E169: 니콜 위부시(Nicole Wiebusch) - "팬데믹 기간 중 타이틀 취득하기"

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One of them just came out and then the other, they announced it a while ago. So in the U.S., I know there are other, possibly other options overseas, but in the United States, two of our common venues are AKC and WCRL. So AKC announced their virtual titling program probably a month or two ago, and they're doing it through December 31st. And it's kind of just a trial thing. So it's not anything permanent, and they're only doing the novice level. So if you already have your RN through AKC, it doesn't do you any good unless you, you know, if you don't have any advanced legs yet, you're still eligible for novice. So you could certainly do it if you wanted to, but you're not going to earn, you know, any other title or anything. So that is going to go through December 31st. And what they did is released five courses. It tells you, you know, where to put the camera and how to set it up. And then you video that course and then you send it in. So that's AKC, and you can earn a virtual RN, which is the same title as an in-person. It's not like an RNV. It's just RN. And then WCRL recently announced their virtual titling program. And the nice thing about WCRL is you can go as high as you want, so all the way up through the championship level. And what they do, it's a little bit different than AKC. They release new courses every two weeks, and there are two versions of each course. So there's a full-sized one, which is 25 feet by 80 feet. And then there's a smaller one, which is 25 feet by 50 feet. And if you do the smaller one, you have to do two courses in order to equal a leg to qualify. So because it's a smaller course, you have to do two different ones rather than just doing the one big one. And so that's kind of cool, though. So you've got, you know, your small spaces. That's going to fit in the most people's backyard, which is nice. And then you can go ahead and earn all the titles all the way up through the championship. So for those people that already have an AKC title, the Rally Novice, they can go do WCRL, which is pretty similar. And, you know, and earn some higher titles through that. So I think that's a great opportunity. And I haven't seen anything about how long this is going to last, but I assume it's going to be around for a while. Awesome. So while kind of, as you mentioned, the virtual titles are both relatively new, you've judged FENZ's team program for a while, which is all virtual. And I know that you've competed with your own dogs in person for a good long while now. Yeah. So what are some of the differences between competing virtually and competing in person?

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You know, kind of both the obvious and maybe the not so obvious. So that's a really good question. And I was thinking about this for a while. I think one of the not so obvious things is that virtual thing, virtual titling is much harder than people think. They think, oh, look, I get to video in my own backyard. This should be easy. But when you actually go to do it, it's not so easy. And I know a lot of people find that in team. You know, the thing with team is that you've got these 10 exercises in level one and they all have to basically be perfect. You know, we're looking for precision. We're looking for rule following. There's things we're specifically looking for. And I remember the first time I did a team run through with my dog who's earned her UD and several high end trials and high combines. It took me like six times to get through and do the team one correctly where everything came together. So, you know, I figured it'd be like five minutes we'd be done. And it wasn't that way at all. So definitely virtual is, you know, there are tricks to it. It's really hard to get it right on the first time. And then what people do is they didn't get it right the first time. So they're like, oh, I'm just going to video it again. And they do it a second time and something goes wrong. Oh, I'm just going to video it again. And then they end up just working their dog way too long. And they get frustrated and the dog is frustrated and everything just kind of falls apart. So I think that's one of the, you know, dangers of doing this virtual stuff is like, oh, we'll just video it again. And we need to be careful that, you know, we're not making it too difficult for our dogs and going too long. Another difficulty with virtual titles are camera issues. There's a lot that you have to think about when you're videoing something. And we'll go into that a little bit later. Um, there's no dog show atmosphere, which is really good for a lot of dogs. A lot of dogs get, um, they get a little nervous about the atmosphere. Um, they, they struggle around other dogs. They get worn out mentally because they're in a crate all day. And then, you know, being taken out to be warmed up and showed. Um, and so I think that can be great. If you have a reactive dog, uh, the virtual titles are awesome because it's going to allow you to get a title that maybe you wouldn't have been able to, uh, otherwise by going to a regular dog show. Um, you know, we talked about a couple of disadvantages, but one thing is with the virtual stuff, I think we're like, oh, let's go set up a course and run it.

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And we don't really think about, you know, proper warmup and any structure for our dogs. Whereas a dog show kind of forces us into structure. We have this, this pattern that we go through. We drive to the show and we set up our crate and the dog goes in the crate and we bring it out to potty and, you know, warm up. And so we have all these things that we do. And so the lack of structure with the virtual stuff, I think could be a challenge for some of the people. Um, but other than that, you know, I think both of them offer really good benefits to people. And I like the virtual thing that it will allow some dogs that would never be able to attend an in-person show to get some of these performance titles. Yeah. So you kind of teased it in there, but, but what tips do you have for filming a virtual run? Um, so after being a team judge for a while, um, and then being an instructor, I was seeing a lot of video that wasn't great. So I actually put together this little infographic for, um, for the videoing and I put it on the FDSA list and then the team players list as well. But I just kind of pulled together some tips. Um, when you print out the courses for both WCRL and AKC, it's going to tell you where to put your camera. So they choose that for you because they want the best angles on, you know, the important stuff. But there's a lot of other things that we can do to help get good videos. And this could apply for classes, virtual titles, team. It doesn't matter. It applies for everything. One of the things to think about is your lighting. You want to make sure that the sun like isn't directly behind you because then what happens is you and your dog become the silhouette. What's kind of a halo. And it's really hard to see the details. So when you're setting up your course, if it's sunny out, make sure that the sun is behind the camera. That's what we want to see. It's going to just help, um, you know, pick up on the details and see the dog better. Another thing that people do is they wear clothing that's really close to their dog. So if they have a black dog, they'll wear black pants. And that's been a thing in obedience for a long time. I think people think, oh, if I wear black pants, the judge can't really see if my dog is crooked or not. And it doesn't work. The judge can totally see. But it makes it really hard, especially in video, to see if your dog is truly straight or exactly what position your dog is in. So wearing contrasting clothing to your dog is definitely a lot better. Another thing to think about is sound. You do need to record these videos with sound.

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They want to make sure that you're not, you know, yelling at your dog or pleading with your dog. And so just think about the environment, you know. And if you're set up next to a park where there's a bunch of kids in the playground, that might not be the best idea. Or if your dog is in the background, crated, you know, in the yard or the van or something barking, then that's generally not a good idea either. So do your best to find an environment where the sound is, you know, fairly low. When you video, you want to make sure that you put your camera or your iPad or whatever you're using in landscape mode, which is the horizontal mode. So it gets a little hard, especially in those signs where we have to leave our dogs. If you have it in portrait mode, which is up and down, it can get a little hard to see what's going on. We want to make sure you can see the handler and the dog the entire time. And a big one is know your space. So when you set up this course, you want to make sure that you know exactly where the camera goes. I've seen several videos posted on different Facebook groups where they have this beautiful novice training run, but two of the signs are completely off the camera. And that is super, super common. So you can use cones if you want, or you can even just use if you're outside, you can use like pieces of caution tape and just kind of, you know, secure that to the ground. But just make sure you know that everything's in the view and make sure you're going to be in the camera view the entire time. And then the last one is kind of funny, but it's turn on the camera, which is something that all of us forget to do. So really make sure that that camera is running before you go run your gorgeous 100 point course. That'd be my final bit of advice. It's a good reminder. You want to make sure all the things are working right. Definitely. Yeah. So one of the major advantages, I think, of virtual titling over in-person titles is, as you mentioned, it can be maybe a blessing and a curse, that you can film it a couple of times and then submit the one that you think will get actually the best score, right? But if that's only really possible if you know kind of how to get that high score in the first place, like if you film it 15 times and you're making the same mistakes, it's not really going to help, right? So what are some of the common places people tend to lose points when it comes to rally? By far, it's handler error. And I find that a little frustrating because it's like, you know, if the handlers would learn the signs.

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And, of course, there's the whole piece about remembering the signs in the moment. It's hard. I've made mistakes, too. But definitely the number one reason for losing points in rally is because you basically did a sign wrong. So really knowing those signs is really important. And a lot of people, they just overlook that step a little bit. They're like, oh, I'll figure it out when I get in the ring. And I certainly review the signs if there's ones I have questions about. But knowing the signs will definitely save you some points. So doing the sign wrong, you know, it's kind of the big thing. The other things that I see are little one-pointers for the most part. So the dog's out of position, meaning, you know, they're heeling two or three feet behind you. Or they get out of position on their heel. Or they have, you know, like a crooked front. That's a common one. Crooked front, crooked finishes. The crooked sits at the halt. So little things like that can definitely add up, you know. So if you can increase the precision of your fronts and your finishes and your heeling, that's going to help a lot. And things like positions, you know, make sure your dog can do the position changes. So, but mostly those are the two big categories. Tight leash is a big one in the novice. And that's the same as out of position, basically. So when you're on leash, you want to make sure that your leash is nice and loose. But all of this stuff can be cleaned up pretty easily for any team. It doesn't mean it has to be perfect. But if you can even clean it up a little bit, then that can definitely save you some points over the long run. Are there, you know, any additional things that might be considered kind of, you know, that might pop up in a virtual run? I think we covered that pretty thoroughly. Definitely. The biggest thing is, you know, make sure your video is working the way you want it to. You've done all those tips. And then just don't push your dog. Like I said earlier, it's so easy to just, and I've done it too, like with team. Oh, we got that one wrong. Well, let's try it again. And it's just so easy to do. And you just have to be careful that you're not, like, you don't end up drilling your dog. And so if you go set up your course and things didn't go well, then take a little break before you try it again. Or, you know, do it the next day. There's nothing it says. You know, we're not in a huge time crunch here. We have until December 31st for AKC. So if it doesn't go so well, then, you know, kind of evaluate what happened and make plans to do it another time.

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So just be careful about that because, you know, in a real show, we don't have the opportunity to redo our run, which is sometimes, you know, unfortunate when we have one little mistake. But in this situation, we do. We can redo it if we need to to get a better score, to get a qualifying run. But we just really have to think about, you know, probably shouldn't redo it right away. Let's, you know, kind of figure out what happened and give our dog a little bit of time to recover before we go back and try that again. Mm hmm. You're offering one of your classes, your rally classes in June. So from good to great, increasing your rally scores. Can you just talk a little bit about, you know, who might be a good fit for that class and kind of what it covers? Sure. Yep. So this is a new class that I came up with. And everybody wants better scores. So I figured it would really be good to concentrate on the most common reasons that people lose points. And so what I did is I polled a whole bunch of judges and experienced competitors and asked them, where do you see the most points lost? And so I kind of compiled this huge list. And that's what this class covers. So this class is not a foundation rally class. However, if you have a decent novice, you know, if you can do novice, the class is going to cover things from novice all the way up to masters. So it really is applicable to a wide variety of people and dogs. So it's kind of nice, but you do need to have some foundation. Like you can't come brand new into rally and expect to really get a ton out of this class. You need to at least know your novice signs. So you're going to learn some of the master and excellent and advanced signs as you take the class, which would be good. But we talk a lot about, you know, some novice signs. And then something that we focus a lot on is just cleaning up a little precision, you know, getting a little more precision, cleaning up a few of those minor errors. So we tighten up your healing, your fronts and finishes. So I think the class would be really good for anybody that wants better scores. Or if you're doing pretty well or you're maybe you're relatively new to rally and you want to learn how to prevent errors, this would be a really good class for that. You could go and learn about the most common errors and just learn the signs correctly and work on the fronts and finishes from the get go. So it could really help you from the prevention side of things, too. You know, just just as you're training to get, you know, you'd be able to get a little bit higher scores out of the right away out of the get go.

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So in addition to the rally class, you have your new stay class on the schedule. Rock solid stays for competition in real life. So I wanted to just kind of ask a little bit about that, too. What is kind of how are you defining the difference between a competition stay and a real life stay for the purpose of this class? So what I consider a competition stay is more like an of an active stay, whereas the real life stay is more of a relaxed stay. And so the way I look at it during an active stay, I need to be paying attention to my dog and my dog needs to be focused on me. And that's important. They need to be ready to respond to a cue, whereas the relaxed stay would be something like a just a relaxed down stay or a station. And in that case, I don't want my dog paying attention to me. I want him just to chill and to hang out for a little while. So those are the big differences. But as we go through the training process for these two different types of stays, we start out kind of similar, but then it's very different towards the end and how we train each stay. And I really do feel, you know, when we have puppies and we're thinking about, you know, we're going to do obedience. We're going to do rally. We're going to do agility. And we're thinking about how to train active stays. And we kind of get stuck on that. And I do feel that that relaxed stays are super, super important. And any performance dog needs to have that ability to just lay down and hang out for a little bit, whether or not, you know, maybe we're talking to an instructor about a run that we just did. Or maybe we're watching a course, you know, watching a handler run a course and the dog just needs to kind of hang out while we do that. So I think definitely for any performance dog, it's really critical that they have both those skills. They can do both an active stay and they can do a relaxed stay. So I think stay is, you know, it's kind of one of those behaviors that falls into everybody's must have, right? Like it's one of those things when you think about basic obedience cues, you get sit down, stay, right? Maybe a recall. But I think a lot of people still struggle to teach it. So where do you see people get stuck? The biggest thing that I see is they increased criteria too much. They just they they try to increase all these challenges at the same time. And so learning how to split out everything and break it all down is really important when you're teaching a stay. If you try to do, you know, you tell your dog to stay and you add duration and you add distance at the same time, that's really hard.

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Or if you have been doing stays in your house and you all of a sudden go outside where there's all these activities going on and all these distractions and you ask for a same level stay that you were doing in your house, you're probably setting your dog up to fail. So I really look at one of the things we do in the stay class is we talk about this is how you split criteria. This is how you move up through the challenges. The other place that I see people getting stuck kind of down the road with the relaxed stuff is they they reward the relaxation for too long. They reward the relaxed stays for too long. So when we are rewarding our dog within a stay, they are most of our dogs are operant dogs today are working for food. So they are, you know, maybe doing things to try to earn the treat. So maybe if you used to reward them for flipping over on a hip because that's a sign of relaxation, they're going to start offering that. And I really saw that with my my younger dog, Excel. He was like the master at this. He would put his chin down on the ground and then you'd see his eyebrows go up as he looked at me like, OK, look, my chin's down. Now, where is my treat? And so that encompasses a ton of dogs right now that they're offering these relaxation behaviors in order to get treats, but they're not actually relaxing. So that's a really common mistake is people just keep rewarding the stays forever and they never stop. And it's really when you stop rewarding them that the dog truly understands how to relax because they're not working for the food. Who should really consider the class? And can you just talk a little more about what you'll cover? So this class is awesome for everybody. If you are just teaching your puppy a stay, this is going to be a great class to get you started and to show you all the steps and how to get get a great stay. If you have a dog that's having stay problems, it's going to show you how to go back and work on your foundation and fix those problems. So it really is a class that any age dog, any, you know, any dog with, well, basically everybody. So puppies without a lot of skills yet or even older competition dogs that you just struggle with. And the stays will cover, we'll cover active and relaxed stays in the class. So we'll cover active and relaxed stays. And then that's going to apply to obedience, rally, agility. It will apply to many different sports anytime where you might need to stay. So before we go, I know you have one more thing on the schedule and I wanted to at least kind of sneak it in here.

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So you have a webinar coming up titled Broken Connection, Why Your Dog Loses Focus. Can you just share kind of a peek into what that's about? Yeah, absolutely. This was a super, super fun webinar to do. It's coming up at the beginning of June. And so everything is, you know, done. It's all in there now. So I recorded it, obviously. And I just, it was really enjoyable. I really, really like doing it. Disconnection is such a huge issue with our dogs. And so the first thing we do is we kind of define it a little bit. We talk about, you know, where the dog's focus is. So if the dog is focused on the handler or the task, we call that connection. And if they are, if they're not focused on the handler or the task, if they're focused on other things in the environment, then we call that disconnection. So we kind of just go into a bit of detail about how to, you know, how to kind of talk about that and define it a little bit. We talk about common reasons that dogs disconnect. You know, just a couple examples would be like handler pressure. The handler disconnecting is a big one. You know, different things like that, that just normal distractions in the environment, upping our criteria too quickly. All of that kind of stuff is covered and so, so much more. And then we talk about how to either fix it or prevent it. So we talk about coming up with specific training plans that will allow you to increase criteria and distractions and all that stuff in a way that the dog can handle it and can be successful. And then the other thing that we do is towards the last part of the webinar is we review several different videos. And just, we've got a lot of agility stuff in there. And then we've got some rally and obedience stuff as well. But we take a look at a dog that's having some issues with disconnection. And then we kind of talk about different ways or different things that might be going on. It's obviously, you know, we don't always know exactly why the dog is disconnecting. But a lot of times you can kind of guess one or two of the reasons. And then we talk about, you know, kind of how we would go about and fix that. So it was really fun. I think it's going to be a great webinar. Awesome. One last question. The one I ask everyone these days as we're kind of heading off. What's something that you've learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? I thought about this question for a little bit because there's so much. You know, we just finished with the Lemonade Conference. And, of course, you know, I learned plenty during that. That was super fun.

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But what really what I kept coming back to is, and this isn't specifically about dog training, but I think it's still really important. You know, with this COVID virus going on, before this all came up, I was so busy all the time. Between homeschooling my children and kids activities and dog activities, I was always running everywhere all the time. And I didn't have time to just spend time with my individual dogs. I have four dogs. Three of them are mine. And I try really hard to spend time with each one of them individually. And since everything has been canceled and we're not leaving our houses every day anymore, I have been able to take each dog out individually quite a bit. And either go for a hike or with my old dog, we usually just walk through the yard. We have 20 acres, so we do short little walks. I don't take him out on the trails too much anymore. But it's just been really amazing. I've always considered myself to have good relationships with my dogs. But when you really spend time with each individual dog and just not necessarily training time. Of course, we all train them individually. But, you know, when I go to a seminar or dog show, all of my active competition dogs come with. You know, it's very rare that just one dog goes with me. And I really, really treasured and enjoyed that time. It's been especially special with Toby, who's almost 15. And it definitely has helped our relationship. And it's helped our training too. You know, even though it's not actively training, just spending time with them individually I think is really important. So that's what I kept coming back to. I've learned some good lessons over this time. And I definitely, as our lives start to get crazier again at some point, I am definitely going to keep carving out that time to take one particular dog for a walk this day. And then the next day, the next dog gets to go and that sort of thing. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Nicole. Thanks so much, Melissa. It was a lot of fun. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Chrissy Schrantz to talk about reinforcers and reinforcement behaviors. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice. Then our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensounds.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

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Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Thank you. name you. Thank you.