Wings and I had a great weekend at the Bay Team’s USDAA trial this past weekend in Prunedale, CA. Out of 18 runs, Wings ran clean in 16 rounds (17 if you count the run in which I ran into a jump wing) with 8 first places and 6 second places.
How to teach the teeter-totter
The teeter-totter performance is composed of three phases:
The way to achieve a fast and confident teeter performance is to teach each phase as separately from one another as possible. Only once the dog performs each rapidly and with confidence does the handler work to put all three together.
Start with the last phase first – Descending the board.
I. Descending the teeter board into the two-on, two-off position:
In the very last stage of the dog’s teeter performance, when the dog is about to exit the teeter-totter, the obstacle resembles the down ramp of the dogwalk. By using the method of back-chaining, train the dog to rapidly run down the down ramp into the two-on, two-off position. Since this method of teaching the dogwalk is well known, I’m not going to demonstrate it here.
II. Ascending the teeter-totter:
To perform the teeter-totter quickly, the dog has to be able to ascending the teeter board with great confidence. At no point in this part of the training is the board pivoting or otherwise moving.
Teach the dog to walk and run on a teeter board laying flat on the ground. Make sure the board does not move at all.
Place the teeter on its pivot, lower the teeter to its lowest adjustable setting, and prop up the end of the board that the dog performs last so that there is absolutely no movement in the board. Have a friend hold the dog while you go to the end of the board and call the dog to the end of the teeter board. Reward the dog with a treat while he is still on the board. Use the reward to encourage a rapid performance of the propped up board and to control the dog’s position on the board. You don’t want him to jump off just yet. Be sure to release the dog with an explicit command. You don’t want him to decide when the obstacle performance has been completed. You need to teach him that you are the one who makes this decision.
Once the dog is doing the lowered, propped-up teeter with speed and confidence, you can start raising the height of the pivot point. At each point in this stage of the training, there is absolutely no movement in the teeter board. If your teeter totter has a limited number of positions for the pivot point, you can achieve the same effect of gradually increasing the slope of the teeter by positioning tables of differing heights at each end of the teeter. Continue raising the slope of the teeter as much as it safe and practical.
III. Riding the moving board to the ground (Aspects of this part of the training are difficult to achieve with large dogs):
Return the teeter board to the lowest pivot point position. Place a prop under the last part of the board that the dog performs. This prop, however, will be too short to actually reach the underside of the board. It will be low enough to enable the board to move down an inch or two. Have an assistant hold your dog at the entrance to the obstacle. Go to the end of the board and hold it up. Ask your dog to perform the teeter while you are holding the board off the ground. In as much as you can, don’t let the board move as your dog runs to you. Give the dog a treat for running to the end of the board. Lower the board gently down one or two inches until it hits the prop beneath the board. Repeat this process all the while making sure that the dog is not starting to slow or become afraid because the board is moving. If the dog does start to slow, prop the board up again and train to regain his confidence. Your goal is twofold: to gradually remove more and more of the prop away so that the drop to the ground is lengthened and to gradually allow the fall to the ground to be more and more abrupt. I always give my dog at least two treats in this part of the training – one reward for running to the end of the board, and one reward for riding the board to the ground.
Gradually raise the pivot point. Gradually increase the distance that the board falls to the ground. (You can always moderate the speed by which the board reaches the ground by holding it for most of the way down.) If at any point, your dog gets worried or becomes less confident, back up a step and make the process easier for the dog.
You won’t need to train the dog to drop from the highest point possible at the end of the teeter. In any normal performance of the teeter, by the time the dog has reached the end of the board, the end of the teeter has already started to descend before it reaches the “free fall” state.
IV. Putting it all together:
Prop the entrance to the teeter up so that it resembles the down ramp of the dogwalk. Have the dog perform the propped up teeter as if it were the last part of the dogwalk (i.e., into the two-on/two-off position). Lower the prop by two or three inches. Now when the dog performs the teeter and reaches the very end of the board, the teeter will fall two or three inches to the ground. Since you have already taught the dog to withstand drops from much higher up, this challenge will be easy for the dog. Gradually lower the props in two or three inch increments. Increasingly, as the props disappear, the teeter will come to resemble, not the down ramp of the dogwalk, but the teeter totter as it appears in competition. If at any point, your dog gets worried or becomes less confident, back up a step and make the process easier for the dog. If necessary, go back to training phases II or III.
The NPR Car Talk guys said once that if you drive a manual transmission car and never, ever stall your car, you’re probably riding the clutch. They said the most efficient drivers do stall out occasionally, since they’re not babysitting the clutch.
I mention this because I would argue that none of us really wants a dog who NEVER knocks bars. Rather, we want dogs who are super-efficient jumpers who knock bars very, very rarely. If you look at photos of her jumping, Wings’ forearm hair is usually sliding along the bar: she is that efficient. She is not one centimeter higher in the air than she needs to be. But once in a great while these efficient jumpers will slightly misjudge, or cut too tightly around a standard and bump the standard, and a bar comes down. Then we ask for a little more care. The goal is a balance between being accurate and being confident/efficient/fast.
Here is my list of Dogs Who Never Knock Bars:
1. Those who worry about bars, hate to knock them, possibly can’t see them so clearly. Dogs for whom jumping is not fun, but on the contrary scary and possibly even painful. This group is comprised of the stride-measurers and early jumpers and way-above-the-bar-dogs. Bars usually don’t come down, but the dogs are painful to watch on course.
2. Other dogs aren’t trying to be efficient (the ones who are just having a jolly good time, running vertically and jumping way above the bar). These dogs don’t knock bars very often either, but they aren’t particularly fast.
Here is my list of Dogs Who Regularly Knock Bars:
1. Dogs not suited for jumping (poor structure or high weight : height ratio: the newfies, bouviers, etc.)
2. Dogs who have not learned obstacle focus: they look at the handler rather than where they’re going. Dogs who start agility “late” after a long obedience foundation may fall into this category: looking at the handler is the default behavior.
3. Dogs whose handlers interfere with the dogs’ job: these dogs knock bars because the handler has called the dog over the bar or given too late a command (telling the dog to turn when the dog is already in the air, so dog drops feet in hopeless attempt to respond).
4. Dogs who have no awareness of their feet
5. Dogs who think bars coming down doesn’t matter (they’re aware of the bar but don’t find hitting it particularly aversive, especially since the Fun Stuff Continues as mom or dad keeps running).
Here is my list of What We Want in an Agility Dog:
1. A dog who is biddable, temperamentally confident, structurally sound (well angled front and rear), physically fit, and visually acute (no vision problems). Drive AND the ability to “think in drive” are also obviously very desirable.
2. A dog who understands obstacle focus and can switch back and forth between looking where she’s going and looking towards handler as necessary.
3. A handler who consistently indicates to the dog what comes next while the dog is still performing the previous obstacle, so that the dog doesn’t have to look at the handler for information (and therefore stop watching where she’s going).
4. A dog who is experienced in the physical requirements for various jumping situations (collection, extension, turning tightly against the standard, working serps, threadles, backsides, pinwheels, whatever).
This takes time, and gridwork is a great place to start. Some people find Susan Salo’s dvds helpful in this regard. Others like Linda Mecklenburg’s material (Developing Jumping Skills). A lot of it is just practice: for example, a dog will take a serpentine more efficiently and confidently when she understands what’s expected and is confident that the owner will always be ahead of her, out of her way.
***5. A dog who understands that she has four legs (not just the two she can see) and what she can do with them. It’s Lesson #1 for any team who comes to me for beginning agility. In particular, rear end awareness–ideally, the ability to lift each rear leg independently — is vital not just for efficient jumping but for speed and confidence on the teeter, dogwalk, etc. The puppies who have been coming here mostly DO have this, and their jumping and beginning teeter/contact skills are a joy to see. Whenever I hear of a jumping problem, CONSCIOUS REAR-END AWARENESS is the first thing I advise working on, after ruling out physical limitations.
6. A dog who simply enjoys jumping, because she’s done a lot of it and been consistently rewarded for good jumping habits (wrapping tightly, keeping her feet up, showing good energy and drive). We tend to reward the contacts a lot more than the actual jumps, which we take for granted…and dogs pay most attention to what WE pay most attention to. One way to build value for jumping is to work a dog on one jump, click-and-treating for what you like, and incrementally making the approaches or exits or your own position or the jumping context more difficult (see #4 above).
Once you are certain you have all of these — particularly #5 and #6 (a dog who is aware of and in perfect control of her own body, especially all appendages, and who enjoys using them — then you ask for
7. A dog who is RESPONSIBLE: who understands that it is her job to keep the bars up no matter what screwball other things (handler calling dog over bar, handler peeling away, even handler signalling late, even another dog chasing her on the course) might be going on. This means that you “correct” the dog for failing to do a job you are sure she is physically capable of performing (she has learned the body mechanics) and mentally prepared for (she understands what she is being corrected for and the “correction” will have the result you want: making her try harder to keep bars up rather than becoming worried about them or you or the course). In simple words, when the bar comes down because of factors “in the dog’s control,” you (at the very least) down the dog and stop the fun. Maybe you restart right away, giving the dog a chance to be right. Maybe you put the dog on a time out for a few minutes. Maybe the session ends. Depends on the relative softness/hardness of the dog.
In Wings’ case, she didn’t care about knocking bars and, for almost her whole first year of competition, knocked a bar in roughly one run out of four. She didn’t make it to the World Team tryouts that year (the year she was 1.5-2.5 yrs old) because of the bar-knocking problem. She had #1-#6, but she didn’t have #7. But the bar knocking ceased completely, instantly the moment #7 went into effect in trials (bar down –> “Wings down, stay, thank you judge” –> the run was over, Wings went into the pen without ceremony, with no toy). Until then, when bars came down, the fun had continued, so she saw no reason to make that extra effort with her feet. Now, if you watch Wings videos, you can see her give a little kick to her feet, over every single jump. I love watching that, because I know she’s thinking. And the bars come down exceedingly rarely. One run out of 30, maybe.
So that’s my advice. Make sure you have #1-6, and then, unless the dog is super-soft, implement #7.
