Weaves and Wraps

Last night was lesson 4 of my Weave pole class.  It is the first time I have run this class and I was absolutely amazed at the progress of the dogs.  After only 4 sessions, there is a Duck Toller in class weaving a full set of six weave poles with entries from all sides.  There are also several other dogs in class that have 3 sets of two poles set out, with the gates angled open.  By the end of next class the poles should be almost in line with each other and I have full confidence that they will be weaving a set of six weave poles by the end of the last class.  It's absolutely incredible that a dog can go from knowing nothing about weave poles to weaving a complete set of six poles in a six week class.  I love this method and I will never teach my dogs to weave any other way again.

Spryte and I continue to work on her agility skills.  I try and go back and revisit foundation skills as often as I can.  It's easy to get caught up in working full courses, but then the finer skills tend to fall apart.  Lately I have noticed she cannot turn tight over a jump. Her idea of a wrap around a wing is to fling yourself as far as you can over the jump and then turn back to me.  She turns wider than a Mack truck!

I did a lot of sending her around cones and obstacles as a puppy.  She loved the game and would race around the cones, running as tight to them as she could, and then she would race back to me.  Next we did it around wing jumps and again she had great success.  We added a jump bar, and it was decent, she still jumped a little long, but nothing like what I see out on course.  Yesterday we practised out in the yard and again I had terrible wide turns.  I was really starting to think that I need to fix this. While pondering over her wide turns it hit me, I have only every done wraps from a stationary position.  Every time I did the ground work for this exercise, I was standing still and sending her out ahead of me.  So of course as soon as I added a lot of motion into the picture, she read it as "jump with extension" and would jump way past the jump before turning.  I had added motion into our courses when working on wraps, but I had never done it in the groundwork. 

It seems so obvious to me now, but it was such an easy thing to overlook when training.  That's the thing with dog training, you can't possibly remember to train every skill to perfection every time.  You will miss stuff and then you must go back and retrain that skill. So Spryte and I have started revisiting our wraps.  I use "dig dig dig" to cue the wrap around the jump and I have started adding a lot of my motion into the picture.  And just as expected, the first few times she flew over the jump.  By the end of the session she started to collect her stride and jump close to the wing and wrap around it.  It's no were near trained, and I don't expect it to carry over into the ring yet. But with a little more practise I should start to get the tight turns that I desire.

That is why I love dog training so much.  There is always something that needs work.  The behaviour is never perfect and it will take years of consistent training to get my dogs to the level I want them. In the meantime I get to spend countless hours training my dogs.  This means many hours of bonding with them, playing, learning from each other and growing as a team.  Nothing beats the relationship that forms between a handler and a performance dog.  It truly is priceless.

Here is a video of Spryte and I working on "wrap" when she was a puppy. Notice I always send and don't add motion! Naughty me!  The goal was for her to wrap the cone and always turn towards me, never turn away from me. If she turned the wrong way, we redid it.  I also wanted distance (that's why I am far from the cone)

Today's practise on wraps and motion.  Her first time over Spryte didn't notice the wrap signals and jumped long (and looked very surprised that I had turned), after that she started paying attention and wrapped tightly around the wings.  The jump bar is angled to encourage jumping tight to the the wing.