely there can be a large range of emotions in there, for sure.

Melissa Breau: What kinds of Control Unleashed games are we talking about? What do you like your agility dogs to know? Can you talk us through a couple of examples or an example or…

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, for sure. My absolute favorite game that I use a lot is the Super Bowls game. I like to use dots for. For it instead of bowls though.

So like an exercise dot type of thing. Just because it's a little easier to use just because people like stepping in bowls or dogs stepping in bowls and like rolling ankles makes me nervous. But so I tend to call it like the Dots Game colloquially, but it is definitely a Super Bowls game. That one I like to use a lot because I find that to be really flexible.

Whereas essentially, like the basis of it is kind of like the up down game where you put a piece of food on the thing and then they eat the food and then they look back to you and re-engage with you and then you repeat. Except it's on a dot, essentially. So I'll use the dot and you put the piece of food on the dot. They eat the food and then they look to you.

And essentially the reason why I like to use that is because it teaches a dog, first of all. Like, they go to a specific target, they eat some food, and then they learn how to engage with you again and also choose to engage with you. So that can work in a number of ways. A, they can tell you kind of like, hey, I'd like to keep going now.

So that's one way I find that to be really useful, because when you're working, you know, on certain distractions, like, for a specific example, I have some games that I'll do for dogs that have feelings about other dogs who are entering the ring as they're exiting the ring. And that can be really hard because, you know, some dogs maybe have feelings about, like, but this is my agility floor, and why do they get to come in?

Or maybe. Or, like, that dog looks really cool. I want to go chase that dog. Or that dog is staring at me, and that's really weird. And I don't like that. You know, a whole number of feelings can be in there. But whatever the feelings may be, I love to use the Dot Game to work on kind of both exiting the ring and then also being able to choose to kind of keep moving away and out of the ring while another dog is coming to the space.

So, you know, you can even add agility to that as well, because, you know, if we're all actually doing what we're supposed to be doing in trials, often we're supposed to be technically, like, coming in while our dogs are running and all of that. So also kind of sometimes integrate actually that into the agility. But essentially the basic is like that, you know, the dog who has the feelings is going down a line of dots, whether or not there's obstacles involved in that.

And each time they do the dot, they're choosing to connect back to their person, and they're saying, hey, I'm with you. I can keep going. So that we really give the dog the choice and kind of the ownership over the fact that they can say, yep, I'm good. I can move through this game. And at the same time, on the flip side, then you also know if your dog can't, because if they don't look to you and they say, nope, then you're like, okay, this is too hard.

We need to reinvent this game for you a little bit, or something like that. So that's probably my favorite one. I use that in a lot of my games, the Super Bowls. I also find it to be the most adaptable, so I use it in a ton of different ways, like, start Lines or end of run routines, all kinds of things, I find that to be useful. But then my other kind of two big ones that I use the most would probably be like the 1, 2, 3 game.

So 1, 2, 3, they look to you reward or a some sort of like mat or default behavior I find to be really useful too. So assuming that you kind of teach those games initially in like a lower stakes environment, not in the middle of the agility ring.

Melissa Breau: Right. How do you begin to introduce that agility context into that picture?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, so yes, 100%. You don't want to just be like, hey, here's these games, let's do it now while you're having a lot of feelings.

Because that's definitely not what we want to build into the games for sure. So I like to introduce them kind of first in just a really easy way. So whether it's kind of like, hey, we're going to, you know, do this game and maybe we'll include one jump in this or something, but it's the same game. Or maybe we'll just go, you know, to an environment that you know to be agility related and practice these games around that.

Or maybe we'll start to integrate it into like we're gonna do, you know, sits and then ascend around the wing or something like that. So it kind of depends on what game exactly. Say it's like mat work, for example. Mat work. We might, you know, start to integrate it as, hey, this is like our go, take a break type of thing. So we're gonna, you know, do like three repetitions of going around the backside.

Now we're gonna go run to our mat and we're gonna go relax on our mat. Okay, now we're going to go back and we're going to do like three repetitions of this. So you can start to kind of integrate it as like a reset like that. So I'd say it kind of depends if you're working on like outside of ring skills. Usually I like to add kind of the different variations of agility first.

So first like, hey, there's agility that exists now maybe you've done some of the agility. Okay, now maybe someone else has done some of the agility now or maybe in an environment that you know that agility exists, that you think is really cool and cooler than the other environment. You know, there's lots of ways to do it and lots of layers to do it. But I would say it probably depends on kind of like your exact goal for how you're going to use it with what skill? If that makes sense.

Melissa Breau: Yeah, yeah. So I know that you said, like, part of the goal here, right, Is trying to get the dog to be a little more thoughtful. So how does that part work? How do the games actually help our dogs learn to be more thoughtful, even though they, you know, are really excited or really anticipating the arousal, running the course or having some of those big feelings we were talking about earlier?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah. So bringing the Control Unleashed games into the agility, if you've worked on the Control Unleashed games outside of agility, I will caveat to that. That it really helps dogs learn kind of how to regulate themselves, I would say, is a big one. So those games in themselves are patterns, largely or based in patterns, or taught in patterns, or taught in relaxation and settling. And so when you bring those patterns where the dog understands kind of how to regulate themselves within the patterns, how to make choices within the patterns, then and finds those patterns kind of very soothing and predictable and bring then those predictable, soothing things into agility, you can then kind of layer those feelings into agility also.

Choice, kind of, as I was saying, is a big one. So when your dog can kind of like choose to look to you and choose to disengage, or choose to disengage from things, you know, distractions, or choose to engage with you, those can also be super, super powerful for a lot of dogs. So say, you know, start lines, for example, say they have a lot of feelings about start lines, putting them within a pattern, say, of like the Super Bowls, where we start to integrate start line behaviors into the super bowl pattern, can be really soothing for dogs.

And also it makes it really predictable, which often as start line, like, is not super predictable because, you know, weird things happen often or like, the human is distracted or, you know, whatever it might be. So bringing that in, you know, predictability, the structure, the calmer, thoughtful feelings, and then layering those into agility kind of slowly, you don't want to just be like, let's throw dots everywhere and just figure it out.

You know, when you do that as a human thoughtfully, then it can really help your dog to kind of carry over those good thoughts and feelings kind of into the agility environment.

Melissa BreauL Do you continue to, like, kind of play some of these games throughout your dog's agility career, or is it kind of like a get to a certain point and then you can kind of fade them out?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, I would say for sure in some ways. So it depends on, you know, say you've done your end of run routine and you've taught it through Control Unleashed games, and then it's fine and good, some even less that falls apart or something, then I probably wouldn't bring those back in if it did start to fall apart. Like for some reason, some dog rushes your dog at, you know, at the end of a run, and then your dog starts to look at the other dog instead of coming to you or going to target their leash at the end of the run because they're worried they're going to rush them.

What can be really nice is within that context, your dog already understands a structure. So then you can rebuild that behavior within the structure. So I'd say in one way that's super useful. So if anything ever happens where like something starts to fall apart or something weird happens, you can help your dog rebuild the confidence or rebuild the kind of their understanding in that way. But I would say in general, certain things like learning how to settle out on course or, you know, learning how to be settled around, agility in general, I would say those Control Unleashed games are definitely always kind of useful to revisit just to make sure we're retaining our good thinking brain.

Particularly as dogs get further and further into agility, they're like, I know how this works. I know all the things or potentially like, you're going, you're, you know, you're having fun and you're like, I want to go to bigger events, then there's a whole lot more feelings there. So I'd say, you know, in those respects, it's definitely helpful to keep those within kind of your repertoire. If somebody is actively competing now or they're attending classes maybe, and they want to kind of work through some of this stuff, do they need to stop like playing or attending class or, you know, competing in order to work on those things?

If it's like over arousal related, you know, are there contingencies there? Feel free to go into all of them. But, you know, if they want to work through this stuff, they need to stop doing other agility things, work on this and then come back to it. Or can they do them simultaneously? I would say it depends. So it's never a bad idea to stop rehearsing the problem that you're having essentially so that you can build back better skills and better feelings and better thinking brains.

So, you know, if it's like, hey, my dog gets super amped up and knocks a bunch of bars and then like comes over and bites, bites me, because they're, you know, having a lot of feelings they're like, no, we don't want to keep rehearsing that. Like, not ideal. We probably would like to just, you know, and maybe it's that your dog does that in trials, but in, you know, in classes, they're fine.

So there can be different layers of that as well. So it kind of depends on what. What we're working on. So for some dogs, it may be that they run really well, but then once they get to a trial, like they sniff and disengage and disappear, or, you know, at the end of the run, they kind of like don't know what to do and they go do laps around the ring because they're like, I don't want to leave.

This is not fun. So I'd say in those cases, then we probably want to step away from just the environments that those are happening in. But we don't have to step away completely. But if we're just kind of in general having a lot of feelings about agility and we kind of get there and we're just like worried about all the people staring at us in a class or in our lesson, or we're like running, you know, along the fence line while another dog runs agility.

Because we're like, I can't focus. There's no dog running agility or something like that. Then for sure, always useful kind of step. Take a step back, just essentially so we're not rehearsing those same things. And because the more we build in those behaviors to our performance, the more we tend to get those behaviors in our performance. So I am not someone who is like, my dog goes and visits people in the ring, like, okay, let's just keep going and keep letting it happen, and then your dog will figure it out.

That's not generally my philosophy. My philosophy is, okay, your dog is going to visit people in the ring. Okay, that's just information that your dog is telling us that they're having some feelings either about the people in the ring or about something else that's causing them to displace by visiting the people in the ring. And that's something we probably want to stop rehearsing just so it doesn't become, you know, a behavior pattern essentially where that person looks at them and laughs or smiles, and they're like, haha, go jump in your lap.

You know, we want to work on that so that we can build behavior patterns of just running agility and then come back to it. So I'd say it varies, but definitely if you're not sure if you should be taking a break. I think it's never a bad idea. So it sounds a little bit like if you have an existing undesired behavior, it might be a good idea to stop the situation where that's happening.

And if you're just doing it preemptively, maybe you keep playing or, you know, some of that kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly. And if it's, you know, and be very thoughtful, like, that's why I love having videos of what all runs and everything. Because then you can really tell, like, okay, you know, because it can be easy to be like, well, this only happens in trials. But then, you know, you're looking at your class and you're like, oh, is that actually my dog checking out?

But just in like a less pronounced way. So is it maybe actually also happening in classes? It's just not my dog running away and sniffing and then jumping on a person just looks different because the environment is a little less intense. So I think, you know, being honest with ourselves with that is also super helpful because then it does kind of, you know, the best for. It's best for us and for our dogs too. Because practicing, you know, those feelings for anyone isn't fun.

Melissa Breau: No, absolutely not. So in February, you have your new class, Fast and Focused, that's looking at Control Unleashed for agility. Can you share a little more about kind of what the class covers, who might be interested, any prereqs, that kind of thing?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, of course. Yeah. I'm very excited about this class. It's a very ambitious class. So we plan to cover a lot in this class.

The class covers essentially a couple different things. So it's going to cover kind of like skills outside of the ring. It's going to cover certain skills inside of the ring. We're not going to be learning how to. To weave or learning how to like, do a tunnel or, you know, anything like that. But we're going to be working either with kind of like existing things that are going on inside the ring already and related largely to like contact type behaviors, start line type behaviors, knocked bar type behaviors, and kind of if we're having feelings with those, or maybe our criteria isn't super clear.

It's going to be working around those and learning kind of ways to help our dogs think through those or ways to kind of work on distractions that might be causing problems there. It's going to be the start line, end of run. So kind of how to shape your run in a way that is Easy, predictable and you know, fun and not stressful for our dogs. And then also kind of like the general aspect of working, you know, in a trial environment.

So you know, the dogs and people and those kind of exciting or you know, stressful or nerve wracking or whatever it is, those feelings going on which, and that's, you know, honestly can be for the human or the dog, like controlling patterns can also be soothing for the human too because you know, the more tools that we have in our tool belt also when something happens can be also very, very helpful for us as well.

So as far as kind of prereqs or anything, I would say it's useful for dogs either who kind of are beginning their jelly careers and that can be like a very young dog who's not, you know, actually who's jumping 4 inches or 6 inches or something, or a dog who is just learning their content behavior or just learning their start lines, you know, and has not ever really fully sequenced.

So that's definitely appropriate. Or it's also very applicable for dogs who have been trialing for a while or even are just starting to trial or even they're just working in classes. You don't even have to be trialing and just wanting to be successful in classes and seminars and are seeing kind of some problems that are pre existing already. So you don't necessarily have to be doing full equipment to get a lot of stuff out of this class.

So if you are doing full equipment though, there's definitely a lot that we can do with that as well. So I'd say it's kind of like varied on who it can be appropriate for. But I would say the only like real prereq is that you don't have like a tiny little puppy who knows absolutely zero things about agility. We do want to have like some understanding of agility things for you to get something out of the class.

If you do have a puppy and you want to audit the class, then for sure you can get stuff out of that too as a feature. But just as far as like working spots, there wouldn't be a lot you could do if you had a tiny little puppy. But and then supplies it's largely flexible unless you want to work on kind of contact behaviors or jumping specifically. So I'd say that's the only one that space and or kind of equipment is less flexible with.

Just because if we're going to work on jumping, we need jumps and we need space to be able to work on jumping. So it's a usually like three or four jumps can suffice. You do want a little bit of space for that so your dog can practice. Because if we're working on knocked bars, we want space for our dogs to be able to actually, you know, jump as they would be jumping, you know, or.

And for contacts, you don't necessarily have to have like a full teeter, but you know, if you have like a contact board or like a mini teeter or you know, a Cato Board that is set up like a teeter or something like that, you know, whatever, you can work with that as well. But I would say those, that's kind of the main part that has the most kind of, I would say limitations that you might actually need more equipment. The other things are fairly flexible though, the other parts of class.

Melissa Breau: So I know you've broken the class into kind of different themes. Do you want to talk a little bit about those? Do students kind of need to pick one? How is this going to work?

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, so the different themes are specifically, I like kind of vaguely said them, but more specifically they are working around other dogs and people.

Start lines and end of run routines is number two. Number three is criteria inside the ring. So that's our knocked bars, start lines. Broken criteria, like broken contact behaviors, mostly stopped behaviors because running contacts is a whole other enchilada. And then outside the ring skills. So that's basically kind of like from the car to the gate to the ring essentially skills basically. So each of those, there's going to be kind of like four themes essentially and there will be lectures for each of that theme by week.

So the first week is going to be mostly like making sure all of our skills are really strong, that we're going to be using class and adding distractions to those already so that, you know, our dogs have good thinking brains within those skills before we actually add agility to it, that we just have like other distractions that you'll find in agility but aren't agility itself. And then as we start to bring them to agility, we're going to have kind of lectures that are going to be broken up, not necessarily one per theme because the themes are often, you know, have different facets to them, but students can basically do whatever they want.

So students like say, you know, you just want to come in and work on end of run routines and start, you know, and start lines or something like that. And you're like, I'm going to just pick those two things. That's great. If you're like, I want to do Every single lecture. That's also great if you, you know, basically whatever you would like to do is great. So you can pick to do as many or as few of the themes as you want.

And you can also be like, you know what, I'm only gonna do this one jumping, you know, lecture because I think, you know, the soft turns that we're working on in this jumping lecture is going to be really useful for me. But I think every other jumping thing my dog understands, and that's, you know, the only time we knock bars is during, like a soft turn type thing.

But I'm not going to do anything else when jumping and I'm just going to work on other things. Like, that's also totally fine. So you can, like, pick like one thing out of a theme or something that's useful to you. So basically it's very flexible. A little bit of a choose your own adventure, but also some guidance there. Yeah, yeah, choose your own adventure, but with guidance. And I'm happy to guide anyway. If you're like, I don't know how to choose my own adventure, we can also do that together.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Any final thoughts or key points you want to leave folks with?

Bronagh Daly: Basically just that. I would say Control Unleashed for agility, I think can be very helpful for any dog. So I think that's just something that you highlighted a bit at the beginning, which I think is important because often we tend to think that Control Unleashed is just for reactive dogs.

So just for dogs who are barking and lunging at other dogs or people or something like that. But it's really just about thinking and about learning successfully and, you know, making the chaos of agility feel like much more predictable and easier kind of to accomplish for everybody. And the various aspects of trialing as well. So if you are thinking you want to trial with your dog or you're seeing issues with trialing, this is definitely a lot of these lectures are going to really, really help with those as well.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Bronagh.

Bronagh Daly: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Julie Flannery to talk about how she gamifies her training for her dogs. If you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice, our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by BenSound.com the track featured here is called Buddy. Audio Editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.

 Credits

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!