E100: 로레타 뮬러(Loretta Mueller) - "어질리티를 위한 소공간 기술"

get super creative about what they can do inside their house. So what aspects of the sport can handlers work on on those days they just can't make it to the field and are just kind of training indoors and at home? You can work on impulse control. A lot of that. You can work on start lines. You can work on turns, drive training, contacts, we pulls, things like that. Again, it's all about creativity. I've even trained a running dog walk in the hallway of my house. So yeah, legitimately. Again, I'm from Minnesota. Two days ago, it was 40 below zero. So we're not going to go outside anywhere. So you have to get pretty inventive sometimes. But I think that's the goal is to think outside of the box. People have a tendency to get stuck in, you know, what should I do at my training class? And, well, I don't have this available to me at home. But in reality, if you just go outside of the box and think about, okay, well, maybe this involves moving some furniture or maybe it involves putting down some matting or looking for objects around the house, you know, in order to train these skills. And I think that that's one of the biggest things that I find that people gain from this is the ability to be very imaginative and creative in figuring out what they can actually do. So it's kind of funny how we start figuring out spaces and people are saying, okay, I'm moving my couch this way and stuff like that. And again, you know, is it a bit of a pain to move your couch and stuff? Yeah, absolutely. But in the scheme of it, you know, you're doing something with your dog, probably when they're already pent up anyway, it's too hot, too cold, whatever. And so you're actually getting some work on your dog and mental work is always, you know, so I guess settling for them. And so I think it's definitely worth it. But yeah, imagination, creativity, it's really fun to see what the students come up with in the class. So you can definitely train just about anything inside, even a dog walk. Yeah. And I'd imagine that just learning to kind of think that way and think creatively probably has a lot of carryover no matter what the sport, no matter kind of what it is they're working on. Absolutely. For sure. Yes. Kind of thinking through the skills that you mentioned there, you know, how do those things actually translate to having a better agility dog or to, I guess, kind of ask it another way. You know, why is it valuable to work those skills at home or away from the field? Because in reality, you're building values in behavior. So if you think about that, the more value you build, the more instilled the behavior is.

A lot of the behaviors that you're looking for agility dogs and a lot of the behaviors that break are based on the behaviors that are not instinctive for the dogs. So most dogs, if not allowed to jump for a while, they still remember how to jump. They still remember how to do tunnels. Most dogs don't forget those kind of things. It's the things that aren't instinctive to them that they have a tendency to forget. So committing to obstacles while you move away, ignoring your motion, weave poles, contacts, stop contacts is a good example. No dog runs to the bottom of a hill and stops. They keep running. So those kinds of things are, they're not instinctive and they require a lot of value building and a lot of value to keep them going. So you have to make sure that you're constantly putting value on those. The more you prove those behaviors, then what happens is the better the dog is prepared for things that come up that could derail the behavior, such as other dogs barking and people and all the kinds of distractions that you see in agility. Agility has got so many distractions that happen when the dog is on course or before going in the ring or even just hanging out at crating. And so it's really important to prove those behaviors if you have them taught so that you can keep those values built. And you can many, many times replicate issues that you have at trials or at training at home, again, as long as you get creative with it. How does that kind of correlate to where different dogs are in their training? I know you mentioned that you have kind of some beginners and some more advanced dogs in the class. So can you talk a little bit about that? Absolutely. Yep. So most of the time, if there are issues with agility dogs, what do they normally tell you to do? Return to some foundation. I know foundation is not always the most exciting thing in the world, right? Spending five minutes teaching a two-on-two-off contact, not super exciting, running a really fun course, obviously more exciting. But the dogs are the same way. So running a full course, crazy like that, and having a great time chasing your mom, chasing your dad is awesome. Two-on, two-off, probably not as awesome. So it makes it that much more important that we, again, build value and make sure that we work on those pieces all the time or as much as we possibly can. So again, handlers don't always want to do that. But if you do keep revisiting the foundations, you will have a more consistent dog, right? So over time, we degrade behaviors. And I say that we degrade them because we love running agility, period.

So we will let things slide, possibly. Then the behavior breaks down. People will say, no, no, no, I don't do that. You know what? I'm guilty of it. At some point in time, everybody is. So let's say the dog doesn't do a perfect contact, but you're still running. Well, all right. It's no big deal. Then the problem is that's the point of degradation. So you have to think of it like a bank account. You have to keep putting money in to draw money out later. And so working on foundations on a regular basis is really a good plan to keep those behaviors solid. In my opinion, anytime you're stuck in the house, whether it's too cold, hot, raining, whatever, it's a great time to brush up on those not-so-super-exciting things. That way you have more consistent behaviors when you do get to training or you do get to a trial. Because I'll be honest with you, there are times where my dogs don't trial for many months. And when they go into the ring, I can trust their behaviors because I've been working on foundations in most of their training. Can you share a little about kind of how your class on all this stuff actually works, how it's set up? Sure. Yeah. So we work on foundation behaviors. Like I said, either teaching the dogs behaviors themselves. So we have some dogs that don't have any agility experience or brand new to agility. Maybe their handler has more experience. Or we're working on making behaviors more solid for seasoned dogs. Or also fixing some behaviors for seasoned dogs. If the dog has a so-not-so-good start line stay, we work on those kind of things in there so that we can get a plan to be able to make that stay solid. I also ask the participants to think outside of the box each and every week. We talk about items around the house that they can help use to train. We also figure out all the options for a specific item. And if you're in the class, you'll kind of go into that. Again, I really want to foster the ability to think about how to maximize their space to get the most out of the training that they can do. And so I think it's just really important that that part of the process is revisited every week so that people can, when the class is over, be able to use the space they have in the best possible way for their dog. Can you maybe just walk us through an example of an exercise that folks can work on, you know, a skill that they need for the sport, but might not realize they can train at home even without a lot of space? So let's just start with the ability to go into drive and then come back down out of drive.

This is a skill that many dogs lack in agility, and you'll see it when they're running on course. They'll go up and drive and possibly stay and drive and go over threshold. So when you see that in the dog, you'll see broken start lines, broken contacts, jumping up at the handler, shopping, as I call it, where they just run around and take tunnels or jumps or whatever without really paying attention to the handler. I want my dogs to go into drive on certain occasions. So with five border collies in the house, I don't want them all in drive all the time. So that would just not be a good experience for me as a dog owner. So what we do is we teach the dogs to get into drive on command. So my dogs are all asleep right now, and I'm not going to use the word because if I do it, they will all wake up and start barking because they'll go into drive. But the word I have is R-E-A-D-Y. So as long as you guys can spell, you know what that is. I'm not saying it right now because I have five dogs asleep right next to me on the couch. But if I say that word, they will go immediately into drive. If I don't say that word, they don't go into drive. And so it's nice to have that ability as an on-off switch. And then also the ability to self-calm or bring themselves out of that heightened state, which is a great skill for any agility dog. If your dog is low drive, it teaches them to go into a higher state of drive on command. And if your dog needs to learn how to calm themselves down, aka they've got too much drive and over threshold, it also teaches them how to self-calm. So it's a win-win. So if you think in terms of how that extrapolates to agility, what comes into play would be the table. So for many people, if you talk to people about what their least favorite obstacle is in agility, many of them will do an eye roll and say the dreaded table. The reason why the table is so disliked, I guess, is because it requires the dog to run full speed for multiple obstacles and then stop for five seconds. And for many handlers, those five seconds are the longest five seconds of their entire life because many dogs just don't want to do that. So many dogs will struggle. They will stay in that high state and stopping just isn't in their mindset. So if you see dogs at trials that freeze and just kind of glaze over or they ignore their handlers, then the handlers start having to try to, you know, get over top of them, which of course is not a good thing. But this type of training really helps with that. And it helps the dogs understand that there will be times where you will be going full speed

and I will ask you for a control situation. And so that's just one of the examples that we go through in the class to help with, you know, when you do get to training or you get to trialing. Do the dogs need any particular skills kind of coming into the class before taking the class? How can people kind of decide if they and their dog are ready or kind of a good fit for the agility in the house class? Really, all you really need is a dog and some rewards, food or toys. That's pretty much it. We have young dogs, older dogs. Like I said, it doesn't really matter. We're not doing anything that would require the dogs to do, you know, super physical things as far as, you know, impacting their joints or anything like that. You know, if you want to work on just foundation skills, either with a young dog or revisit skills with an older dog, this class is definitely something that you should look into. Again, if you're stuck inside and don't have much access to a training area, but you have some space in your house and you want to do agility and figure out exactly what all you can do in that space, this is a class for you. I know it's small spaces, but is there a too small? You know what? I'll be honest with you. I've seen some pretty small spaces in this class and we've made it work. So you're going to see all different, yeah, you're going to see all different sizes of areas. I've seen areas as small as like a five by six, five by seven, you know, like an area rug, you know, all the way up to bigger spaces where I wouldn't even consider them that small. I'm like, well, that's huge. You can do all sorts of stuff in there. Um, so, you know, I would say, you know, five by seven is pretty small. And, you know, if you got something a little smaller than that, you might want, might again, move some furniture or something, but, um, we can, we can make things work. Cause most, a lot of the stuff that I'm doing is actually on kind of a five by seven space. So that's pretty darn tiny. Yeah. Can you share a little more just generally on what you will and won't cover in the class? Anything else that folks need to know? We cover the foundations, like I said, stays, handling, um, some contact work, um, impulse control, stuff like that. Things that, um, you need in order to do agility and also things that you need in order to just have a functional dog in that environment, very high speed, high energy environment. Um, we don't teach full obstacles, um, and we don't get into weepholes in that class just because, um, you know, I want it to be open to as many ages as possible.

And I think we pull training is best left to dogs that are a bit more physically able and older. So I want to make sure that people with puppies can, you know, take advantage of the class as far as, you know, what you should expect. You'll just see different levels of how we work on particular skills. Uh, the goals, like I said before, ranging from totally new to seasoned agility dogs, and you'll get to see how we take each step to a higher level and then how we take these seasoned dogs even, and bring them back down to basics, how we prove behaviors and then what the end results will be. Um, and then I'm sure. Cause it happens every time I've taught this class. There are some dogs that we have to deal with possible emotional stuff that we have to also work around. And so there probably will be a couple of dogs in that group that usually end up having that. Um, usually it's with the impulse control stuff, but it all depends on the dog. So we have a pretty wide variety. Um, it's, it's pretty, pretty cool to see the groups and the different breeds and stuff that we've got this time around. So I'm pretty excited about it. Last question here. Uh, what's something that you've learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? The one thing that I was taught just a couple of days ago, or I guess reminded of maybe it was that dogs give us all the feedback we need. We just have to listen to them. And as long as we listen, we will have communication. If we think that we have to do something a very specific way and we get ourselves stuck inside a box, then what happens is we cut off that communication line. So listen, look at feedback. Feedback is never anything more than feedback. It's not failure. It's just the dog telling you what they understand and what they do not understand. So we just have to listen to them. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Loretta. This has been great. Yeah. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Hannah Branigan to talk about everyone's favorite topic, healing. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have 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 BenSan.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Thank you.