Part 1 - Running across the planks

Discussion

Before I started training the ‘stop’ I taught Jaidi to run over the planks with no hesitation and no stopping. Additionally there was no criteria to ‘hit it’ i.e. the contact, so in this respect was teaching pure drive and speed across the planks, as opposed to conditioning for a running contact. This was started around 8 months old and all carried out on the flat. The intention was to then join the running and stop together around 12 months old before progressing to raised planks. In this way we could have fun without worrying about accuracy and no danger of injury from excessive stop repetition / falling off raised planks.

Why not use tried and tested method of back chaining? Typically this would be how a 2O2O is taught, by conditioning the stop and then sending the dog to assume the position gradually moving ‘backwards’ along the plank, i.e. starting from the finish and ending up at the start. Well for a couple of reasons:

1. It has to be done by hands on method (i.e. positioning dog on contact before releasing), so cannot claim to be taught with complete Independence.
2. Dog is taught from day 1 to condition the position for the stop, so potentially only offering a quick release as being the ‘competition’ alighting method towards the end of the contact training (I will come to that in some months when talking about leaving contact as a taught behaviour).
3. The initial training has to be to a static reward (either NT or toy) so not making use of the dogs love to chase and be rewarded.

Planks, cones and ball launcher set up ready for training session

Method

The method was built around 2 primary motivators, reward and thrill of the chase. The initial work was all done by shaping, before working with my training partner for a couple of months, an automated ball launcher.

The steps broke down like this:

1. Shaping to run through 2 cones
2. Learning about the ball launcher
3. Joining the ball launcher and cones exercises together
4. Adding planks to step iii
5. Fading the cones
6. Fading the launcher (which leads into the earlier articles for teaching and adding the stop)

Through the next few weeks I will go over the exercises used in the steps i – vi.