AG335: Success Over Stress: Confidence Building for the Sensitive Agility Dog
Course Details
Do you have a dog who can become very sensitive during your agility training? Do they struggle with perceived failures or being “wrong” even when they aren’t? Do they struggle with certain environments or agility related sounds/sights? Or do they struggle to repeat sequences or learning new skills that involve repetition or trying something new?
This course is tailored specifically to you! This includes sensitive dogs that stress down as well as those who stress up or stress into specific traits such as sniffing, stalking, barking, etc.
Throughout this course, we will go over strategies to help your sensitive dog walk away from training sessions feeling GREAT! Along with these specific strategies and exercises, we will also go through reasons why our dogs may become sensitive during training and ways to mitigate that. We will also go through what that sensitivity itself may look like so that you can be proactive in the future.
We will go through strategies both for at home training as well as seminars, classes, and trials.
You will walk away from this course armed with new tools to help balance out your training and leave everyone feeling more cool, collected, and confident!
Teaching Approach:
Lectures will be a combination of written description and demonstration video. We will be going over general confidence building exercises and ways to structure training to help our sensitive dogs as well as lectures discussing what those sensitivities might look like in their subtle form and strategies to help attending agility events more successfully.
Feedback will be a combination of written feedback and videoed voiceover feedback.
Bronagh Daly is a Certified Control Unleashed Instructor, Certified Family Dog Mediator, Certified One Mind Dogs Instructor, and a graduate of the Aggression in Dogs Master Course. She does not believe in one-size-fits all...(Click here for full bio and to view her upcoming classes)
Reset stations! They are one of my favorite things to use with dogs who have a lot of feelings about agility training.
What are they exactly? Essentially place that you can go with your dog when something goes wrong. This can be something that actually goes wrong such as a misunderstood, verbal or missed contact or just something that is perceived as wrong by your dog. They also act as a way to get your dog to reinforcement without having to reinforce a mistake that occurred. I also love to use them for dogs to struggle with repetition as a way to reset them or break up training. And most importantly, they serve as a way for your dog to stay happy and engaged with your training session no matter what is going on.
We will be using reset stations in a few different manners throughout class and build several different skills upon them. This is why we will be working on a couple of different reset stations so that you have as many tools in your tool kit as possible as we work towards your dog being able to walk away from every agility experience feeling wonderful.
For reset stations, they will be focusing on for pain types:
Small, mobile station — rubber exercise dot
Mat
Raised station
Snuffle mat
I find it to be helpful to go through all of the exercises below with every option because you will likely find ways to apply all of them throughout the six weeks! If your dog is averse to one of the options, let me know, and we can figure out a way to troubleshoot it and make things more comfortable for your dog.
So first, let’s make sure that your dog is comfortable with each of the reset station types!
Snuffle mat:
This one is definitely the easiest. Place your snuffle mat on the ground and immediately add food to it and allow your dog to access the food. Wait until your dog finishes and looks to you and when they do, add more food to the snuffle mat.
Now, when your dog looks to you this time, pause and insert a snuffle cue before dropping the food. We want good clean mechanics here so your dog actually hears the snuffle cue. If you already have a scatter cue, I would make this a separate cue for clarity.
Now take several steps away, pause, and say your snuffle cue, then move towards the snuffle mat and drop food into the mat.
Repeat as needed, up to at least 5 to 10 feet of distance from the snuffle mat.
Small, mobile station (dots):
My preference for this type is to use round, flat, grippy exercise dots. We want our dogs to be able to see them easily and we also want our dogs to be able to move over our dots as needed without tripping etc. They should look something like these:
Begin by standing directly in front of one dot with your dog. Say your dot cue, then place a piece of food on the dot. Let your dog eat the food off of the dot. After they finish eating, wait until your dog looks up at you. When they do, repeat.
When that’s easy, try the same thing with two dots. Repeat the same process each time where you pause after they give you eye contact, say your dot cue, then move onto the next dot and place food on that dot. As soon as the food is placed on the dot each time, the food should be readily available to eat every time and your dog should go to immediately eat it.
Mat/station:
Place your mat on the ground and sit with your mat (on the ground or chair is fine!). As soon as your dog shows any interest in the mat, begin feeding on it. No marker cues needed here for now! Feed several times in a row, then cue a thrown treat and throw a treat away.
Let them retrieve their treat and wait to see if they will engage with the mat again. Once they do in any capacity (just looking at it or taking a step towards it), begin repetitive feeding on the mat again. After several treats, once again cue a thrown treat and throw the treat away.
Continue with this first step until your dog is eagerly, or at least consistently, seeking out their mat.
Once they are, we’re going to raise our criteria a bit! After feeding a couple of treats for returning to the mat, pause and see if they will offer lying down on the mat. The second they start to do so, mark yes and feed them the rest of the way into the down. Feed them several times for remaining in their down on the mat, then cue a thrown treat and throw the treat away.
When they return from now on, you are going to wait them out until they settle into their down position. When they do, immediately mark and feed them on the mat. Feed several times in a row, then cue a thrown treat and throw the treat away.
Now that the down on the mat is consistent, add in a mat cue! Simply insert the cue as they are returning from their tossed treat and clearly approaching the mat. When they go all the way onto their mat and lie down, mark and reward on the mat. Still release with a thrown treat cue.
And on a similar note, we’ll also want to make sure we have a good stationing cue. Repeat the process the same way, but the position is optional. Completely fine to train the station with a specific position or you can also train the station to have the criteria of all four feet being on it in any way your dog chooses.
Now that all of our stations are nice and comfortable, we’re going to add our first easy exercise:
Note: work this separately for each of your reset stations.
PART ONE:
1. Stand next to your reset station with your dog. Q a very easy behavior for your dog, slight pause, queue your reset station, then immediately move to it and reward dog as applicable to station.
2. Now take one step away and repeat.
3. Continue to add distance, always adding in repetitions where you move back in closer to the reset station to make sure you are not just continuing to add difficulty to this.
PART TWO:
1. Now go back to standing directly next to your reset station. Cue two easy behaviors, followed by queuing your reset station.
2. Add distance as we did above with the two behaviors
3. Go back to standing directly next to the recent station again and Q3 known behaviors
4. Once again, Work at increasing distance as we did above
PART THREE:
1. Now we are going to work on training something new with our stations. Have your reset station set about 5 feet away. Take a leash or any kind of string that your dog can easily see and place that in a line on the ground between you and your dog. Throw a treat behind your dog for them to get if needed to create space.
2. As soon as your dog makes any motion towards your leash/string, mark and reward with a tossed treat behind them. Our goal is going to eventually be to get them to stop with their front feet just over the leash/string.
3. After three reps, cue your reset station and run over to it, rewarding your dog there for several reps. After they look to you at the end of three reps, throw a treat away back behind the leash/string.
4. Continue like this, marking and rewarding for approximations of your dog initially getting to the point of having both front feet over the leash/string and eventually pausing there. Stop every three reps to go to your reset station, then begin again.
5. If your dog is showing any signs of feeling sensitive at any time, immediately cue your reset station even if you have not done three reps yet. Then go back to your session.
That’s it for reset stations! Just so you can see where we’re going, here’s an example of how we might use reset stations down the line:
Instructor: Bronagh Daly
