Reward System

Rio was a very good girly at training class this week, although I do have some quite major things to work on. We were training channel weaves, which Rio is very good at; she runs right through with me on both sides and varying distances ahead of her, and will pick up minor entries. It’s a fun game, running in a straight line!

However. We’ve always trained with a tug toy because she loves tugging, but I think we need to go away and do some more homework. This week she was racing me but once she’d reached me, she lost interest and wouldn’t attempt to tug. It seemed that the tug was a good game but not seen as a reward for the work, and that her focus was in the chase. She likes chasing me or her tuggy, but once we’ve stopped moving it’s no longer interesting. That’s sort of good, but it’s not an effective reward system as I’ll be running whether she’s done it right or not.

She’s also a foodie, and I am really reluctant to use food in agility training. It doesn’t work for me, I need my dogs to drive away and I can’t throw food. She gets treats whilst the other dogs work, but I think I need to cut that down so that it’s a case of agility = tug = agility.

I know I’ve created this problem by working so much on her recalls and encouraging her to chase me, plus she already has a high chase drive. We also don’t play fetch at all, so I haven’t exactly been cultivating her desire to chase a thrown object. I think our goal this week will be to do some fetch work, but also to build her drive for the tug a little bit more and try to include that in her training sessions, so she begins to associate the tug game as the reward.

Dylan was rocking his Aframes this week. It’s weird because this is always the contact obstacle we had the most trouble with, when he was learning, but it’s the one he’s most consistently good at now. Makes me happy!