Switching gears

Sometimes dogs teach us things we didn't necessarily think we needed to learn. And Zipper, my youngest, greenest, and smallest dog, has been teaching me a lot.

I've always sort of been the weave person around CCSC. Agility weaves, where the dog enters a set of vertical poles from a specific entry (first pole by left shoulder) and weaves through them rapidly, is one of the most difficult skills for a dog to learn because unlike jumping and tunneling, it really isn't anything dogs would do naturally. Back years ago when I started Viva, my first agility dog, I decided I wanted to teach her how to weave using a then new and revolutionary method called channel weaving. In channel weaving, we offset every other pole so that there's a hallway or "channel" going down the middle between the poles. We then pattern the dog to want to run down that channel quickly for a toy. Over time we make the channel narrower and narrower until the poles are finally a single line, and the dog weaves through them.

Channel weaving is the weaving foundation given to all dogs at CCSC. It works really well. And I'm good at teaching it. Not only have I taught quite a few students at CCSC to have fast, accurate weave poles, my Cala won the 2005 Purina IDC for 60 weaves, completing the weaves in just a bit over 13 seconds.



So along comes this little dog. And he doesn't like the channel method. I tried doing channels with him, and unless there was a second person actually standing at the end, he didn't get it. And not only that, but he didn't get the poles moving together. The minute the poles got close, he'd try to weave each individual pole instead of going down the middle.

I had two choices. I could either force him to fit my method, or I could change my method to fit him. I decided to do the latter. So Zipper and I are now exploring teaching weaves with the clicker and weave wires, the weaves inline from the very start. We've had some stumbles along the way and his weaves aren't as far along as I'd like them to be. On the other hand, he showed me from the very first practice that this made more sense to him than channels. And I'm confident he's going to end up with good weaving skills.

The moral of the story? Sometimes you have to switch gears and go into the land of uncertainty to train your dog. Sometimes the dog teaches you instead of you teaching him. Good trainers are not so wedded to a specific method that they have to force the dog to the method. And while I'm sure I'm making mistakes teaching this method to Zipper, overall the learning of it and the road we are travelling together makes me a better trainer both for Zipper and for all the other dogs I will teach and train.