Transcription

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'll be talking to Petra Ford about training for the open ring. Hi, Petra. Welcome back to the podcast.

Petra Ford: Hi, Melissa. Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. So to start us out, do you want to just remind everybody a little bit about kind of you, who you are, maybe your dogs a little bit?

Petra Ford: Sure. My name is Petra. I have three dogs right now. I have Zeal. He's retired from competitive obedience. He's a national obedience champion. He's 13 and a half. And this dog, I don't, I don't know, like, how I got this lucky.

He still hikes with me and I mean, off trail hikes up down hills for an hour and like 10 minutes yesterday and he ran the entire time. I have no idea how this is happening, but I'm really happy that he can still do that. And he still likes to train. He loves getting his turn. It's hilarious. And he's always the distraction dog when we train. He thinks that's a super fun job.

And then I have Zesty. He's five. He's my competition obedience dog, currently competing. Oh, wait, I skipped Zana. Sorry, Zayna. Zayna is nine. I'm competing with her in competition obedience. And Zesty's five and I'm competing with him as well. When Zayna retires from obedience, I'm gonna do some rally with her, so I think that'll be fun. But she's still in good shape and she's still enjoying competing in obedience. So we'll just keep at it until she's like, I'm out. And then we'll do something else.

Melissa Breau: All right, so I wanted to talk specifically about open obedience today. And I think it's maybe a pretty common misconception that people who are just getting started think like, okay, let me train all the novice skills and then when I get to open, I'll worry about open. And they don't really start thinking about open until then. When do you begin working on open exercises with your dogs?

Petra Ford: Eight weeks old. So really, if you think about it, novice is heeling. That's the bulk of novice. It's heeling, right? That's it. It's that one thing, heeling. It just happens to be the most complex exercise that dogs have to do. And I think novice is insanely hard because you're not just in other. In open and utility, you're doing one healing pattern.

In Novice, you're basically doing two full heeling patterns and the figure eight. So it just takes a long time to get the dog trained thoroughly. Like it takes me a good three to four years to get my dogs heeling the way I want. So what am I going to do in the meantime? Well, I'm going to teach all the open and all the utility exercises, right. I'm going to teach the foundation pieces and then just keep building on it and building on it.

Plus it's fun. Like the dogs like gives them some variety. You're not just here heeling all the time, right? You're doing a bunch of other skills. And dogs, they like to learn and they like to be challenged. And I think it makes it more fun for the handlers too. I think when they're new, it's all just a little bit overwhelming. Like there's so much to learn as a handler. But if you think of like the open utility exercises as not if you don't think about the whole class and a whole exercise, if you just think about teaching little pieces, then I think it's not as intimidating.

Melissa Breau: So speaking of that, I think you definitely know all of the exercises and I looked them up before writing these questions. So I know what the exercises are. For those who are new to obedience or maybe listening to this and haven't played in obedience before, can you just talk us through what the actual behaviors or the skills for the open ring actually are?

Petra Ford: Sure to the novice. Because you're mentioning novice too, right? So for open you have to do an off leash healing pattern and figure 8. So that's kind of similar to novice. Then you have to do a retrieve on the flat, which basically means just throw the dumbbell straight ahead of you. Dog runs out, retrieves it front finish a retrieve over the high jump. So you throw the dumbbell over the jump.

The dog runs out over the jump, picks up the dumbbell, comes back over the jump, front finish, drop on recall. So it kind of builds on the novice recall. The novice recall, you leave the dog, you call the dog, the dog fronts drop on recall. At some point while the dog is running towards you, the judge gives a signal. And at that point you either give a signal or you verbally tell your dog to down.

Your dog drops quickly to the ground. And then when the judge gives another signal, you call the dog to front and then finish. So that's a drop on recall. And then we have probably one of the hardest competition obedience exercises. Which is command discrimination. Which on the surface doesn't sound that hard. People are like, well, I can get my dog to move between a sit down and a stand.

But what makes this exercise so hard is you are almost always lined up with a dog, with a ring gate behind the dog. So there's pressure behind. Sometimes you're lined up kind of in a corner, so there's pressure on both sides. And then the judge stands off to the side. That's pressure on a third side. And the dogs know they are not getting out of that position for quite some time, which makes it really hard for dogs.

But in any event, you will know the combination ahead of time. If you go and open A, the combination is always the same. The judge says, stand your dog, you stand your dog. The judge says leave. You walk 15ft to a marker turn. The judge gives you signal you can. It's always stand, then it's a down. So you can give a verbal and a hand signal to down your dog.

Then the judge says, leave you go another 15ft and then you give a signal to sit your dog. If you are in open B, then there are a bunch of potential combinations and you don't know which combination it's going to be until the till you get to the trial that day. So it could be down, sit, stand down, stand, sit, stand, sit down or stand down, sit. So you have to teach your dogs all those orders.

So that exercise is pretty challenging. That's why. That's when I for sure start very young. And then the last thing is. Did I get everything? Yeah, the last thing is to get your leash. So in novice, you do a sit, stay, get your leash. But I think it's about, like, give or take, 30ft from the ring entrance. For open, it's only about. It's not even 15ft. A lot of times it's like 10, maybe even less feet away.

But you stand your dog and then you leave your dog. You leave the ring, get your leash, step into the ring, wait for the judge to tell you to return. Return to your dog. Yeah. So that's open.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. So those are the skills, Right? You talked a little bit about how they differ from the novice stuff. What challenges, complexities beyond just the skills that you need to teach. Do teams really need to prepare for open that maybe differ from earlier levels?

Petra Ford: Yeah. So the biggest, you know, the majority of people that go to a competition, their dogs in their, you know, wherever they train, at home, in the training building they go to every week, the majority of the dogs can do the basic exercise like so in a pristine, sterile, for lack of a better word, environment.

They can do the individual exercises. Where it gets complicated is dealing with distractions, right? So there's a lot going on in the environment, and it's different every time. It's not always the same, right? So every competition I go to every time, and I've been doing this a ridiculously long time, unique things still happen, unexpected things, Something I would have never thought of in a million years, right? So the dogs have to deal with those kind of things.

Environmental distractions. There's a lot of judge pressure they have to deal with. And, you know, as the exercises get more complex and the dogs have to do more complex chains on their own, they just. There's just more for them mentally to hold together, right? Like, they just. There's. It's. If you think about it, it's an animal. Nothing they're doing is natural. Not a single thing. Like, yeah, maybe they run and get a ball that you throw in the yard, but for sure, they don't have to do a clean pickup.

They don't have to hold it perfectly. They don't have to do a perfect flip, front, release the object, do a finish. Like, none of it's natural. So it's really all a bunch of tricks chained together in a ridiculously long chain. And that's a lot for the dog to remember, right? And hold together. So it's really important to make the exercises really strong, to make sure the dog can do them around a wide variety.

And variety is a key word of distractions. And with a lot of judge pictures, right? Like, judges in a whole bunch of different places because they're never in the same spot all the time. So for those teams that maybe have done a lot of that type of work, they've learned the pieces, right? They've gone through and learned the behaviors. What makes the difference between a team that's kind of good at open and a team that's, like, really great? Like, you watch them and go, wow. A lot of time and work.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough.

Petra Ford: Yeah. I think it's. No, I think it's. It's kind of along the. It's. For one, experience is helpful, right? Because if you take me, for example, I have seen so many. So many different possible challenges that can occur in the ring that I have a wealth of information to pull from. If you've never been in the open ring and you walk in and suddenly the high jump is set up in a way, like on the diagonal, and you've never Seen that before and you didn't even know that was a possibility.

And you're going to be like, oh, God, I never trained for that. Well, of course not. You didn't know, right? And there can be a wide variety of ways the ring is set up, or maybe all of a sudden the judge is standing near the dumbbell and you're like, wait, I thought the judge was going to stand next to me and the dog. I didn't know they could be out there.

So experience is definitely helpful just in terms of, you know, what a lot of the possibilities are, and so you can prepare your dog for them. Right. And it's also, I think, that people that are newer feel like, okay, I've taught my dog the exercise. My dog knows it, therefore, my dog should be able to perform it in the ring. And more experienced people understand that that's not enough, Right.

That you need to prepare your dog, like I mentioned, to deal with distractions, to deal with judge pressure, to deal with and to really strength challenge the exercises and strengthen them so that the dog is super confident performing them, so that the dog knows the exercise inside out, backwards, forwards. When you're working on your training plans for all of that.

Melissa Breau: So when you're thinking about kind of what you need to work on, how do you decide, like, either in the moment or kind of, you know, thinking about your training for the week, like, what part of an exercise you're gonna work on proofing, or, like, work on challenging next? Do you look at, like, the dog's cue response, the handler movement, the environment, something else? Like, how do you. How do you make those training choices?

Petra Ford: So I'm doing some things a little differently now. We're doing this with one of my training partners because she has a young dog. And so what happens is. So there's three of us that train, and the three of us have, like, very advanced dogs, right?

So we're. We're always setting up challenges because. Well, because it's important to strengthen the dog's understanding of and commitment to the behaviors, and because our dogs are at that point in their training. But I said, let's just let the puppy see these things, right, that are different. So, for example, we might have, like, a kid's toy that looks like a little crabby thing and it makes noise and it moves all around, right?

So her dog is not fully trained. Obviously, it's a puppy. It's young, but she's just going to train whatever she would normally train. Maybe it's just like a recall or just some or she's going to do some simple behaviors, and the crabby thing's just gonna be moving around. And for the dog, it's seeing, like, one or two weird things, unusual things. It's just gonna be part of what the dog's gonna see, right?

So every time we train and we do something a little different, like I think we put like a blanket over the bra jump just to make it look different. And her dog is in the process of learning the bra jump, and we just continue training the bra jump as if nothing was different. It a blanket over it so it just looks different, right? So we're not making it so hard that the dog has to make this conscious effort to ignore it or to make a choice like, you know, don't get that thing.

Get this thing instead. It's just kind of there in the background. So that's what we're doing with the young dog, right? And that's what I'll be doing when I get a puppy next year. But as far as an actual challenge within the exercise, where we're like, okay, here's the exercise, and I'm going to create a challenge. So for example, I'm going to throw the dumbbell. And when you get out there to your dumbbell, there's going to be a toy out there, right?

Or a closed, because I have labs, securely closed container of food that you cannot possibly open. And now my dog has to go out there and make a decision, right? Get the dumbbell or go for the food dish, or get the dumbbell or go for the toy. And it's a challenge, right? So of course the dog is inexperienced or it's a lab. It's going to go for the food dish.

And then we're like, ah, silly dog. The dumbbell. Get the dumbbell. And then after a couple reps, the dog's like, I know what to do. I get the dumbbell. And I'm going to ignore that food or I'm going to ignore that toy. And when they do, we're like, yes, that was brilliant. And everybody, like, freaks out and we have a big party. Now the dog is making choices and it's becoming confident, right?

And we create all different challenges where the dog is like, where we make it a little harder than what the dog will see. And the dog starts to go, I can do this. So, like, Zana loves when we make it hard, right? Because I think she thinks when it's normal, it's stupid. She's like, I know what I'm doing. This is too easy. She loves it. She gets so happy, and she's so proud of herself.

And she's like, you silly humans, you can't fool me. You can come up with whatever you want. I know my job. So as a result, she's very confident with her exercises, right? She's confident with her job. She understands what she's supposed to do. So when I'm in the ring and something happens, if anything it makes her better. So if I'm healing and a judge is practically on top of us, like, scoring, like, so, you know, I love when they do that.

It's. I'm going to get her best heeling because she's got. She looks at me and she's like, this person is not going to mess me up, right? And that's what I want. I don't want her going, oh, God, this person's on top of me. This is so awkward and uncomfortable, which it is. Why are they there, right? She's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that's what I want to work towards with my dogs, that if something drops behind them or something unusual happens, instead of them going, oh, God, oh, God, they're like, yeah, yep, got it.

Doesn't matter what happens. I know what my job is. I can do this, right? And I find that the more challenges we put in front of them and the more successful they are with the challenges, the more confident the dog gets overall, right? And the more and the more solid their understanding is of the exercise, right? Because a ring is not always a pristine environment. It's not always perfect.

Things are going to happen, and I want my dog to be able to solve the problem. I don't want my dog to go like, oh, God, a problem. Oh, God. And panic and fall apart. I want my dog to be like, yep, I can do this.

Melissa Breau: Thinking that through, right? When you're breaking out pieces from the bigger chain or you're working on, like, little bits and pieces, you know, if you're isolating maybe parts of the retrieve or a finish or a healing transition, how do you avoid, you know, overdoing that aspect?

Petra Ford: So over segmenting things and not maybe letting the dog see the big chain enough, how do you, like, find a balance between breaking things down and working on, like, little bits or specific challenges versus, like, okay, this is really what it's going to look like in the ring. So when I add challenges, like, true challenges, right? I can only add that to something that's fluent. So if a piece of the behavior is fluent, I can add a challenge to that piece, right?

And I will, because I don't want to wait until the whole exercise or the whole class is fully trained to add a challenge. But as the dog progresses in their training, and they are a chain is now fluent, then I can add a challenge or multiple challenges to the whole chain, right? Because they know the chain, the behaviors have to be fluent. Because otherwise, when you add a challenge, the dog's not going to be able to come up with the answer, and then all they're going to do is fail.

And then all you're doing is adding stress and worry, and you're actually ruining their confidence. You're making them insecure. And that's not what I want. So as my dog gets more advanced, I can do a whole chain. So if there's an so with my dogs now, let's say they're considered fully trained, right? They know all the exercises really well. If there's a piece that I see that's weak or that's gotten weak, I could choose to isolate that piece and just strengthen that.

But if my piece, if my chains are all fairly solid on a given day, I could certainly add challenges throughout the entire chain and just keep going, right? I could tell my dog, good, that's it, and then move on to the next thing. Or I could add a challenge, but have my dog complete the entire chain and then reward the dog. So I tend to just. I tend with everything.

I tend to mix it up right there always has to be balanced. Like, you have to work on pieces, but you also have to work on the chain. And then sometime. And then I don't always add challenges because then what happens is if we're adding challenges all the time and the dogs are getting like, oh, challenges, challenges, Then all of a sudden you show them, like a kind of clean ring with just the judge.

And now it looks completely different. So sometimes we do ring picture that's somewhat more clean and just work that. So it's a constant balance. It's just mixing everything up. And I reassess my plan. So I basically assess what I'm going to work on based on, for example, if I go to a competition, what are the pieces that I thought were weak or that I would like to be better?

So I'll focus on those. And why were those pieces weak? What aspect is it that the dog's understanding isn't strong enough? Was it pressure? Was it distraction? What was it? And then I'll work on that. And then the rest of it is just maintaining this balance of some sessions have to be motivational, some have to be challenging. Some have to have distractions. Some have to be, you know, shorter pieces, some have to be longer pieces.

It's just constantly balancing it out. It's a juggling act, for sure. Yeah. Lots of different angles to look at things with, consider and piece together.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. Yeah. So we're talking about all of this because you've got your open obedience, Conquering complexity and challenges class on the schedule for the December term, which, when this podcast comes out, registration will be open for the class. Do you want to talk a little more about the class itself, kind of what you cover, who might want to sign up?

Petra Ford: Yeah, sure. So we used to call it proofing, what this class is about. Right. And the old way of proof proofing was you set up a challenge so you make the exercise hard, and then the dog makes a mistake, and then you tell the dog they're wrong. So that kind of sounds not so fun. Right. So that's not what we do. And I was doing a panel discussion with Denise, I want to say it was at.

Not this camp, the prior camp. And she's like, yeah, I don't even call it that anymore, because no matter how much we say that we do it in a positive way, the word still holds this negative connotation because of its history. And so she said, I just call it like adding. I think she said complexity or challenges, one of those things. Right. And so that's why I kind of was like, all right, I'm not going to name this a proof in class.

Right. Because that's not what I'm doing. Were mindfully adding, very mindfully and thoughtfully adding challenges that the dog can win. So the dog is right most of the time. And if the dog is struggling a little bit, we can help them out. But it's not about making the dog wrong. It's about making the dog helping the dog learn that they can do it, they can push through these challenges and they can win the game and.

And building their confidence. So if you have. If your dog is not fully trained and open, but you have pieces of open that are fluent, then for sure you can take the class because it's. We're going to be working on pieces a lot. If your dog has longer chains or if your dog knows open, or if your dog is in open, but you would like it to be stronger or you would like your dog to be more confident, then for sure this class is going to be good for that.

We are also going to be working on things like transitions and ring entrances, because those are really Important as well. And most importantly, this class is fun. Like, whenever I have people and I've in the past where I start to say, well, let's add this, they're like, oh, God. Oh, no. Oh, no, no. That's gonna be too hard for my dog. Right? Then I get them to start doing it, and then they become, like, addicted to it.

Cause it's super fun. It's fun for us, and it's fun for the dogs. Like, and then they get really creative and come. And I'm like, ah, that's a really good idea. I'm gonna try that. Right? So, yeah, like, students have come up with great ideas and they get more confident as handlers and trainers, and the dogs get more confident. And like I said, it's super fun. I love proofing.

It's literally one of my favorite things because I like watching my dog evolve. And I love watching my dogs just get really confident and, you know, kind of like I described Zayna and Zesty's getting there now too, where they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, watch this. I can do this. And then they're like, really proud of themselves. So, yeah, it's fun. It'll be. It's a super fun proofing it or challenges are super fun. So, yeah, I'm excited. Looking forward to it. For those that register, should they already have all of the exercises for open? Like, what prereq level, I guess, do they need to be at just pieces? Like, for example, if they don't have a full retrieve on the flat, but the dog can maybe, like, get the dumbbell and then they just throw a cookie between their legs because it doesn't have a front and finish.

Petra Ford: Right. They don't have to have finished open exercises. Like I said, if they have pieces of open, like, let's say the dog's jumping over the broad jump, but they haven't added, like, the front and the finish, or they send the dog over it, but they're not informal heel position yet. As long as the pieces that you're working on are strong, fluent, Right? If a piece is fluent, then.

Or let's say a dog can do command discrimination, just not full distance. That's okay. As long as you have pieces that are fluent, you can start proofing. And the sooner you do it, the better it is. Right? Because all it's. Because I almost feel like what happens is people train the exercises in a sterile environment and then that becomes part of the picture, right? That becomes part of the cue system and the context.

And they do that until the dog is fully trained for the ring, then you go and you add challenges and yeah, it's gonna look drastically different to the dog. But if you start introducing these things again in a very thoughtful, systematic way earlier, then I think it's much easier for the dogs, you know, down the road and as they progress.

Melissa Breau: Any final thoughts or key points you may want to leave folks with as we wrap up?

Petra Ford: I mentioned the main thing is that, you know, we're going to make the that this doing adding challenges strengthens the dog's understanding of the exercise and it builds their confidence and confidence and it strengthens their ability to self problems.

And when they're in the ring, no matter how well you train your dog, the ring is hard, your dog's going to be under pressure, your dog's going to be challenged, your dog's going to have periods when it struggles a little bit and they're going to need the skill set of being able to be confident, solve the problem, push through to the end, and that's what this course is going to give the dogs.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Petra. Thank you for having me, as always. My pleasure also, as always. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with Ashley Escobar to talk about how to use fitness conditioning to improve your dog's impulse control, body awareness and precision. 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!