Obsession of the Anorak

An important distinction in the Tandem is that we disregard the rule of thumb that the handler should always be positioned on the side of the turn, because the dog turns most naturally in the direction of the handler. There are times when the clever and evil judge will design a course that intentionally positions the handler on the wrong side of the turn. The handler needs an answer to that riddle.

We rely on the premise that our dogs already understand how we move. So in the Tandem we turn towards the dog, distinctly and boldly. The dog, understanding our movement should make the turn in this new direction although the turn is toward his side.

Natural Movement

I have to slow down and make this point. When watching a student practice any movement I like to view the movement through a filter of rational comparison with how that person might move naturally through the conduct of life.

What does it look like when a person turns a corner?

Many handlers will introduce mechanics to any movement in dog agility that has no foundation in natural movement. It takes much longer to teach a dog to abide the cues of the handler when false-mechanics are introduced to the movement. But it is possible… because dogs are clever and engage naturally in a system of compensatory learning.

But wouldn’t it be better if we understood how dogs perceive our movement and use those natural cues to communicate with the dog?

Which Arm should Signal the Tandem?

There is a bit of a controversy with the Tandem Turn, that is, which arm should be used to signal the turn. It’s reported that Susan Garret calls the “off-arm” the “evil Ohio-arm,” and advocates using only the inside arm (the arm nearer to the dog.)

Of course, the turn is more than just an arm signal. At the same time the handler is rotating his body, turning, and moving in the direction of the turn. It’s also a good idea to develop a verbal command to coincide with all of these other cues. Often in seminar I will have a handler stick her thumbs in her back pockets and conduct the dog through the turn with no arm signal at all. The more compelling bits of the cue come from the rotation of the handler’s body, turning the corner, and stepping in the direction of the turn.

Whether evil or not, the advantage of the off-arm signal is that it draws the opposite shoulder in towards the dog and into the turn. When using the inside arm signal the handler must be keen to draw the outside shoulder into the turn of his own volition.

Oh, as to the controversy about which arm to use. I like to operate under the assumption that whatever works is correct. There are no “one size fits all” solutions in agility, though we may discover that inside-arm and counter-arm have different attributes.

Attributes of the Movement

This is a word that I use that isn’t in much currency in the world. An attribute might be defined as the quality of the dog’s response to a handler’s movement.

I made the claim yesterday that 90% of the time the Tandem Turn is better handling than a raw Rear Cross… but sometimes, only a Rear Cross will do. This is an acknowledgement of the difference in attributes between the two movements.

An attribute of the Tandem Turn is that it creates a wide sweeping turn. Whereas an important attribute of the Rear Cross is that it creates a tightened turn. The illustration above shows the dog earning a refusal at jump #3 because the handler uses a Rear Cross rather than a “wide sweeping” Tandem turn. Don’t get me wrong here; people get away with the Rear Cross in this scenario all the time. But if the dog does tighten the turn, which he actually should, there’ll be very little the handler can do to prevent the refusal.

To tell you the truth, if we move the #3  down to where jump #4 is,  then the Rear Cross makes considerably more sense than the Tandem Turn. But then, even with a Rear Cross a dog with powerful obstacle focus would be tempted to take the option jump and not pull through neatly (suggesting that there’s quite another handling movement with attributes more ideal for this challenge.)

So while we’re speaking of attributes, I want to introduce the possibility that a Tandem Turn conducted with a counter-arm signal might actually have different attributes than a Tandem Turn conducted with an inside-arm signal.

In this illustration I’m showing exactly what  my old retired boy Bogie would do (and did do) should I come up with a counter arm signal in the turn from jump #2 to  jump #3. He always took the counter-arm signal as an instruction to turn hard aback.

So if I truly wanted the considerably more subtle turn to jump #3, then the inside arm is the way to go.

* * *

I’m getting a bit away from Mary’s request for me to talk through the training steps. I think that tomorrow I should talk about how to deal with problem dogs. A problem dog, in terms of the Tandem, is a dog that insists on spinning towards the handler in the conduct of the turn. Ideally, we want the dog turning neatly away from us.

Though to tell you the truth, not everything has to be broken down in the granular bits and the compulsive “foundation work” of the obsessive anorak. Sometimes we train by playing and we learn by doing.

Thanks to Bernadette

I must thank Bernadette for the word “Anorak”. I had to Google up a UK-English to American-English translator to figure it out. But it’s a lovely word and especially cute because I am one and didn’t know the word for it. LOL

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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.