When done well, heelwork can be downright beautiful. But if you've ever tried to teach heelwork, you know it's much more complex than it might look at first. Join me and Dante for a conversation on the pieces that you need to consider to get lovely heeling with duration.

Transcription

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breaux 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 Dante Camacho here with me to talk about beautiful performance heel and how we build it. Hi, Dante, welcome back to the podcast.

Dante Camacho: Hi, Melissa. Thank you so much for having me back.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Do you want to start us off? Just remind us a little bit about you, your dog, kind of what you're working on.

Dante Camacho: Yes. Well, my name is Dante Camacho, as you mentioned. I'm a dog trainer from Brazil of all places, and I've been working with dogs for over 25 years and involved in a bunch of different dog sports as well.

My current dog is a Parson Russell terrier. His name is Burpee. And we actually have been working on a lot of things. He's four years old. We've been doing formal obedience, like FCI obedience. We've been doing agility for a while. We do canicross and we do also freestyle and scent work. So iwedoes a lot of stuff. So, and we, within these sports, the idea of healing is very present, of course, in obedience, but also in freestyle, in the dog dancing, because it's one of the elements we work from the very beginning.

And yeah, he's a fun dog and we're having a lot of fun. It's like me and my wife, we both train him. I can't do all these sports by myself. So we share the sports, share the dogs…

Melissa Breau: You split them up?

Dante Camacho: Yeah.

Melissa Breau: So as I kind of mentioned in the intro and as you very kindly elaborated on in the last question, we wanted to chat a little bit about healing today.

So to start us off, when we're talking about heel work, kind of what are your goals? What can you describe kind of what that picture looks like for you?

Dante Camacho: Yeah, of course. To me, heeling is possibly one of like the most beautiful behavior that I can see, like a dog perform with the handler. The connection that you can play, you can watch. When a dog is willingly and happily heeling next to a person, to me it's just beautiful.

And so I'm looking for that. I want the dog to have a great attitude, to really look like it's enjoying the healing. Usually that means the dog will have its head up and it will, you know, sometimes we'll be prancing, but not always. It's not necessarily necessary, but I will see that constant engagement. The dog Is looking at the person like it's really. Something great is happening. It's not even about to happen.

It's already happening. So I want that. I want closeness, but I don't want pushiness. I don't want the dog to be pushing me or. Yeah, I want the behavior to really look like the dog is having a great time doing it. And also the person. Like, I find that the element of the person also makes a huge difference in that picture when I'm looking at someone doing the.

Doing some heeling. So I want the person to also look relaxed. Look relaxed in the sense that, you know, it's not tense or, you know, constantly staring at the dog, trying to control it, but, you know, comfortable, like, sure that the dog is with her. And. Yeah, so that's what I'm looking at.

Melissa Breau: At what point do you kind of start working on heel work with a new dog? And, you know, what do those early steps look like?

Dante Camacho: I'd say that everything I do with a new dog, being a puppy or an older dog that I get, everything that I do, like, the basics will influence my healing work because a huge part. A big part of it is engagement. So how I engage with the dog and the dog's ability to maintain engagement, the dog's ability to maintain focus on a specific point, let's say a specific area or something that I target, let's say, so that I can start in the very first time I'm actually interacting with a dog.

So I focus on creating those basics that will directly influence and be used when I start becoming a little more. A little more picky or, you know, more specific about the heel position and the healing behavior and everything. So do you start kind of even with a baby puppy, or is there, like an age at which you're like, okay, it's safe to, like, really focus on this, or no.

Yeah, I start with the baby because I'm not starting with teaching position. Since I'm starting with teaching engagement, then that doesn't matter. And that same engagement will work for everything else that I'll do with the dog. But I acknowledge and realize that this is one of the elements that is crucial for good heeling.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. Okay, so talk us kind of through your process from there. Right. So a little bit of an overview and maybe a little bit on how it's different and how some other folks maybe approach it.

Dante Camacho: Yeah, yeah, of course. As I mentioned, like, I've been working with dogs for a while, and in the very beginning, like, 25 years ago, I kind of had to figure out myself how I would teach heeling, because my only source was, like, videos that I would see maybe at craftspeople doing obedience and all that stuff. And luckily, I had dogs that were good enough that they wanted to work with me and all that.

So I taught in many different ways, I thought, you know, just by shaping the dogs, by using targets, target sticks, luring, like, all different types of, you know, different ways of teaching, and they all kind of work, you know, and some better than others. But that may also be because of, you know, where I was at as a trainer as well. But what I realized is that in most cases, there's a huge focus on healing.

Let's just heel. Like, get the dog on your side and start heeling. And then once the dog's there and you're walking with the dog, then you start kind of trying to make it better, which, to me, doesn't really make much sense because we're actually putting the dog into a position when we don't know, and the dog doesn't really know what it's supposed to be doing. So my approach is to teach separate skills simultaneously, maybe, or maybe one at a time, whatever fits into your training.

And then once I know my dog has these skills, I can put them together. And then healing becomes, like, much easier, much simpler. Because once my dog is in that position where it's going to be next to me and we're going to be moving and there is going to be distractions and there's going to. The need for engagement is there. It already knows all these pieces from other stuff that we were doing. And then when we put it together, it just makes more sense. I find that it makes it easier for the dog.

Melissa Breau: Okay. So I think a lot of times folks start working on their heel work, right? They maybe teach position, and then they kind of get stuck as they're adding duration, and maybe the behavior falls apart a little bit, Adding criteria in one area and everywhere else, it starts to slip. Can you talk specifically about that element? Like, how do you. Once you've kind of been working on your pieces, you start putting them together. How do you then get some duration on that behavior?

Dante Camacho: Right, right. So that's crucial. That's one of the most difficult things, like when you're teaching the heeling. I think everybody has been through that, and some dogs will just have that mental stamina to maintain the position and continue, but most normal dogs won't have it.

Right. You'll have maybe some working breeds, you know, that will just stick to something. And, you know, even if they're not healing nicely, good position or anything, but they can stay focused on something for a long time. For most dogs, that's not reality. They need to build that stamina, that duration. That may be not only because of mental training, their ability to do that, but also physically, because it is tasking physically.

So one of the pieces is to actually maintain your dog's health, to make sure that the dog is actually feeling physically really well and it's strong enough to maintain those positions for a long time. But the key point that I think that makes the most difference is the clarity of when a behavior or these, this behavior starts and ends. I think that makes a huge difference. Most people, as you say, as you said, have their dogs on their left and start healing and doing all these things and moving their hands and talking to the dog and you know, like, and okay, so the dog starts and then suddenly people want the dog to just heal without all those aids.

And the dog doesn't really know what was happening before, what's happening now. And worse, often what will happen is people will do the exercise for a certain time, reward the dog, and when they start again, it's not clear for the dog that it actually had even finished before. So I think that makes the dog confused, that wastes a lot of energy, and that because of that, dogs can't use their energy, their focus, exclusively for the moment of the exercise because there's so much going on.

And I think that lack of clarity is what makes it difficult. What I want is to make it very easy and clear for the dog to understand. We start here and we finished here. So once that is clear, I can systematically increase that time. But the dog always knows when it starts and when it finishes. And I build my dog's ability for duration, not only in healing, but in everything else I do.

When I say, you know, in the beginning I mentioned engagement. Some people want their dogs to heal for, I don't know, a minute, right? Non stop focusing and all that, but they can't or they don't know how to get their dogs to engage with them in any other way for that long, the dog always needs to stop, to do something else, to be rewarded in the middle. So if you haven't taught the dog to engage doing things that the dog already knows and they are easy, like how do you expect the dog to do something that's, you know, healing can be very tedious for dogs, can be, you know, difficult, simply difficult.

So if the dog doesn't know how to maintain that engagement and you know, stay connected and do something for a longer period of time. The things that it knows really well, it's going to be very hard to do it when it's healing. So that's why I want to make sure it's very clear when it starts, when it finish, so that I can also increase it systematically and it make it easier for the dog and the person, too, because we also need to maintain, you know, that. That connection, that focus on what's happening.

Melissa Breau: That's really interesting. How do you. Can you just give us maybe an example of how you make it clear when the healing is done? Because I'm trying to think through that, and I'm having a little trouble picturing what that might look like.

Dante Camacho: Yeah, so that's. That's actually quite simple. If you. You can have marker words like verbal cues, but I think those are a little bit harder because dogs are so sensitive to what we're doing, how we're moving, where we are.

I use the concept of a starting point and an ending point. That start and end point becomes very clear for the dog. Then what we do between the start and the end is what changes. That initially may be 10 seconds of interaction, and then eventually it will be many more seconds or minutes of interaction. But we can gradually do that start and end, and put stuff in between those two moments that make it very predictable for the dog as well and very easy.

And you will notice that also having that very clear for the dog. If I push too hard, let's say I went too far and the dog got distracted in the middle, it also becomes very clear for the dog that the behavior has stopped, and that means we are restarting. We don't restart where the mistake happened. We just simply stop. Let's go back to, you know, where we start.

Because if we start, we have to do. We have to end having everything correct in between those two points. If anything happens that's wrong, we just go back to the beginning. And that's one of the things I've learned that makes things so much clearer for dogs. You know, like imagine. Imagine, let's say you have to walk and not even talking about healing. Let's say just lose leash walking, and you're walking from point A to point B.

And you want to walk with your dog, you know, next to you, loose leash and all that. And when you get in the middle, the dog suddenly, you know, pulls to the side because it sees something. Okay? So you stop, you get your dog back, and you may even step back, like a couple of steps, and then you get your dogs back into position, you know, and then you continue.

That, to me, is not clear to the dog, but if you finish, like, you stop the exercise there. Okay, you could. We can do it. Let's go back to the beginning and then simply restart, you know, and there is not a correction that happens in the middle. It's just a restart of a thing that's completely right from the beginning to the end. And it's amazing how dogs notice that difference.

It may be just a few steps extra, but if you start from the very same place where you did before, it just makes much more sense for them. And I don't know the scientific explanation for that, but I just have noticed and tried and tested with multiple dogs, and it just makes more sense to them than stopping in the middle and then fixing it and continuing. Interesting. Something I'll have to play with.

Yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah. So it's a way to make sure that things are always right. And if they're not perfectly within your criteria, it just doesn't keep going. We just stop, and then we start again. And if we can't do it the way that we want it, it's fine. We just do it a little bit less. But always within that frame where everything is within the criteria we set.

Melissa Breau: Interesting. So for folks who are kind of listening to this and saying, maybe, maybe I want to try some of this, but maybe they started with a different method or they kind of played around with some other options for teaching healing. Can you talk about, like, can we blend the different approaches? Like, is this something that is complementary to some of the other stuff folks maybe have been taught or playing with? Or do they kind of need to start this way and follow these specific steps? Does that make sense?

Dante Camacho: Yes, it makes sense. Your question makes sense. You definitely can use bits and pieces of what I'm going to show. If you have started already teaching in a different way, but each piece will kind of work for a specific area or a specific issue that you might have. So maybe your issue is your dog keeping the head up and looking at you.

So you'll get a part of the webinar that will be more directed to that. Or maybe your issue is that engagement for a longer period of time. Clarity when it starts or when it ends. Distractions. So if you have issues in one specific area, you might be able to use one or other piece of the webinar. But of course, the protocol, like, the system works as one thing.

Everything, like, every step makes sense for the next one. But definitely people will be able to get pieces if they want. They don't have to restart completely if your dog already has good positioning, for example. But you can start any new dog that has never done any heeling, there will be steps to show from the very beginning.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. So, as you kind of alluded to a little bit in that last one, we are doing a webinar for us on March 13th titled Focused Healing.

Creating your Dream Heeling one step at a time. Can you talk to us just a little more about what you're going to cover in the webinar and maybe who might want to join us?

Dante Camacho: Yes, yes. As you mentioned, it's one step at a time. So that's my idea is what I want to show people is that we can actually have, you know, very separate and deliberate steps towards the goal of heeling.

And so we kind of focus each step in different areas that we want. That what I consider important in heeling, let's say continuous focus on a specific target attitude, you know, towards the resilience. And when I say resilience is I mean behavior resilience, how much the behavior is able to. To withstand distractions or things happening around. So different elements that I consider steps that we are going to teach and then eventually put them together.

And within that, there will be simple tips and maybe stuff that people will find curious initially. But that may explain why you may be having issues with what you're doing with your dog now. So, yeah, everybody's invited because it's going to be a lot of fun. And I always try to bring new stuff and stuff that make people, you know, think a little bit more about their training.

It's not just about, you know, repeating. It is a protocol. You can just follow it. But I really want people to observe their dogs, think as much as possible and what the dog is going through and how it's feeling about the process and. And then get to your goals in a faster, easier, and more fun way. Awesome. All right, Any final thoughts or maybe key points you kind of want to leave folks with, let's say?

I think, as I mentioned, healing is awesome. I think it's beautiful. I just love watching healing in any dog sports. I think it's just amazing. But it can also be very difficult to some dogs. And as I mentioned, it can also be tedious if we don't work to make it something fun. So my goal and what I believe it's the goal of most people is to make so that healing is something our dogs enjoy doing and they're always looking forward to doing it.

And that's how we go about teaching and how we, I believe is the way to, to get to any behavior. But it's more specifically in this kind of, you know, exercise. I know even obedience the way I teach, like I teach my dog FCI obedience, which is different from AKC obedience. The difference is, is in what is asked of the dog or how much is asked of the dog during the competition, during the exercise.

But the principles are the same and beautiful healing doesn't matter if it's in the US if it's in Europe. It's always beautiful. Yeah. As long as you have that sense of connection and flow and movement together. Flow, I think, is the word. It's a good word.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Dante.

Dante Camacho: Thank you, Melissa. It's been great. And I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at the webinar.

Me too. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Kim Palermo to talk about Control Unleashed Pattern Games. If you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice for our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dogs Sports Academy.

Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided Royalty Free by Bensound.com 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!