Contact Behavior Dilemma

[omnipoodle]

I can't decide what I want to do about Faith's contact behavior.  What I have been doing is asking for 2o2o on every down-ramp--the A frame, the dog walk, and the teeter.  This has been working fine.  My reasoning has been to keep it simple and not ask for a different behavior for different obstacles.  Now I am trying to add a nose touch to the

Comments

[cryslea]

Why are you adding the nose touch to the feet/2o2o cue?

[omnipoodle]

Good question--it's mainly because I want her driving down the A frame with her head low and oriented toward the ground. She tends to want to watch me as she's coming down the ramp, which means she's more likely to lose her balance and she's slower. Also, at our last agility class one of the instructors expressed concern that keeping her head up is putting too much stress on her back and shoulders.

Also, I figure the more she has to do to get released off the contact means the more solid her contacts will be. If I'm training for 2o2o and a nose touch, she's less likely to blow a contact in a trial than if I'm just training for 2o2o.

[cryslea]

Good answer! :)

Are you planning to train the nose touch for all contact obstacles, then, or just for the A frame? To me, it makes sense for it to be the same for everything, although your worries with the teeter sound valid (though I have no idea- I've never touched a teeter). At any rate, it seems easier to have one cue/behavior that can cover multiple situations, instead of having to train everything differently. Although, dogs are masters at discrimination, and I'd imagine Faith would have no problem realizing the nose touch is only for the A frame. Of course, that doesn't give you the benefit of a more solid contact overall.

Don't listen to me, though. I know (practically) nothing about agility.

[omnipoodle]

I'm planning to have the nose touch for both the A frame and the dog walk. I sort of think of them as the same obstacle; I even use the same cue for them, "walk it," which means "run across this plank thing that doesn't move." Eventually I would like Faith to understand that her contact behavior is part of the obstacle performance so that I don't have to explicitly say "feet." If I think of it that way then it seems more likely that Faith would be able to distinguish between her A frame/dog walk contact behavior (with the nose touch) with her teeter one (without the nose touch). Maybe what I should do is train the teeter contact from now on without the cue.

You might not do agility (yet), but you know a lot about dog training--I definitely appreciate your opinion!