Ivy's Journey: July 2010

Ivy at 13 months - all grown up now. Her puppy days seem to have gone in a flash.

When I first downloaded the photos for this post, Ivy had started her 2 X2 weave training a few days earlier and had clocked up 8 very short sessions.

3 weeks later (yep, that's dial up for you- LOL) she is weaving 2 sets of 6 poles with a short gap between them which I plan on starting to close up at our next training session.

Ivy is the first dog that I have actually taught to weave from start to finish using this method, although I did use it with Cruz to train his entries after I taught him to weave on channels.

Although not quite '12 poles in 12 days' (which I certainly wasn't aiming for) I am still blown away by just how fast this method actually is. It's the first thing everyone says about it and you hear this over and over, but I think you have to experience it yourself before it really sinks in.

Same thing with the entries - they are truly mind-blowing at times and although a lot more proofing will need to take place over the next few months, I can't believe what this baby dog can do. Currently she is making entries that my Masters level dog would struggle with - after around 4 weeks of training.

It hasn't been all smooth sailing though - some people write about training this method and make it sound like it was all too easy from start to finish. It's easy to watch the DVD too and think that it's not that difficult to get results. Not even considering the fact that Susan Garrett is a highly experienced world class trainer, it does say on the DVD that what you see is a 'compilation' over a number of training sessions so even though we get to see some of the 'failed attempts' we don't get to see how many of them there actually were which makes the training process appear that it's really going fast.

One thing that I would have liked included with the DVD would be to see the success rate percentage from each of the sessions that the demo dog had. From my experience with Ivy, there were a couple of what I would call critical points where her success rate plummeted for a bit before coming back up again. I have a friend also currently training this method with her young BC and when we discussed our results we found that we both experienced this at around the same points in our training. This is not something that I found with teaching channel weaves, where the success rate percentage climbed slowly but steadily at each session, or maybe it's just a training kelpies V BC thing ?

So would I use this method again ? Absolutely, especially now that I have worked through it and have had the chance to use some 'problem solving' along the way. Would I recommend it to everyone ? Yes, but with some cautions.

Firstly, as SG says also in the beginning, you really need a dog that is comfortable with the shaping process and understands offering behaviours. Although I have trained Ivy with shaping right from the beginning, there were still occasional times when we ran into a stumbling block and I got all the associated stress behaviours of barking, spinning, doing zoomies, etc. Dealing with this, or with a dog that lies down and refuses to offer any behaviour at all, is hard and I think at these points you have to know your dog well enough to make a judgement call about how to continue. Plus it was also a first for me having a dog that defintiely 'stresses up' rather than down and was not easy to deal with at first, hopefully I have a bit more of a handle on it now.

For an inexperienced trainer, I would think that you need someone to actually demonstrate each stage along the way - I have seen a number of people training it from the DVD only who are not necessarily doing it 'right'- even though the DVD is very comprehensive it's still a lot to take in. After watching it 3 times now, I'm still getting little bits and pieces out of it that I missed the first couple of times. And people are very impatient. (Including me at times !) You only have to look on You Tube to see some of the liberties people have taken with this method, and to me this is not a method that lends itself well to 'a little bit of this and a lot of my own spin.' I am using it in one of my classes with a small group of students at the moment. Although I am pleased with their progress, it has taken a lot longer for them to work through and there have been a lot of misconceptions along the way, despite handouts and demonstrations given to them in most sessions. (The reward line concept appears to be one thing that is confusing to them for some reason)

Even as a more experienced trainer, I was glad to be able to compare notes with my friend - and there were times for both of us (no matter how brief they were) where we questioned whether this was going to be the best method for us when working alone. It was a big help when we shared our experience and discovered we had both faced similar things. This is the downside when you use a method that is not currently being taught at most clubs and many people have heard of it and watched the DVD but never actually tried it, or worse, watched it once and then believe they are an expert.

I also think you need to have the confidence to be able to work through any problems that arise. SG has really good troubleshooting tips available - and luckily for me the majority of problems Ivy had were covered. But there were a couple of times (those previously mentioned critical points) where her accuracy went right down and I had to deal with this, plus any stress signs she showed. An understanding of latent learning is helpful at these times, plus record keeping where you look for signs of stress, not always as obvious as that exhibited by a crazy BC but very important to be aware of and to understand how far you can actually 'push'.

Just for the record, my main critical point was:

-with 2 sets of 2X2's, the first rotation after the poles were already at 1 o'clock and 7 o'clock - this obviously changed the picture for her a lot more than it seemed to as this session clocked up 30% accuracy compared to the 90% recorded in the session before. All of a sudden she got totally stuck at going in the wrong side of the poles on the right although she had never done that before.

There were also a couple of 'lesser' ones along the way which I won't go into as this post is probably already boring enough for anyone not training weaving with their dog, and maybe even boring for those who are. (Yes, it's all about me - LOL)

My highlights along the way are :

-watching her weave 6 poles on video for the first time.

-adding a jump (and then a tunnel) before the poles and seeing her run a jump-tunnel-jump-poles sequence ....... I can't believe that the first sequence I have ever run with this dog actually included weave poles.

-and the big one for me........... weaving 6 poles outside the ring at club training last week while her 'bestest gal pal Sassy' tugged with her mum right alongside the poles. (We 'repaid' the favour when Sassy had her go !)

So a big vote in favour of 2 X 2's and everything that training them has taught me along the way. I would love to hear from anyone else who has trained them and what their experiences were rather than just the stock standard forum comments implying that it was easy to get the dog weaving using this method, but then the follow up that they 'tweaked' the method a bit.

Hopefully I will have just as favourable things to report about her contact training in a few weeks time, which has also begun to transfer from her travel board to lowered contact equipment. We will see how that pans out - so far 4 out of 4 dogs with sucky A Frames (except for Cruz on the occasions he gets his striding right and nails it ) - can I finally train one that I actually like with Ivy ? Watch this space I guess.