June 1, 2024
|6 Week Online Class
Ring Confidence for Agility, Obedience, and Rally!
Work on solid trial prep behaviors to both prevent ring stress and to dig yourself out of a hole! This class works on teaching your dog AND you the ring routine to be successful in agility, obedience, and rally trials. The most important class I teach!
Time & Location
June 1, 2024
6 Week Online Class
About the event
Most handlers spend months or even years teaching their dogs the specific exercises and obstacle performance found in the obedience and agility ring. We heel for months, and then we spend several more months making sure our dogs can perform their heeling with a wide variety of distractions. We teach retrieves, exams, recalls, and stays. We make sure our weave pole entrances and our contact performances are independent and fast.
Yet we often fail to teach our dog what to actually expect at a trial. They are thrown into this new, chaotic environment with a stressed handler. It is the first time they see a stranger approaching to take their leash, another person who seems to be in charge other than mom is giving orders, and there is so much novel stuff to look at!
Most dogs experience a great deal of stress as they are plunked in this new world and many of them do not just get better with repeated exposure. For most dogs, the opposite happens. Because you are limited in what support you can give them in a trial, the dog is left experiencing that stress and realizing that the rules for trials are different than practice.
The solution involves teaching your dog exactly what to expect at each little point in a trial from the moment you arrive to the moment you exit the ring and reward them. Knowing what to expect greatly lowers anxiety for both people and dogs!
For dogs who have already trialed and are stressed, then we will also need to spend time changing that conditioned emotional response to each of these parts!
This class will help prepare you and your dog to enter an obedience, rally, and agility ring with confidence. We will do this by training the dog to understand their role at each little step, reducing ring stress, and systematically preparing for the distractions which could crop up along the way!
What type of teams should take this class?:
- Young dogs who have not yet started trialing. Give these dogs a great foundation for the future!
- Dogs who are fine in the general show environment but stress and worry once in the ring itself.
- Dogs who disconnect and lose focus once in the ring.