Music for Dog Agility

What’s the right music for dog agility? Music can express both a mood and a moment in a way that the dull spoken word never can. I reckon the answer isn’t the same for everyone.

I know this is a silly departure from my usual. It’s the weekend though and the beginning of Spring. So go, have fun. Dance.

It came to me finally that I have different music depending on whether I’m training my dog or in competition. So I rummaged through the old musty chests of my eclectic musical interests and I came up with the following; I even went out to YouTube to find links to the music (YouTube is full of good stuff):

When Training the Dog: I’m Beginning to See the Light ~ Duke Ellington; I like this music because it sets a slow deliberate pace, like the very excellent dog trainer, not in a hurry at all. The idea of “I’m Beginning to See the Light” fits right in with what you’re after with your dog, the dawning of understanding as you fit performance to cue. The vocal on the soundtrack is less compelling than the instrumental. But I love the fact that the song was sung and recorded something like 80 years ago.

When in Competition: Minor Swing ~ Django Reinhardt; This is a great piece of music. The inspiring part is this feeling that “I’m supposed to be here!” It is rhythmic, smooth, and competent; exactly what you want in an agility performance. And, the artist is having fun. We can all learn from a guy like Django!

Okay, now it’s your turn. What is your agility music? (If you do Who Let the Dogs Out… you aren’t trying hard enough).

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston Houston.Bud@gmail.com. The web store is up and running.  www.dogagility.org/newstore. I have five volumes (over 100 pp each) of The Joker’s Notebook available on my web-store at an inexpensive price. These are lesson plans suitable for individual or group classes for teaching dog to work at a distance.

Turn to Nowhere

I have this little snippet of a course from TDAA judge Vickie Tillman that inspires a quick discussion of agility handling strategy. Note that I’ve scaled the obstacles and the transitions between them to the dimensions used in the big dog venues so as not to offend the sensibilities of people who’ve never faced competition in the TDAA.

On this course the edge of the ring is represented by the upper margin of the drawing. This is an important note.

I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that most handlers will turn their dogs to the right at jump #15, although that jump provides a choice of turning directions. I can capture the consequences of the turning directions by describing the dog’s path in either direction:

In this drawing the blue line represents the consequences of turning the dog to the right at jump #15. You can see that the dog’s path clearly favors the wrong course pipe tunnel coming back over jump #16. The red line shows the consequences of turning the dog to the left at jump #15. Turning left sweetens the approach to the dogwalk at #17.

I have in the past documented the critical analysis for determining turning direction, when there is a choice.

1. What is the natural turning direction?
2. Which direction results in a shorter consequential path?
3. Which direction presents the more flowing consequential path?
4. Which direction presents more risk?
5. Which direction is accommodated by the skills of the team?

Natural turning direction is a two-part question. Whatever side the handler is working will influence the dog to turn in that direction. In this sequence most handlers will have dog-on-left, leaning the natural turning direction to the right. The second part of the question is presentation of the jump. This is easier to illustrate than explain:

Given the dog’s approach, the natural turning direction would be to the left because the dog will have a simple wrap around the wing.

However, in our subject sequence the natural turning direction is influenced only by the side the handler is working; while direction of approach is neutral.

And neither turning direction results in a shorter consequential path.

To determine the more flowing consequential path I’d have to give a nod to the left turn at jump #15. Turning to the right will require another turn, however modest, after jump #16. I can’t leave this question without referring back to the illustration I did for natural turning direction (to show how flowing consequential path balances with flowing consequential path):

What we’re really envisioning here are “downstream considerations”. All agility handlers are familiar with the basic requirement for thinking downstream for upstream decisions. So in this illustration a turn to 4A favors a turn to the right at jump #2 even though it isn’t what you’d consider the natural turning direction.

In our Vickie Tillman sequence the direction that presents more risk is clearly the right turn, because it presents the pipe tunnel as a wrong course option.

The question of which direction is accommodated by the skills of the team is very important in this sequence. If the handler has dog-on-left he and the dog must have in their repertoire an instruction to turn away at the #15 jump.

Earlier I said “On this course the edge of the ring is represented by the upper margin of the drawing. This is an important note.” An interesting thing that I’ve found with my boy Kory, even though we have fabulous directional skills… there are times when he will second-guess my instruction. What he sees is that all of the good stuff (more agility obstacles) will be out to the right. To the left is nothing but the ring barrier. When I say “Left!” he will believe “that don’t make no sense!” and turn to the right nonetheless.

Part of our ongoing training is to demonstrate to Kory that when I say Left I mean Left; and when I say Right I mean Right; and he should trust my judgment in these matters. But it is hard to deny the logic of fighting against the turn to nowhere.

Named Obstacle No-Handling Discrimination

At the Poodle Club trial in Cincinnati this past weekend I had the opportunity twice to approach the pipe-tunnel-under-contact-obstacle with Kory while I was at a considerable distance. In both cases the correct obstacle was the contact and dog’s path favored the pipe tunnel. I’m proud to say that he chose correctly both times. I recognize that this is an insufficient statistical sampling but I am encouraged by Kory’s spot on performance.

Hazard double-Q’d both days. My god she’s a lot of work, being a pure-for-motion dog that demands that I hoof it through the entire course in a path equal in length to  hers. While she is not a dog that takes away your breath when she runs, she is solid and steady in her work. And I’m proud of my girl.

Kory owned both of the standard courses. But in jumpers he dropped a bar on one course (I believe I did not support him properly over the jump, even though I was at some distance); and on the other jumpers course, as I’ve previously related, I failed to run him without his tags.

So there was the weekend with two dogs… a bar and a collar away from perfection.

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston Houston.Bud@gmail.com. The Country Dream web store is up and running. www.dogagility.org/newstore. You know… I have five volumes (over 100 pp each) of The Joker’s Notebook available on my web-store at an embarrassingly inexpensive price. These are lesson plans suitable for individual or group classes for teaching dog to work at a distance.

Real Dogs Don’t Wear Tags!

After a seminar day at QCDTC I stayed over for the weekend AKC trial hosted by the Greater Cincinnati Poodle Club. The morning started with a very fun romp of a jumpers course designed by AKC judge Karen Wlodarski. I got to run both Hazard and Kory on this. Hazard ran clean tho not terribly fast. Kory is a different matter altogether in terms of both speed and challenge. I must say that the course went exactly as planned; we escaped all the subtle options (I’ll describe below). He gave me a stunning run, according to plan.

The judge NQ’d us anyhow, because I failed to take his tags off before the run. The judge was very nice about it and didn’t blow the whistle until after our run. I was nonetheless very pleased with Kory and don’t care that much about the Q anyhow, as it turns out. Just to make myself feel better about it I phoned home and blamed Marsha for not reminding me as I walked out the door, as she usually does.

Those of you who run more than one dog are familiar with the idea that you can take very different views of course strategies based on the individual needs and quirks off your dogs. In my whole agility career I’ve never run two dogs who were so dramatically different than Hazard, who I drag laboriously through the course, and Kory who I push great distance with little effort, and a lot of conversational handling.

The first half of the course is dog-on-left which might seem unimaginative. It is, in fact, a speed building rip that has a couple subtle wrong-course options for the unwary. While these options weren’t so compelling for the smaller dogs a number of the big dogs demonstrated the possibilities. After jump #3 is the triple in a nice straight line. And after jump #4 is the gratuitous and flatly presented dummy jump.

The technical part of the program begins on the dismount of the weave poles with, again, a couple wrong-course options when entering the pinwheel.

As it turns out the real challenge in this course was the awkward approach to the #18 jump. A simple analysis of the dog’s path in this course will show a line that slices by the #18 jump for a refusal. We saw that plenty today, even with the small dogs. What I did with Kory at this point was turn him to the right as though we were going back to the weave poles, then flip him left as the approach to the jump opened up. Funny thing, I had also agonized about the final wrong course  option, presented by jump #1.

The Standard Course

I Q’d both Hazard and Kory in the standard course, so, not a bad day. With any luck my pups will have the same edge tomorrow!

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston Houston.Bud@gmail.com. The Country Dream web store is up and running. www.dogagility.org/newstore. You know… I have five volumes (over 100 pp each) of The Joker’s Notebook available on my web-store at an embarrassingly inexpensive price. These are lesson plans suitable for individual or group classes for teaching dog to work at a distance.

Awkward

When reviewing courses about the most scathing thing I have to say to novice course designers is something like… “That’s awkward!” It strikes me that I should really define my point of view on both the word and the principles of course design that inspire me to use it.

Rather than taking an example from my large library of resources I endeavored here to make the awkward design myself. It’s easy to be lulled into being okay with a sequence like this. Look how neatly the Clean Run Course Designer draws the dog’s path as though this is a simple little romp for the dog.

Now, you must know, CRCD is a retarded robot and hasn’t the slightest idea about how dogs move. The dog’s path calculated here is an algorithm that brings the dog’s path square to each obstacle by number. That’s not the way it works in real life.

The course designer (and frankly, savvy handlers) should think in very linear terms with the dog’s path. The dismount of a jump is always dictated by the approach. In the dismount the only pertinent variable is the dog’s turning radius. And the turn establishes the line of approach to the next obstacle.

As you can see in this drawing, in which I’ve superimposed the dog’s true path, there is no real approach to jump #4 on the dismount of jump #3 without managing that approach. That’s awkward!

That is not to say that the Master handler will fail in the awkward presentation of the sequence. Indeed, he (or she) spotted it early in the morning when picking up the course map; and he fretted through the fancy handling to precue the turn at jump #3 and draw the dog around for a square look at jump #4 without earning the refusal.

[What! A refusal on a jump? See the Google-Proof Trivia Contest, below.]

The dog’s managed path doesn’t much resemble the whimsical line drawn by the Clean Run Course Designer.

Fixing the Awkward

Sometimes the awkward moment is caused by the imposition of a new sequence on an existing course. This is a practice that we call “nesting”. I’m a big advocate of minimal course changes so that the day can move along in a timely manner. But we don’t need to be lazy about it. There are subtle tweaks that we can take that really don’t constitute a lot of equipment movement and will make the course more generous and flowing.

All I’ve done here is given a modest rotation to jumps #3 and #4; and it’s turned the awkward into an interesting little handling sequence. I even threw in a pipe tunnel under the A-frame to scare everyone (twice). Nobody really minds a handling challenge when the dog’s path has flow and he can be, for the most part, released to work.

Bud’s Google Proof Trivia Contest

Can a dog commit a refusal on a jump in the TDAA?

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston Houston.Bud@gmail.com. The Country Dream web store is up and running. www.dogagility.org/newstore. You know… I have five volumes (over 100 pp each) of The Joker’s Notebook available on my web-store at an embarrassingly inexpensive price. These are lesson plans suitable for individual or group classes for teaching dog to work at a distance.

Chicken Coop

I’ve been working on a chicken coop for the better part of a week. I’ve enlisted the assistance of my brother-in-law John who has pretty much taken over from a project management point of view. If I had built it myself I would have built it in a couple days and it probably would have resembled the shack the Beverly Hillbillies lived in, before they actually struck oil. John is more of a Beverly Hills kinda guy.

I’ve bought 8 chicks. Four of them are sexed pullets, probably a northern Leghorn breed. The other four are Jersey Giants (sometimes called Black Giants); and I have no idea of their sex yet. The Giants are a calm breed who lay brown eggs and will lay in cold weather.

Okay, having chicks means I really had to get going on the chicken coop project. I’ve seen some dismal digs for chickens; and I had pretty much resolved that I’d provide a roomy coop with ample brood boxes and roosts.

I’m getting a bit of an education on basic building skills from John. Whether you’re building a chicken coop or a tool shed or, presumably, a house you have to make every effort to keep everything thing square and level from the floor/foundation into the walls and ultimately the roof.

Since the coop will be an attractive thing I’ve put it on the northeast part of my property (where it can be viewed from the road). I could have hid it on the other side of the tractor barn (the metal green building you see in the pic) had it been of my construction.

I had wanted to build the thing with recycled lumber. But it was proving too much work to trim out old oak board (like the 2×4’s you see on the roof). So I have a couple/three hundred in board and OSB paneling.

The side of the building facing you in this picture is where we’ll put the man door. It’ll just be a cutout from the OSB. Between the coop and the tractor shed I’ll put a chicken wire enclosure for the birds when they’re not out pillaging the neighborhood. I’m hoping that the structure will be very predator resistant. I’m worried more about feral dogs than anything else. In this part of the country people still dump dogs in the wilderness as though they are doing the animals some kind of Christian favor.

I’ll keep you up to date.

Meanwhile Back in the Training Center

The chicken coop thing has been tough on the body. After a days work I have to go back in and do another 8 hour work day. Mostly this has been dedicated to doing TDAA stuff, reviewing courses and so forth. The blog has fallen low on my priority scale.

Class on Wednesday night was selfishly devoted to a variety of skills I’ve wanted to work on with my own dogs. I wanted a good workout on the weave poles; I wanted to proof my discrimination skills (I do a “named obstacle” / no handling protocol); I also wanted to work with turning options.  This is the set of the floor I came up with. It’s very simple and has an interesting variety of sequencing possibilities.

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston Houston.Bud@gmail.com. The Country Dream web store is up and running. www.dogagility.org/newstore. You know… I have five volumes (over 100 pp each) of The Joker’s Notebook available on my web-store at an embarrassingly inexpensive price. These are lesson plans suitable for individual or group classes for teaching dog to work at a distance.

The Fox and the Hedgehog

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. ~ Archilochus (7th-century bc)

Are you a fox or a hedgehog? There’s an argument for being a hedgehog you know. You know that thing very well and it shapes your complete existence. I’ve heard that Winston Churchill was a hedgehog. He was utterly convinced that the German Nazis were a dire threat to the world. His clarity of vision helped to defeat the German menace.

The fox, on the other hand, views the world from more than a single perspective; strives to develop all of his abilities; and survives the complexity of the world by adaptation. The fox knows that one hedgehog’s truth is another hedgehog’s lie.

If I knew then what I know now!

There was this theme for dog agility bloggers “If I knew then what I know now!” That work was due yesterday; because I’m a procrastinator and generally late for life, I did not participate. But the exercise generated some amazing reading:

http://dog-agility-blog-events.posterous.com/

I was especially entranced by the posting of an obscure agility blogger (Nancy Gyes)… because she reminded me of a thing “train every behavior long before you ever need to use it.”

I didn’t completely ignore the call for the bloggers theme. My brain pretty much took me to a different place that became more of a sci-fi saga like Time Cop than the remorseful retrospectives of dog trainers thumbing through their woulda-coulda-shouldas. I’ll share that story with you another day once it has coalesced in my brain.

The Hedgehog Learns from the Fox

Yesterday I put up a post on Threadles (http://wp.me/pmSZZ-Zt). Armed with by Droid video smart-phone I went into the lower field to demonstrate the handling. And the exercise became fail fail fail.

You must understand that I am a hedgehog who puts great store on handling skills. Now I find myself in some cases overmatched being an old man with a young, exuberant, relatively fast dog with magnificent distance skills and obstacle focus. Sometimes it can be hard to “handle” your way out of an exercise that demands that you be in two places at once.

Taking Nancy’s statement-of-the-obvious to heart I decided to go out and train Kory for a simple skill… to do the jump and come back to me for the next instruction (ignoring the enticement of perfectly eligible and inviting obstacles). I’ll consider this a directional skill. The word I put to it is “Come-Back!”

Here’s the result: http://youtu.be/29Z0N2oHwEo. Of course I only introduced the command/performance training today (and it took Kory about 2 minutes to learn it). I’m fully aware that the skill isn’t  owned/earned without making it a solid part of my daily exercises for several months.

The Homer Simpson Moment (d’oh!)

Because it was raining outside (did you hear the rain on our metal roof)… I took the exercise inside to the Nancy Gyes “G” alphabet drill (which we finally put up last night as our Minute league play game ~ see http://wp.me/pmSZZ-Z8.)

D’oh! It occurred to me that Nancy may have anticipated the use of the letter “G” as a threadle exercise… so I popped the CD into my computer and, sure enough, there are a couple. Here is “G” exercise number 12:

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston Houston.Bud@gmail.com. The Country Dream web store is up and running. www.dogagility.org/newstore. You know… I have five volumes (over 100 pp each) of The Joker’s Notebook available on my web-store at an embarrassingly inexpensive price. These are lesson plans suitable for individual or group classes for teaching dog to work at a distance.

Threadles

A threadle is the ultimate blind or managed approach. When the threadle comes in pairs the course designer is being completely bloody-minded.

I teach that all handling comes from a simple analysis of the dog’s path. The Clean Run Course Designer drew the dog’s path above. Lovely! And if the handler thinks in the same fuzzy and sleepy-dreamy terms then this sequence will be a very tough challenge.

Here I’ve redrawn the dog’s path so that it owns a sharp and linear quality, giving the handler something substantial on which to base his handling. What we know about the single threadle is that the handler will conduct the dog on three lines with two corners. Each corner, as you know, is a specific timing event for the handler.

Because of the combination of threadle upon threadle the handler is further challenged to have dog on left on the approach to jump #2; and, I would think, dog on right for the transitional (red) line.

A Geek Thing to Save Bandwidth

One of the annoying things about watching a YouTube video is that you basically have to reload the darned thing every time you go back to view it. So you’re constantly using up your bandwidth. Furthermore, on the first viewing you’ll get those horrible vid-stutters as the play outraces the download.

A few months ago I went out to find a utility that would allow me to capture and store the YouTube video on my computer. So you pay for the bandwidth only once. And then, being on your computer it will always play seamlessly as though you were watching the teevee or a DVD.

Here’s what I found: http://atube-catcher.dsnetwb.com/video/

This morning I watched a fun movie starring Julie Andrews in a biography of Gertrude Lawrence, filmed in 1968. I went out to see if I could find her song Someone to Watch Over Me on YouTube. Sure enough…

Some One to Watch Over Me

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston Houston.Bud@gmail.com. The Country Dream web store is up and running. www.dogagility.org/newstore. You know… I have five volumes (over 100 pp each) of The Joker’s Notebook available on my web-store at an embarrassingly inexpensive price. These are lesson plans suitable for individual or group classes for teaching dog to work at a distance.

Doodling

Finally done with my taxes which were, like I said… very complicated this year. This is an annual ritual that reminds me of the Christmas movie with Darren McGavin (A Christmas Story) in which he goes down into the basement to make war with the furnace. It’s kinda like that.

Interesting thing though, I’m actually two weeks ahead of where I was last year. What was going on last year to make me so late?

Spring is Sprung

We make our transition this week to the spring training schedule; which means that we return to weekly evening classes and leave behind the once or twice a month Sunday mini-clinics. I know that’s not all that interesting. But to me it’s a change in the essential rhythms of life; and I must readjust.

Frankly I’m getting antsy now to put in my garden and even sneak away to the pond for an afternoon of catch ‘n release.

What I would like to do, in terms of training, is put up something in the building and something on the lower field and change up both every few days. There are lots of things that can be accomplished training-wise with subtle tweaks of equipment.

Here’s a bit I’ve been playing with:

Now, for all that the sequence has decently flowing lines for the dog there are some subtle challenges that I’m studying. From jump #3 there’s a solid discrimination with the tunnel tucked under the A-frame; the approach to the #5 jump is at an acute slant (and shouldn’t be taken for granted by the handler, at all); and on the dismount of the weave poles the handler has a blind or managed approach to shape the dog into the pinwheel at jump #7.

The blind/managed approach is becoming more an more popular in competition. So, we must practice.

Now renumbered… the lines seem a little angrier than the previous sequence. But it’s not so bad. Note the in-your-face options after jump #2 and #3. The approach to the A-frame is a managed approach, or should be. That approach is complicated by the discrimination.

Again, on the dismount of the weave poles, the handler is faced with a managed approach to jump #10. This isn’t really all that simple. The handler is trapped back at jump #10; and the dog may feel a little love for the pipe tunnel option. The more the allure of the pipe tunnel draws the dog the more the approach to jump #11 is spoiled. It’s certainly an interesting moment in this sequence.

Let’s Get Bloody-Minded

While I was pouring over the last sequence a couple things jumped out at me to which the sane little voice on my shoulder was saying… “don’t go there.” On the other shoulder is the evil little voice that says “Hey, train for the preposterous or be unprepared!”

I really had to laugh thinking about the evil voice on my shoulder. There was a SciFi movie way back I think in the 60’s with Ray Milland where he had a head sprouting like a growth on one shoulder (the head was Rosie Greer; a name football fans should remember). There’s nothing in this ridiculous image that furthers the discussion except to complete the portrait of evil.

The course designer is trying to stretch the handler between control moments. For example, the handler should manage the turn from the A-frame into the pipe tunnel and yet be available on the dismount of the pipe tunnel to manage the approach to jump #5. We repeat this theme on the managed approach to jump #9; a moment that clearly requires the handler to pick the dog out of the weave poles and shape the approach to the jump. And this bit is followed by a threadle between jumps #10 and #11.

I don’t really approve of the course design. When in training, however, whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.

The Thing With Two Heads

I couldn’t help myself… I had to go find the picture. Funny… it’s not nearly as scary as I remember it. And frankly now that I look at it, Ray Milland looks much scarier and seems more to be the growth.

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston Houston.Bud@gmail.com. The Country Dream web store is up and running. www.dogagility.org/newstore. You know… I have five volumes (over 100 pp each) of The Joker’s Notebook available on my web-store at an embarrassingly inexpensive price. These are lesson plans suitable for individual or group classes for teaching dog to work at a distance.

IFCS Loaner Dogs?

Team Australia will be competing at the IFCS World Agility Championships (WAC) to be held in Dallas/Fort Worth, TX 11-12 May 2012.  Because of Australian quarantine restrictions which would require, amongst other things, any dogs traveling out of Australia to be in quarantine for a month upon their return, the team will be running “host” dogs at the Championships.

Australia has a full team traveling to the Championships: three handlers in each height class (12″, 16″, 22″ and 26″) each needing a dog. Two years ago in the UK the Australian team had someone have to pull out at late notice due to circumstances beyond their control. So this year they would like to have a reserve available for each height class.

Team Australia Members at IFCS WAC 2010 (UK) formed a fabulous relationship with all of the host dog owners with many still in contact with each other 2 years later.   So we anticipate this will be a lot of fun for all of the US host dog owners as well.

The best case scenario is for the team to work with dogs that have experience in running/training with handlers other than their owner; and that would be available for team training sessions in the days prior to the Championships.  At this stage the team has offers of three 12″ dogs but are yet to get all of the details (including availability for team training) of the offered 16″ dogs.  The dogs will be competing under IFCS rules with equipment more or less in line with USDAA.

* * *

It looks like team Australia is looking for small dogs; particularly for the 16″ division; though I’m thinking that the team would be very interested in a great 12″ dog either as an alternate, or as a dog for their primary team. This is a marvelous opportunity to get world class exposure for a dog in one of the most exciting agility competitions on the planet.

If you have interest in pursuing this please email me at Houston.Bud@gmail.com. I’m thinking that it would be a very good idea to have some YouTube videos to show off your dog.

More information about the event can be found here: http://www.usdaa.com/article.cfm?newsid=1722.

Panel of Judges for IFCS DFW 2012

The judges for IFCS this year include: Dave Hanson, USA; Darcy Bennett, Canada; Tim Laubach, USA; and Riette Mohr, South Africa. The IFCS website has introductions of each of these agility judges and examples of their course design. You can find that here: http://www.ifcsdogsports.com/.

I’ve been fascinated for many years by South African course design (as a break-out from the sameness of American course design). I was delighted to find a course from Riette Mohr which will actually fit in my training building and will be a great candidate for league play within a couple weeks.

This course was presented on a very large field. By the time I converted meters to feet and started trimming the edges I was surprised that it fits so neatly into a considerably smaller area. I’m thinking that this course was designed originally for something quite smaller than the field on which it was presented as an example course.

It’s a bit of a control-minded course. The dog is set loose primarily from #10 through #15. But even this sequence includes two technical obstacles and somewhat technical moments both at the beginning and at the end.

Of course the IFCS will feature some of the best technical handlers in the world, with appreciably fast dogs. Riette’s courses should be delightful to watch.

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston Houston.Bud@gmail.com. The Country Dream web store is up and running. www.dogagility.org/newstore. You know… I have five volumes (over 100 pp each) of The Joker’s Notebook available on my web-store at an embarrassingly inexpensive price. These are lesson plans suitable for individual or group classes for teaching dog to work at a distance.