Interesting factoids :-)

It has been so awesome to actually be home and have time to train my dogs this past week and a half!! We have really gotten some great work in and I have learned a few things too!

Interesting factoid number 1: even with a very limited test group, I learned that a 2on/2off dog walk simply cannot compete with a running. I know this probably does not come as a shock to very many people but it is always really interesting to conduct a timed experiment :-)

Maze has a pretty fast Dog walk and even with a fast lead in and an almost instant release he was consistently a full half second slower than Merger who has a minimally trained running dog walk that is still not as fast as I expect it to be as a finished product.

Merger consistently came in at between 1.49 and 1.52 seconds and Mazes fastest was 1.93 and there were generally closer to 2.0 to 2.1. SoBe who is but a tiny waif of a dog generally runs around 1.37

Of course there is still a bit of controversy regarding whether a dog with a running contact performance can turn tight enough at the bottom of the contact to make it worth it, I think yes but we will see.

Don't get me wrong I am still of the belief that a running dog walk performance is NOT for everyone but there are some definite reasons to consider it if you are looking for the fastest overall performance.

It also must be mentioned that there is a heck of a lot of training involved in a running contact criteria, more in my opinion, than a 2on/2off.

That brings me to my other factoid :-) Do you know that the word criteria is not even truly defined in the dictionary? Since I spend so much of my life teaching and since I use that word so very often with what I consider to be varying degrees of understanding by my students, etc... that I decided I was going to post the actual dictionary definition and have a bit of a chat about it on the Blog.

I went to dictionary.com and was surprised to find that it was quite difficult to actually find the definition of criteria. This particular word is a derivative of criterion and what I did find as a definition feels a bit vague to me. It is as follows, "Criteria, to form correct judgement regarding the intended goal." This is quite ambiguous if you ask me, very open ended to say the least.

Why was I even on this particular, quest? Well, I was hoping to sort of do the old in your face regarding how incredibly gray we seem to be in our criteria establishment and maintainence.

Kind of hard to do utilizing that definition!

However, it does not change the fact that in the world of agility maintaining our established criteria is absolutely crucial to any amount of consistent success.

I truly believe that people do understand this but it does not change the fact that even at the most base level, the place where we start to teach the dog what the criteria of all of the basic behaviors, obstacles, etc.. are we fall short.

There is way too much humanization of our canine counterparts and we allow rationalization and reasoning to determine whether a behavior is actually trained, how many parts we lump together, and, ultimately why the dog may or may not have been successful in their attempts at offering the intended behaviors.

We also have an incredible and very honest desire to help our dogs and make them successful, therefore we "help" them with the hard stuff.

The very best help you can offer a dog is to clearly define the desired behaviors, break them into pieces that the dog can truly learn and understand, increase your criteria as new pieces are learned, proof these pieces and ultimately the final behaviors and maintain the criteria that you have set forth.

This is so very hard!!!! However, the payoff is huge!

Rome was not built in a day and a dog cannot be trained in a month, but, Rome is beautiful and so is that Q ribbon. Happy training!!