As you're preparing for your dog's first trials, whether that's years away or that circled date on the calendar is staring you down, hopefully you have been able to get your dog to lots of new places to train. Extra important if you are looking at helping a dog who has already shown and it didn't go quite as planned!
These places don't need to be formal dog training centers. Parks, the back of parking lots, and dog friendly stores are great places to go to work around distractions. And they also allow you to do a lot of experimenting to see what type of acclimation your dog needs before working, how long that normally takes, and having very clear not working now vs working cues.
When I'm out and about, I focus not on "skill development" but on "trial prep." I'm not teaching new skills and I don't even start out testing to see how trained exercises hold up in a new location. Minimally at the beginning of the session, I'm focusing on my dog's understanding of at least 1 aspect related to a trial.
Stuff like focused ring entries and fast setups before a party. Maybe progressing to setting the rewards down and then moving away from them to setup. End of run routines of getting the leash and walking back to the reward. And eventually, mini chains where I'm combining lots of these little pieces!
Doing this out-and-about training is a huge part of knowing whether your dog is ready to trial or not.
Run Throughs & Fun Matches
And sometimes, we can even take advantage of more formal setups such as run throughs or fun matches.
It shouldn't be a a surprise that I do not handle these type of events like a trial!
There is zero benefit to the dog in handling a fun match like an actual trial! The dog loses out on that reinforcement for their hard work. You aren't rewarding the great moments, you aren't resetting the not so great moments, and you're basically letting whatever happens, happen.
I've already talked about the fact that getting "experience" for the pure sake of getting experience is a plan that usually leads to problems. Trial-like environments need to be seen as stress free as possible for the dog!
Instead, my goal for run throughs are to keep up the 3 main goals of my Ring Confidence work
The ring is a happy place to be.
Distractions are a cue to focus
The ring prep routine we are working on at home is the same in this "new" environment
That often means breaking things way down and starting at a level you are 100% sure your dog can win at.
For many dogs, it will simply be seeing if the dog can give you good focus and energy outside of the ring before you enter and immediately party.
At most run throughs, you have a set time. As long as you let the workers know, they are ok with you entering and leaving multiple times to do as you wish. Sometimes you will not be able to reward your dog with food or a toy in the actual ring. In that case you can set your reward on the stewards table or just outside the ring and exit as often as you need to in order to reward!
This may feel hard to do. Especially if you are the only one doing it! I promise you that not as many people are staring at you as you think. And many people will see this and think it's a great idea to try too!
As your dog improves focus and attitude, start to add more pieces to their work before your party! Enter, remove the leash, and walk with connection to a starting spot.
Remember to leave the ring, if possible, between each new rep so that you can work the entrance piece again!!
Having the "rule" of a reward ending that rep is another great way to help us slow down and not add in too many pieces before the dog is ready! If we know that the beginning is really tough for the dog, we will find ways to break it down and repeat it vs powering through and trying to get to he next piece!
Examples!
This is video of Ginny's very first formal run through for rally/obedience! This did not go as well as I planned. I thought she would be ready for enter-leash-pause-reward, and then slowly adding in some work on subsequent reps. But she struggles with the activity and then really struggled with a dog who was stress barking/whining.
I do a lot of cookie scatters and some movement breaks. On the positive side, you can tell we've practiced ring entrances a ton as she was able to do that even when stressed! What she was not able to do was the leash removal with focus! This might be because it needs more practice to be able to do under pressure, or it might be that stationary work is just harder for her to do when stressed vs movement based work (that's good to know about your dog!!) This is her entire first turn.
Here is an example of agility work. This isn't a run-through, but I hope it gives you an idea of what you could work on at a fun match! This is a bit of waiting at the gate, entering with focus, work the leash removal, setup, then her end of run routine.
And here is an example of Loot doing an obedience run through with helpers. I work primarily on the ring entrance and move toward the judge. This was right at the height of how hard I wanted to make it and could have made it easier!
And this is an example of Ginny's first agility trial run through! It's a pretty quiet event, and because of all the work we've done to prep for this, I do jump in and start some actual "work" in the ring. I work on entering and waiting for her to turn to focus on me, collar removal, and then a few jumps before cuing the leash. The leash on then leads to the reward cue which is out of the ring.
You can see that this is right at the maximum difficulty level I'm comfortable with as she had brief moments of needing to look around.
If you haven't trained a lot of the ring prep skills in an easy environment you'll need to do that first. You can see just how much effort it takes the dogs to do their routines in these settings despite being routinely practiced!!!
I love breaking this down and discussing all these little pieces in my Ring Confidence class!
Put Nov 22nd on your calendar to register and commit to working on your dog's routines!
And if you aren't already a member of my free facebook group, come join us to get support on your journey!
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