A few agility questions

[bugs]

Well we are currently on a break from agility we get a whole month off. Jill officially graduated level 2 after two times of taking the class. She has mastered everything now and was never scared to do any of it. Jill is now going on to level 3/4. But I have a few agility questions for ya ll.

Jill is exactly 12 inches tall, so she will be jumping at 12. I had started her at 8 and then for the last maybe 6 classes she jumped 12. She has no problem jumping 12 never did, until 3 weeks ago, she is now balking at the jumps, she loves jumps. The odd thing is she will jump 12 on some of the jumps but not on others wing jumps are usually the ones she wont jump and then again its not all the wing jumps just some of them. She will either go around or under them. So we put the jumps back down to 8 inches and she did that for two weeks, week 3 we went back up to 12 and had the same problem but she would jump them for me if we were just sitting there waiting our turn, and I would treat her after every jump but then when it came to run the course she would go past some of the wing jumps but not all of them some she would jump.
So do I just put the jumps down to 8 and leave them there for awhile, or should I put them at 10 and have her jump that. I dint want her to get use to jumping 8, she needs to be jumping 12.

And then what do you all do at the contacts? Where we go they do two on two off but Jill is just incapable of doing that and started expecting a treat every time, I don't want her to get use to that so I tried not treating her and she stops and looks at me like I forgot something. We have been doing a running contact but I am afraid that she will easily miss a contact.

I am sure there are more questions I have buy I cant think anything right now, Thank you for taking the time to read this.

[jwestoverpug]

Colleen,

I would definitely raise the jumps as gradual as possible. There are so many possible reasons for her refusing jumps...it's hard to pin point what's happenning without watching her.

The winged jumps it could be an issue of you being laterally farther away from her in combination with her not having full sight of you. When the jumps are at 8" it's easier for her, so the extra challenge isn't as difficult for her. Does Jill have much distance work?

Is she faster at 8" than 12"? Most are. It's possible that you are at a different position...perhaps a bit ahead of her when she's jumping 12" Every dog is different, some just don't like it if we get ahead of them and they panic and stop or start going around obstacles.

Has the difficulty level gone up at the same time as the jump height? Does she jump 12" ok when you do a really simple sequence? When I work on a new skill I always make things a bit easier on them while they're learning.

You can always enter her in preferred and jump her at 8" too.

Contacts...ugh....I'm not a fan of 2 on/2 off either. Out of our 4 pugs 2 have never missed contacts, not in trials, not in class. They really didn't have any kind of contact training, that's just them. Then I have 2 others that will launch any chance they get if I don't stay on top of it. What I did with Kittie is taught her to do a quick nose touch on a target that is placed a few feet AWAY from the bottom of the dogwalk/A frame, and then keep driving forward. This got her head down, and looking for the target. She still does not run all the way down the A frame, but generally we're ok. Abby hates to wait for the teeter to actually hit the ground, so I had to teach her to run until both feet were in the yellow and then wait for me to release her.

There are lots of options for teaching running contacts. Some use stride regulators, others place a hoop towards the bottom that the dog is taught to duck their head under as they run down.

Hope that helped answer yor questions,
Jesse

[eclecticmk]

Molly doesn't miss contacts either and she is pretty fast running off the obstacles. My teacher does favor 2 on 2 off with the big dogs in class. I started training her using that method but after a while it wasn't necessary because she wasn't blowing the contacts so I stopped making her.

I had to bump Molly up to 12 inches at Nationals after only practicing at 8. We've been doing ok so far with the change. Once I made the change we never went back down to 8. I think Jesse might have the key - maybe she likes to run with you in sight or ahead. I'd play around with that and see what happens.