[00:00:00] Hey there. If you're an agility nerd, you're in the right place. You're listening to fostering excellence in agility. I'm Megan, your resident agility competitor, coach, and mentor. And this podcast is where I break down all things agility and guide you on your path to excellence. Are you ready? Let's go.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back. Today, I want to talk to you about proofing. When I first started training dogs, proofing was explained to me as a way in training that we set the dog up to fail. We trick them. On purpose and to giving us the wrong response. This oftentimes looked like saying a word that was close to a release word or a cue that we wanted them to [00:01:00] respond to in order to try and get them to break their start line stay or their stop contact.
Or it could have looked like really funny stuff that we were doing with our body and our handling and our emotion to get the dog to break these stationary behaviors. Then we would reward them heavily when they ignored the trick, but that didn't really solve anything for me, other than maybe my drug have a question, question mark over his head when I did say the word that I wanted him to listen to, because he then had to think, is that the real word or the trick word?
So fast forward to today, I do not train like that anymore. And so I really. Try to replace the word proofing with generalizing. Another really nice term was [00:02:00] coined, um, by Hannah Branigan as fluency enhancing. This is exactly it. I want to build a robust education around the things that my dog knows. So I want to generalize their behavior to a lot of different context and situations.
And that's going to look like adding in layers of arousal and distractions. Over time throughout their education. When I go through this list of ideas, I am in no way expecting a team to have trained through every single thing that we can come up with, but I do expect the training focus to kind of center in on the layers of distractions that might be more difficult for your team.
So for example, Sprint. Has a very high level of discomfort around people that [00:03:00] I have trained through very thoroughly to the point where you may not see it if you saw us competing or even out in public, you wouldn't know that, but that didn't mean that the majority of my generalization centered around adding in things that I didn't want her to be uncomfortable with.
So very slowly layering in people pressure and. People with dogs pressure because I knew that that was a reality for her and I wanted to make it as easy as possible For her to still perform at the highest level Even though those layers of distractions are going to exist and that's just the reality for her and for many teams that I work with Or that maybe are listening to this podcast.
So when I'm thinking of generalizing, usually the first thing that we will generalize is just basic handler distractions. Because while [00:04:00] we are the ones guiding the dog on the agility course, we're also the one providing a lot of distractions. to the dog out there on the agility course, right? They have to be able to know when to listen to us, or watch us, or both, or neither.
And a lot of times, our movement and our words can be a distraction to them. So I think it's really common in training that we are already including a variety of handler presentations to most of our behaviors, right? This is making sure that you're not always in the same place when you release your dog from the start line.
It means that you're not always in the exact same place when they hit their contact, or when they hit that weef ball entry. Right, we're already probably doing these things naturally, just following whatever training program that, that we're engaged in, or the class that we're engaged in. But I [00:05:00] want to take that way farther when I'm talking about Generalizing to a level of fluency that I believe is needed for ring sustainability and competition.
So I want to look at, can we generalize different arousal levels? So if you've taken my leaf pole training program, you may remember that at the very beginning stages, when your dog is just learning how to find one, I asked you to reward this differently because your dog will respond differently to kibble versus a tossed toy if your dog is into toys.
If they're not into toys, they probably respond differently to kibble versus meatballs. So, just by using a different reinforcer for the behavior, you're going to be generalizing that [00:06:00] skill. You're going to be adding in different levels of arousal, and you're going to be asking, do you understand this behavior when a meatball is on the line?
Do you understand this behavior When the toy is on the line, okay, so that's going to be another layer of fluency that you're going to be building into this situation, and you're always going to be building on success and asking questions that you are really sure that the dog knows the answer to. Other layers of fluency that I'm looking at when I'm generalizing is adding in people to your regular day to day training.
It can be starting off as just a person standing nearby. This can be a big deal if your dog is primarily homeschooled and you train alone. Like my dogs do a lot of the time, so just adding in a [00:07:00] person standing nearby might cause your dog to go wait, is that person relevant to me right now? And through the process of generalization, setting them up for success to hear the cue and perform the cue in the way that they know how, even with an additional distraction, they learn, no, that person isn't relevant to me.
And this behavior, and I can do it anyways. And when you get to that point, and you Have a training pal that you can kind of give this assignment to, now you can ask that person to move around, and maybe they're moving around behind your dog, or parallel to your dog, or in front of your dog, whichever is easier, and then you build up from there.
Maybe this person goes from standing to sitting, or sitting to standing, similar to ring crew when you're in the competition ring. Again, slowly [00:08:00] introducing these ideas to your dog that the person isn't relevant to the behavior and doesn't impact their ability to perform. Other things that people can do when we're using them as generalization is that they can raise their arms, like in a judge like way.
They can call numbers in a judge like way. I remember when I took my Terrier Shrek into the agility ring for the first time, and I entered fast because I could, and as soon as I entered, I realized that morning that he had never heard someone call numbers while he was running, that this might be a problem.
And of course he did. He ran over to the judge and said hi at the first number that they called. And this was seven and a half, eight years ago, so I have made lots of mental notes about that. [00:09:00] And. A hundred percent did not skip over that step when I was raising Sprint. So all of these things that even though we can't replicate exactly what people do in a trial, and we sure as heck can't replicate the number of the people, we can show them That, that people in general are not relevant to the picture.
We can also include dogs into this situation. And always when I'm working with dogs specifically for layers of distraction, I do always start with protected setups. Protected setups are. Either both dogs are on leashes, one dog is behind, if there is an off leash dog, another dog is behind a barrier. So this can be like an X pen, or a gate, or just a fence, anything, so that if the working dog does overreact and leave.
Even [00:10:00] if it's in a positive way, it's still an overreaction in my mind. If they leave work, it means it was too hard. I don't want those two dogs to have access to each other. They have to earn the right to have access to each other like they might at a dog show. So we build on success over time. So that if that dog does have an overreaction, leave work to go say hi to that dog, they aren't getting anything out of that interaction.
So, a lot of times, the dog will be attached to the human, and they just kind of follow the same guidelines that I explained with the person. First, they're just standing there, kind of doing nothing. Then, they're walking around point A to point B. Maybe the handler is feeding that dog. Maybe the handler is doing some simple behaviors with that dog.
Maybe they include some toy play. Maybe they do some more exciting things that encourage the dog to [00:11:00] bark or make noise. Over time, the more your dog sees these things in training, and can perform their job to fluency, Even though that person and that dog are, are nearby and interacting with each other, the more they're going to be able to ignore these things at a dog show.
They will walk into the competition place and go, Oh yeah, all this stuff is not relevant to me. Because you have shown it to them in training, and they have been reinforced very heavily for dismissing that distraction. Another layer of generalization and fluency enhancing that I'm going to look at is environment.
It is very easy to get kind of stuck in going to the same place every week to train and not really venturing out into the wild to do much work. [00:12:00] I certainly have fallen into this myself, and I tried to really Do better on that front when I was raising Sprint. It doesn't really matter what we went to train But I did try to take her to a lot of different places Just to do anything, because you can get access to novelty and just helping your dog generalize working in novel places just by getting them out and about.
Doesn't have to be to agility facilities, you don't even have to do agility work at all for them to understand the concept of getting ready to work in novel places. But. Even in agility facilities, I think that we can change the environment when we are training in known locations. So this can just be, can you [00:13:00] do your weave pull entries by a tunnel?
Can you do your weave pull entries by an A frame? Can you do your weave pull entries in the corner of the building? Can you do your weave pull entries by the gate? So even though the overall context is still at their weekly agility class, we can change that environment enough to show different types of environmental pressure in our training.
And then the last one that we do have to get a little bit more creative about sometimes is noise. Um, one of the last rentals that I did, uh, this year, I held my phone in my hand and played music while I was running. So this kind of simulated like a noisier environment where we sometimes
And just by running a couple of sequences with music blasting at us, because, because the phone was in [00:14:00] my hand and still being able to give my cues on time, and she reacted to my cues in a timely fashion, really does kind of, at least, work for us. You know, check that box of confidence of, oh, she really can hear me.
So even if you don't have a fancy sound system or a speaker with you, just having your phone in your hand and play music or YouTube videos of agility noises or things that might distract you that tend to be the noises that we hear in competition, it can go a long way. So that's not an exhaustive list of things that I'm generalizing.
And how I might go about them depending on the task, but I hope it gives you some ideas of how to start branching out in your training and introducing some different layers of fluency to your behaviors. But before we go, I want to focus in on why this matters at all. And obviously, I'm [00:15:00] after ring sustainability.
I'm after Having the same performance in training and in competition, and if I see something that's different in competition, I have a way to address it in training. It's a lot harder when a problem only shows up in competition, and then I have to get more creative in training to be able to solve that.
But if I come across something in competition and I know for a fact that I haven't done enough generalizing, then For that specific skill, that's really easy to take back to training when you're in this mindset of adding layers of fluency and increasing your dog's ability to generalize skills. So, but for me, ring sustainability is deeply rooted in the handler's confidence.
I'm gonna tell you a common story, you can decide if you, if this has [00:16:00] ever happened to you, or if you know someone it has happened to, right? You're at a trial, the dog does something that they don't usually do, and you don't move on from it in your brain. And then in the next run, oh gosh, they do it again.
And instead of pausing and, you know, maybe going, well, that just needs more training. Humans, sometimes we start to get weird when we're trying to make the dog successful. So then in the next run, we completely change our handling to help the dog be successful. And, Now we have this feedback loop of, I must do it in this exact way so that the dog is, is correct.
And that erodes our confidence and our expectation in what we're doing. We thought the dog was capable of, [00:17:00] and then it becomes maybe a small technical skill that needed a little bit more generalizing. Now it has become a mindset thing. It has started eating at your confidence in each other, and that's a tricky spiral to get out of.
So above all else, this Large amount of generalization for me is about confidence, and I really understand where trust your training comes from, but I like to take it a step deeper than that. I want to know that my training will actually work. Hold up. And if it doesn't hold up, I will fix it in training.
So there's something really great about having clear evidence of my dog knows how to ignore this type of distraction. So then when you go into a competition, you have a [00:18:00] really good understanding of what your dog knows and what you can expect of them. And that's a different level of confidence in my mind than trusting your training.
So, it might be semantics, it might just be how my brain works, but I like knowing what I'm going to get out of the dog and not having any questions in my mind. Because if I have questions in my mind, it's probably because I haven't trained it to the level that I expect to be showing up with at that competition.
So hopefully that makes sense. And I hope that this list of layers can inspire you to get out and add more generalization to your training.
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, there are several ways you can leave me positive reinforcement. One, leave me a five star review. Two, share with your fellow agility nerds, or three, [00:19:00] share your thoughts with me on social media. Be sure to follow at FX agility on Facebook or Instagram.
