Radical Canines

If I’m being totally honest, I find training obedience for the sake of obedience tedious and boring. Training a sit or down so I have those behaviors is so very meh to me, but training them as a foundation for sit pretty or rollover is so much more motivating! On an intellectual level, I understand basic obedience skills are important and it’s important for me to not only teach them but also maintain them. On an emotional level, they bore the crap out of me and I have very little interest in training them.

This has become abundantly clear as I have been looking at my dogs and the current holes in their training, Rugby’s in particular. He has a great sit, down, stay, and come in the context of disc and even agility most of the time, but outside of that, he’s more than a little impulsive. Dog sports have long been my focus with him so I never really took the time to train outside of that world. With the recent issues we’ve been having in agility, I thought perhaps filling in some of these hole in our basic obedience couldn’t hurt in address the issues and in all likelihood, would actually help. So I decided about 2 weeks ago to commit to training obedience with Rugby for the sake of obedience.

We’ve been working on our focused heel and place behaviors as well as his impulse control. Rugby has a very loose understanding of heel position and what heel means. We did a little bit of work with heeling for his rehab but all of his heeling was lured and was on both the left and the right to attempt to maintain symmetry. He’s been working hard and I think its starting to make sense the specific position, location, and orientation that is expected of him during heeling (and its still not a super precise or contact heel by any means but that’s fine by me).

So I’ve never really taught Rugby place. I’ve taught him to go to a table in agility, to get up on a platform and stay, but never a specific location that he needed to go to and not move from until he was released. We’ve been working with a Cato Board to give him a defined space. Funnily enough he has a really hard time just getting on it. He prefers to target it with his hind feet and then back up onto it to sit. It’s not efficient by any means but if he understands his job is to get on it and stay on it then I guess I’m okay with his methods. In the last few days, I’ve definitely seen he’s understanding the expectations even when treats are dropped or other dogs are released to work, which is good. So far I’ve only worked Ryder, but the next big test will be working Rumor with Rugby maintaining his place, something I haven’t been able to do since Rugby was a puppy.

Of course all of this has been within the context of my living room, but I’m definitely seeing improvements in that specific context. A few more weeks and I think we should have solid enough understanding to venture outside of my home to begin working around more real world distractions.