Wednesday, August 02, 2006      

'Nick' of Time: Lessons from a great dog

In this Issue:

Early years

Patience 

The Early Years

First, let me tell you something about my agility career.  My first exposure to agility was in 1991  when my wife told me she wanted to try it with our Poodle “Rose”.  We built a few jumps and a Mini A-frame and told Rose to go do them.  Maybe our early training wasn’t quite that crude, but it was crude by today’s standards.

  When Rose was about 6 months old Sherry took her to a 3 Day Seminar hosted by CCDAC (Canine Combustion Dog Agility Club), the only agility club in Michigan at the time.  Sharon Nelson and Ken Tatsch, the founders of USDAA,  presented the seminar.  Sharon Nelson later broke away from USDAA and formed NADAC.  These guys were the “experts”.  The training methods were just as primitive as what we were doing but more of it.  We were shown weave poles and A-frames (full sized ones – awesome) and … other stuff and how to train them. 

Sherry trained Rose for agility competition. When Rose was about 4 years old,  Sherry saw an advertisement in the local newspaper for  herding dog pups.  She had seen Border Collies in agility and they seemed to do quite well.  So in March of 1993 she investigated it and for a price of $50.00 came back home with something called a Montana Stock Dog.  The breeder told her that it was a breed developed by the Montana ranchers to herd their cattle and that he would “live to take a command”.  At 2 months old he would race towards us and almost slide to a down at our feet and bark!  So, we taught him the ‘down” command … that was easy! 

I really wasn’t involved in agility at that point in time.  I would go along with her to trials and other events and help wherever I was needed.  I actually had no interest in agility. 

Sherry had already done some training with Nick before I got involved with agility.  I took over his training  in about 1995 when I took a 6-month sick leave from my job for a slight bout of depression.  You might say training Nick turned out to be part of my therapy. 

Nick was a very impatient dog.  He always seem to want to do “something, anything, PLEEEEEASE”, and he wanted to do it NOW!    My temperament was very much like his.  A match made in heaven, NOT!  The way I confronted problems was with anger and so did he.  Two macho males confronting each other was not good.  Our training method at that time was the only one we knew and that was the ‘yank and yell’ method.  There were many times when he would stand there and bark at me or even bite me because he didn’t understand what he was supposed to do and I was yelling at him to stop doing that.  Needless to say our “training” session were not very productive.

I am not proud of those early years of training Nick.  Sherry has a saying: “You have to be smarter than what you’re working with”.  Nick was a type of dog that Sherry or I had never dealt with before this time.  We had many thoughts of getting rid of Nick, but who would take SUCH A DOG ?.  If we couldn’t find a suitable home for him, would we have to put him down? 

Patience:  

Patience and calmness were the toughest lessons for me to learn. It took me a long time to understand both of these.  Part of my personality was perfectionist and I got angry if something wasn’t perfect.   I now believe that patience should be one of the foremost aspects of training and learning agility.  I regret learning this so late in my agility career.

I have told many of our students in class “you can’t do anything wrong”.  The reason I say this is because you are always learning.  If you are learning, how can what you do be wrong?  Here’s the kicker; you are always learning!  The reason Nick would stand there and ‘yell’ at me was because I hadn’t taught him what it was I wanted him to do and he was frustrated.  I needed to train him.  It was that simple.  If he didn’t do what I wanted then I need to do more training.  Nick was impatient but not stubborn and he certainly wasn’t dumb.  My anger and frustration only impeded our progress.  You cannot learn or instruct if either is present.  Do I get frustrated?  Sure I do, I am human! However,  I now try to remind myself that I AM TRAINING.  If I just can’t seem to fend off the frustration I finish the training session with something that is easy, reward it and leave.  I really try to not get frustrated in the first place, but it does happen.  That’s a big change from 10 years ago when our training sessions should have been called frustration sessions. 

Teach your dog.  Don’t frustrate the dog or yourself.

In the next Nick of Time I will cover the subject of calmness.  Keeping your composure when training and most importantly when running a course with your dog, sadly, took me too long to learn.

© 2005 Gary Wargo