Instructor: Shade Whitesel
Course Details
This course introduces the basics of ball play, tug drive building, how to shape behaviors with a clicker and some foundation obedience and focus skills. Handlers will learn the beginning skills of channeling their dog’s prey instinct into toys instead of other animals. We'll start teaching the dogs to play with guidelines and rules that make adding obedience skills easy and useful for our respective sports. Included in those rules are bringing toys back and letting them go, not playing keep away and jump all over the handler! Knowing how to play with your dog and channel those instincts can be immensely helpful to any high arousal sport as well as helping add excitement and attitude to lower drive venues.
Sit, down, stand, rear end awareness, the beginnings of stays and heeling are covered along with a section on shaping. We also talk about the difference between luring, capturing and shaping, when to use one over the other and the pros and cons of each skill. When and why to use different marker words and switching reinforcement, from tug to ball to food and back again, is also covered. It is essential to keep or build that skill throughout the dog’s working life in order to give the trainer more tools in her toolbox.
Each week consists of 2-3 behaviors to work on, along with a discussion topic, which helps keep the silver spots involved in the class.
While this course was originally formed with IPO dogs in mind, it is also good for any dog with prey instinct and handlers wishing to learn how to channel it! It is designed to be taken as the first course in the Drive and Control series, formally titled Fundamentals of IPO.