Puppy Jumping Begins
I feel kind of nervous starting jump work with Rio, I had the no-agility-til-12months thing drilled into me from the moment I started 10 years ago. When Dylan was a puppy it was very much still the accepted wisdom, but now it’s ok. I agree that it’s ok, but it’s still weird.
Since Rio has never even seen an agility jump, I set up the jump outside with the bar on Micro (that’s about 6″ high) and then we did some clicker training around and about, with rewards for interacting with the jump. She offered a few hops over the pole, then demolished it by falling over the pole, and then demolished it again by whacking one of the wings with her paw. We did a few recalls over the jump bump in between the wings just for fun.
We then did 5 reps with the bar on Micro and the jump bump in front as a V-bounce type set up. I wasn’t sure how Rio would do but she was great, she noticably improved between the first and the last in figuring out where to power from, and getting a much nice shape over the pole. In so much as that’s possible with a 5 month old puppy over a tiny jump!
I probably won’t do anything again until the weekend with her, but I really want to start cik/cap work (or kip work, because that’s the word I use!) with her too this week. I’ve been putting it off because I need a stick-in-the-ground pole to begin with and I don’t have one, but I think I’ve found something that will work. I also want to start our flyball chute work this month as well, but I think I might end up pushing that back until March. We start our Foundation Agility class at the end of February and there is only so much time to spend doing big training type things when I’m still trying to do lots of socialisation too.
4 Comments
Crystal
I don’t know anyone who trains flyball using a chute. Do you think you could explain in more detail? I’ve seen it mentioned on some training websites I’ve seen, but not in much detail. We generally use a turning board for training turns.
Leanne
I suspect a training board is what we call a chute. Something like this?
http://youtu.be/Ts_bFU5wmeY
The one I’ll be using is more indoor sized 🙂 I will get Rio on video for her first few sessions as I haven’t used this method with a pup before, so I need to make sure I’m reinforcing the right things, so hopefully that will clarify!
Crystal
What we call a turning board is basically a plywood board the same size and shape as the front of the box, covered in the same matting material. We teach the dogs to do over-and-backs over a box jump, then add in the board flat on the ground on the far side of the jump. We then place the jump and board in front of the box, and have the dog do turns with the board flat at first. Then, we slowly increase the angle of the board by leaning it against the box, until it eventually is flat against the face of the box.
Basically, I guess we start from the ground and go up, where it looks like you will be starting from the wall and going down (which I have heard about, and have trained Pallo for wall turns, but never had the chance to start a dog from there).
Leanne
A turning board sounds very similar to our chute – the only difference is our chute is bigger than the box to make the turn easier to begin with, and is the same angle as the box from the start.
I don’t personally do wall turns but it’s similar to that idea! I don’t use the flat-board method as I find (with my dogs!) that they tend to turn off their front rather than their rears (the initial weeks on the flat encourage the forward motion in the turn, rather than shifting the weight back and powering off the rear). I do know plenty of people who have used it successfully though, so it might just be how I train it! 😀