Designing Distance Games for the TDAA

A handler will tell me from time to time… my dog won’t work at a distance. To which my reply is invariably… “Have you considered training him?” With this in mind it strikes me that some TDAA judges have never trained their dogs to work at a distance and so don’t really appreciate what a trained dog might do. And this lack of confidence and understanding is reflected in their design of distance challenges for play in the TDAA.

Be very clear about this: A distance challenge should be proofing of the skills of the trained dog!

Distance Games – 2’6” is NOT Working at a Distance

Consider this distance challenge. The judge has drawn a line all of about 2’6” from the key obstacle. You can’t actually see the lines that I’ve drawn to measure the length of the distance challenges because the numbers used to describe the length of the lines are pretty much as big as the lines themselves.

Most handlers have arms long enough to stretch all the way out to indicate the ramp, so I’d submit that the dog doing the jump and the A-frame are not working at a distance.

Setting Criteria for Distance Work

A 4” Games I dog should be able to work away from his handler at a minimum of 5′, especially on a simple lateral distance challenge.

I might have made this more complicated, drawing as many as 16 lines. But that’s really too many lines with which to burden the course design crew and frankly too intellectually complicated for most judges to follow when determining whether a handler and dog have succeeded in their challenge. Okay, let’s settle on four lines (which will be complicated enough!)

Note that I fully expect the big dogs in the Games III class (those big husky 12” and 16” dogs)… to be able to do this lateral distance challenge from a cool 11′ distance. Trust me on this… 11′ is a modest test of the dog’s willingness to work at a distance.

The Van Deusen Question

I got this query from Wayne Van Deusen yesterday. You’ll want to pay careful attention to this discussion because he’s talking about the challenge game in the 2009 Petit Prix in Racine, Wisconsin. I’m sure a lot of you might want to spend a little time training your dogs for this challenge.

Here’s what Wayne asked me:

>> A quick question.

I’m submitting an idea for a distance challenge for the Petit Prix in addition to the weave pole challenge that already exists. As I write up the rules for it. I was just going to say the dog who does the longest distance wins. But someone said it should be done by height class as 4″ dogs need to put in more strides than 16″ dogs. Your humble opinion, please?

Distance to the Tire Challenge

For $2.00 entry fee (You may enter as many times as you like) The handler will have three opportunities to send their dog to the tire. The tire will be set at the dog’s jump height. The final send will be the distance entered. The dog with the longest send will be declared the winner.

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Coincidentally, I’ve been struggling with this very question recently; mostly in terms of trying to understand how we set distance lines in TDAA games.

The idea that has been haunting me is this… 1″ of dog = 1′ of ground. The part that has been nagging at me is the excess of the multiplier. So If I can send a 4″ dog 12 feet to a tire… that means I would have to send the 16″ dog 48′ for the same accomplishment. No… I think we’ve lost the comparability altogether.

So what I’m thinking is that each jump height probably deserves a basic fudge factor. So what you would do is measure the length of the send from the send line respective to that jump height. So if the 4″ dog sends from 20′ then the 16” dog will have to be sent from 32′ to have a comparable measurement.

I have no idea whether my suggestion will be adopted by the Petit Prix host club in Racine. I’ll continue to work with them on it.

Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston: BudHouston@hughes.net. And Check out my new publication the Idea Book – Agility Training for a Small Universe available at www.dogagility.org/store.