Ideas for retraining weave poles.

[alligande]

This is the situation, the dog has been trained using channels, the focus has been on speed through the poles, not closing them, so what we have is a dog who when the poles are open 8" barrels through in a straight line to get to his toy. Close them beyond that point and he comes out, as he has zero understanding of bending his body. I am not sure of the time frame they have been training but those poles have been open at least a year. My two beginer dogs I am working with can already manage the poles much closer after 3 sessions. I experimented with guides and that does nothing to help, he is not food motivated so I can not reward him part way through. I am stumped as to how to persuade him to stay in the poles

What we have available for equipment is the channels and a set up of "V" weaves, no 2x2 and the ground is such that we can't just stick something in the ground.

I am hoping that some of the creative trainers on this board might have some ideas, I trained my dog with 2x2s so would love ideas.

[d112358]

Do you have ex-pens handy? I haven't gone to the ex-pen level, but I know someone who swears by it (as detailed here: http://www.powerpawsagility.com/wp-content/uploads/ChannelwithWiresDec_07.pdf )

 

I had a few dogs who liked to muscle through the channel as it squeezed shut. What worked for them was an exercise using 4 poles in-line with a lot (3+ rows) of wires. It's a short enough run that it's easy to reward and being completely closed the dog basically has to bend. It's awkward to only set up 4 out of 6 poles on a straight base, you have to be careful about where the dog is stepping and your reward placement.

 

If the channel lets you move poles independently, you can also experiment with fluting the channel in an hourglass-type shape (8" at each end, down to 6" in the middle), so the dog doesn't have the pressure of the poles uniformly throughout - making entry and exit easier and making them less likely to pop out.

 

At home and off the obstacle, have the handler teach the dog to weave between her legs or circle an upright so he gets used to bending his body at speed.

[gcv-border]

Hmmm - I am a little stumped too. I trained on channels and Torque had no problem understanding what he had to do to get through the poles as they closed. Lucky me I guess. Torque has awesome weaves.

 

To make sure I understand, if the poles are 8" apart, the dog runs through fine, but if they are moved to 7" (or even 7.5"), he comes out because he doesn't bend?

 

Here are a couple of things that come to mind:

 

Close the weave poles more incrementally than you have been doing. i.e. move from 8" to 7.5". I don't know what jump in spacing you have been doing, so you may have already tried this

 

Are you using 6 or 12 poles? I know some trainers use 12 poles from the get-go (Sylvia Trkman), but I used 6 poles - mainly because I didn't know any better, but it worked for me.

 

Do you have a hill to set up 6 poles on? I found that to be the best way to teach my dog to collect before going into the poles. He had to teach himself if he wanted to stay in the poles, but he already knew correct weave pole performance. He just needed some help on collection. If the dog will collect before weaving, he may more easily transition to bending.

 

At 8" apart, I would start teaching angled entrances. Again, if he has to bend his body to get into the poles, he may continue to bend while going through.

 

Good Luck and keep us updated.

[TEC]

I used wire (other materials available) guides on traditional weave pole setup. One version of that is described in d112358's post above, but I didn't use xpens, or change the distance between poles.

 

Dog was lured and guided through with a combination of food, leash, and toys, along with large measures of praise. Never thought about it at the time, but that setup teaches the dog to bend from the beginning. She was the fastest dog through weaves of our group that met for class, with good precision.

 

I constructed my own rigid wire guides, but I have seen commercial versions that easily clip on the poles.

 

Takes a little practice to hold a leash almost straight up from the dog's collar, run alongside dog as it weaves, and manually weave the leash from above the dog, but for a short while it worked nicely for us. The leash gets old quickly, so you can mix it up by luring through with something tasty or a toy. A ball/frisbee/tug toss as dog exits, puts a nice exclamation point on the exercise.

 

IMO teaching enthusiasm, cadence/rhythm and flow are keys to weave poles, so any method which does not prove-out to promptly reach those objectives should be modified or put on the shelf.

 

I used food and leash for no more that 2-3 days of training, and a toy was tossed at the conclusion for quite some time. The wire guides can be raised on the poles after a week or so, to act as mere suggestions to your dog, and removed after a couple weeks. Don't forget the praise. That's the way we did it. Something you could experiment with. -- Regards, TEC

[alligande]

More restrictions... NO x-pens that would have worked really well, I have used a similar set-up with Brody and really made the difference. I have plastic clip on guides, depending on height he jumps them or ducks ... No hills to practice on. And the poles themselves are "homemade" they were welded on the island and are two strips of 6 poles that you manually push in and out while kicking sand out of the way not very accurate but get the job done.

I was thinking about trying to go backwards and take the handler motion out, by back chaining to a dead toy, at the moment he drives to a thrown toy while the handler runs.

I was watching him carefully today and realized that at no point did he bend, as soon as a slight bend was required he was up for 2 poles and that was that. He is a pretty "stiff" dog for a border collie, you can see it when he jumps, but he has no medical issues he has a very conscientious owner.

I haven't seen this but with the WAM poles he just hops through them, and as the come up he try to jump them.

He is not going to set the world on fire but he has the potential to be a decent agility dog and enjoys training, and I would really like to help his owner come up with some solutions, she owns the equipment and the club.

[TEC]

Do you think the dog is sufficiently agile to do weaves? You may have to slowly close the gap spacing (always upright poles in straight line) over weeks/months to develop enough litheness in your friend's dog. Things like a series of tunnels set in serpentine fashion, or several low hurdles in which the dog has to rhythmically jump left and right, a little like hopping to and fro as the dog moves down a fence-line, might assist him gain more flexibility/energy.

 

How about using those low wire garden borders as guides (they look like a little fence) that you can buy at hardware stores? They are light and less expensive than xpens. Don't they come in different heights? Is your ground too hard for the wires to penetrate? They could be arranged directly on the ground surface, and attached to weave poles to form loops. Just a few options.

 

Maybe you could clip 2-3 of your guides between each pole at different heights to keep him in the weave path. -- TEC

[d112358]

The poles themselves are "homemade" they were welded on the island and are two strips of 6 poles that you manually push in and out while kicking sand out of the way not very accurate but get the job done.

 

Are the poles permanently attached to the base or can you pare it down to a setup with just 4 poles (with short protrusions from the base in the other spots)? Do you have an inline set of weaves to work with?

 

Maybe you could clip 2-3 guides at different heights between each pole to keep him in the path. -- TEC

 

Multiple guides on the same gap (so it looks like a wall of wires or a wrestling ring) is the setup I used with the 4 pole in-line exercise described above (for the dogs who decided a channel was a wrecking-ball challenge).

 

Changing to a dead toy would work if this was a setback for a week or two, but I think at this point he's practiced the behavior of 'running beside poles very fast' without thinking about bending his body so much that he needs the whole picture reframed.

 

I would aggressively change and invest heavily in teaching him that he can bend (and build speed while bending) with other exercises - send out around a cone, weaving through legs, tightly wrapping a jump, shaping in-line poles.

[gonetotervs]

Does the dog know how to weave in and out of a person's legs?

With channels open for a year, you have a dog that knows this obstacle really, really well. It is a dogwalk on the ground and the performance is to race through it.

If you cannot get stick in the ground or 2x2, I'd train weaving through legs, and then close the weaves to much, much tighter -- 2-3 inches maybe and start completely over. I'd teach weaving through legs and then clicker train/shape/lure some on a short set -- 4/6 poles to start.

[mum24dog]

Sounds to me like the channel weaves have been tainted by the failure to close them soon enough and by small enough increments. It that is the case I would stop flogging that particular dead horse and retrain from scratch using a different method.

 

IME for most dogs with reasonable motivation it doesn't much matter what method is used as long as the handler is enthusiastic enough to gee the dog up.

 

I favour the channel method for certain dogs and am in the process of helping three handlers retrain their dogs that way and it is going well. The beauty of channel weaves is that you can use 12 poles from the start. I really don't like guide wires and prefer not to use luring if I can help it.

[mum24dog]

 

If the channel lets you move poles independently, you can also experiment with fluting the channel in an hourglass-type shape (8" at each end, down to 6" in the middle), so the dog doesn't have the pressure of the poles uniformly throughout - making entry and exit easier and making them less likely to pop out.

 

 

Or the other way round - narrower at the start and finish and wider in the middle to start with if that is where the dog is coming out. The dog has to work harder at the start and closer weaves trigger the weaving motion which will hopefully continue for the rest of the obstacle.

[alligande]

Thanks for thoughts, I am thinking that perhaps we should back chain them in a modified 2x2 method, get him entering two, then three etc, using the WAMs locked up right. I am concerned about removing poles and him driving forwards, I don't want him hurting himself on the stubs. As the channels are two strips it is hard to create an accurate hourglass, I like the idea, but I have a feeling that a complete retraining would be the quickest and get the desired results, as I think the dog walk analogy sums the situation up.

[alligande]

As background, the group I am training with a very keen and when I first watched them work I was pretty impressed, nice tight turns, fast aggressive handling, but the more I watched I realized there were gaping holes, all the dogs could do a lovely Ketschker, and send to the back, but none could drive forward to a jump without their handler being there, I am not talking distance, not being able to start a sequence with the handler on the takeoff side of the jump. On tight sequences the dogs jumped nicely, on a straight bars came flying down.

 

They have never had a trainer, people come here do seminars and so they have learned lots of things, but when they were starting out they did not have any guidance on the foundations. They also only compete among a small group of people and so don't get to meet many handlers who are really good, and watch them in person.

[d112358]

For the stubs, you can angle the entry and always drive to the end with no stubs, or cover the other poles with a cloth - that way you don't inadvertently train him that entering in the middle is just fine.

[alligande]

For the stubs, you can angle the entry and always drive to the end with no stubs, or cover the other poles with a cloth - that way you don't inadvertently train him that entering in the middle is just fine.

I am confused, could because I have not had enough coffee yet, how is there an end without stubs? Using 2x2 there is an emphasis on rewarding straight down the poles, and that rewarding at an angle is bad.... But I do get the concern about training to start in the middle. Heading out to the field shorty...

 

Edited to answer my own question, if I use the WAMs then I can lay the stubs flat and they won't be any more of a bother than the field itself.

[gcv-border]

As you added in post #5, the dog is not very supple. I like the ideas presented of training turns away from the weave poles to see how flexible he can be and to get him to realize that he CAN bend his body.

 

If the channel weaves were made by a local welder, maybe they could invest in a couple of the 2X2 set-ups and retrain the weaves using the Susan Garrett 2X2 method (available on DVD). I have never trained with this method, but I hear a lot of people who do and really like it. IIRC (and please correct me if I am wrong), the strengths of this method are reliable entries from any angle and the dog gradually learning to bend his body. I think it would be very hard to replicate this method using the WAMs (even with the stubs laid down) since the steel bar which holds all the stubs is so visually prominent that the dog may be confused by that - particularly since he has already trained on them.

[alligande]

We are on an island and things can be a little expensive to get here, a set of 2x2s is on the desired list, but as the equipment (with the exception of the channels) is the best money can buy in Spain, aluminum and rubber contacts she has already spent a lot of money.

I was working with him today, and it was obvious he really had no understanding of what going through the poles meant, which I think is the bigger problem than bending, he just does not have a clue what the job is.

I was concerned about the base but in the beach sand surface the base sort of disappears so it is not a distraction.

We spent time with a clicker rewarding him for going through 2 poles, his owner has 1 set of 2x2 at her house so she is going to continue the game. I am hoping if we can teach him the understanding of going through the poles then adding more will come...

Will report back.

[d112358]

My current instructor is a big fan of Mary Ellen Barry's twist on the 2x2 method (first article here).

 

I am confused, could because I have not had enough coffee yet, how is there an end without stubs? Using 2x2 there is an emphasis on rewarding straight down the poles, and that rewarding at an angle is bad.... But I do get the concern about training to start in the middle. Heading out to the field shorty...

Edited to answer my own question, if I use the WAMs then I can lay the stubs flat and they won't be any more of a bother than the field itself.

 

If you label the poles pole 1-12, you enter at pole 9 and drive out pole 12. The end of the behavior (reward end) will consistently be clear of stubs. This won't work well for 2x2s since you need the flat angle of entry to actually make it into the proper behavior, it's more geared towards shaping 4 with wires.

[alligande]

My current instructor is a big fan of Mary Ellen Barry's twist on the 2x2 method (first article here).

 

 

 

If you label the poles pole 1-12, you enter at pole 9 and drive out pole 12. The end of the behavior (reward end) will consistently be clear of stubs. This won't work well for 2x2s since you need the flat angle of entry to actually make it into the proper behavior, it's more geared towards shaping 4 with wires.

Thank-you for the link, I remember seeing it when it first came out. I have everything I need to make this work, 1 set of 2x2s and WAMs that are in 4s but can have poles pulled out easily.... Hopefully I can persuade Cosmo this is a fun game. My only modification will have to be working with a toy, we can not throw food as it will vanish in the sand.