AG300: Fast & Focused: Control Unleashed for Agility
Course Details
When it comes to agility, the most successful agility dogs are the ones who can retain the best thinking brains.
Whether it’s in the ring or outside of the ring, the agility environment can be a lot. That can cause a bunch of feelings! And those feelings can lead to all kinds of behaviors that aren’t helpful for your agility performance.
So how do we help our dogs? Building clarity amongst all the chaos! And how are we going to do that? Through different exercises and concepts built off of games and patterns from the Control Unleashed program.
We’re going to break this down into four over-arching themes throughout class:
Working around other dogs and people
Start lines and end of run routines
Criteria inside the ring (knocked bars, broken criteria, etc.)
Outside the ring skills
You can work on all four themes or pick between them!
We’ll start with basic exercises that apply to all or our concepts, then from there, homework will be split into the four different categories.
No matter which themes you decide to work on, you will walk away with a dog who’s able to think in the face of what once distracted them and have the clarity you need to move successfully forward on your agility journey.
Teaching Approach:
Lectures will be a mix of written instruction and video demonstration. Each of the themes will have different progression tracks that will be released at the top of each week. Feedback will be a mixture of written and video/voiceover instruction!
The end of an agility run at a trial can be a really feelings-inducing time for a lot of dogs!
The run has just ended, so even if things all went perfectly, at the very least our dogs generally have big excited feelings about whatever just played out. Then on top of that, our dogs often have expectations when it comes to how/when they should receive their reinforcement, which is inevitably going to be different during a trail. And at the same time, there are lots of potential things going on around them, both inside and outside of the ring—people setting bars, moving leashes, dogs starting their runs, people and dogs moving by, etc.
So it absolutely makes sense that they might having feelings!! But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to mitigate those feelings. Because what do all of these things boil down to? Lack of being able to follow specific, set expectations. Sooooo that’s exactly what we’re going to do for our dogs!
To make all of this as easy and clear as possible for our dogs, we’re going to split this into a couple of different pieces:
Targeting your leash (or you, then your leash)
Exiting the ring
Delayed reinforcement
And for all of this, we’re going to be using our CU Superbowls/dots pattern.
For this first week, we’re going to begin to shape our pattern. The initial pattern will be the same for everyone and then later on, we’ll be able to tailor the full, specific routine more to each of your dogs.
Our set up for the pattern is going to look like this:
You should have four dots laid out in a row with at least two feet between them. Then about three-four feet away from those dots, have a wing or cone set up at one end.
We’re going to do the Superbowls pattern up and down the set of dots, ignoring the wing for now. The only thing different than the Superbowls pattern is that we’re going to cue our dots verbally. This will become important later!
So start by placing a piece of food on the dot and let your dog eat it. Wait until they look up at you and when they do, verbally cue “dot” and then move to the next dot. Place a piece of food on that dog and repeat. Continue to do this back and forth on the dots, always going all the way from one end to the next.
Video:
Now that your dog has a good grasp of the pattern in this specific set up, two dots away from the cone/wing, you should now have your agility leash preplaced directly on top of the dot.
We’re going to repeat the same pattern, but with our leash on top of the dot. Repeat the exact same exercise as above, but just with the leash there. Nothing else should change.
Video:
Our last piece for the week will be about adding your leash cue. The set up should look exactly the same here. The only difference should be that you are now saying your leash targeting cue instead of your dot cue before you move to the leash/dot combo. Since the pattern is predictable, I like to just insert the leash cue in here without doing a formal cue transfer and I find that almost all dogs are 100% fine with this. If you think your dog won’t be though, let me know and we can try the more formal cue transfer!
So if you think your dog will be fine, literally just replace your leash cue verbal with your dot verbal right before you go to that dot/leash. Keep using your dot cue everywhere else and the pattern should remain the same.
Guest Instructor: Bronagh Daly
