Question For Agility People

[Kavik]

From a crossover person I would say it is at least as much of a problem for the handler

I am not doing as much 'obedience' with Kaos as I have done with my others - mainly just recall.

[rottiadora]

That's an excellent point Kavik and Poodlefan, I agree.

As the saying goes - Great dog, shame about the handler!

Edited September 5, 2006 by rottiadora

[smokeysue]

Obedience is fine. Just concentrate on working your dog on "both" sides if you plan to do agility.

I've seen so many left sided obedience trained dogs struggle when crossing over to agility.

Hi Rottiadora, yes we have been doing obedience since Feb, then started agility, and just in the last 3 weeks have been trying to get the dogs working on the other side. Well, the dogs are confused and so are we. We do obedience first then 1/2 hour break then into agility, and Ice is just getting the hang of it now being on the other side. We do one side then the other. So has taken a few weeks to get the hang of it. But most of the owners are running around the outside still with the dog still on the left. But doing both is good training for the dogs. Sue

[sidoney]

Re crossing from left to right, there is a doggy component there (trained by the person). Obedience dogs have been multiply rewarded for being on the left side (assuming positive training). At any rate, the left side is the best place to be. It takes time for a dog that has this kind of association to realise that the right side is also a good place to be. So you reward the dog many times for being on the right. "Circle work" or "shadow handling" is good for this (it's kind of "agility heeling").

Analogous is the agility dog that has been rewarded so many times for doing contact obstacles that it will ignore other obstacles and do the contacts. The remedy is to up the reward rate of the obstacles it's ignoring.

On the handler side of things, I've noticed that many handlers, if given a choice, automatically start exercises with their dog on their left. Even if they also handle with the dog on the right side, consciously handling both sides, they will often start the left. This ends up being the side the dog works on when it's fresher and keener, and may also get more time/repetitions.