Dutch Shepherd Forum

Eric - could you add an Agility section under Activities?

I finally made my AKC agility debut with Vada (Dutch Shepherd) and Seven (mixed breed) last weekend in Duluth MN. The club that hosted the trial is nice and friendly and the venue and footing was great. The courses were challenging too.

Both dogs started in Novice. Vada Qd in her Standard runs both days. She also Qd in Jumpers with Weaves on Saturday. Her JWW run was amazing! She ran it in 16.57 seconds and was faster then all of the other Novice dogs. I was not sure how to handle a few spots on our JWW run on Sunday and since I had questions I did not run confidently and I screwed up our run and we had a bar down.

Seven started out kind of disconnected since it was a new place and he's pretty green. But he got better as the weekend went on and he Qd in JWW both days. His Standard run on Sunday was nice too but he had weave issues.

A friend of mine video taped my Standard runs. I did not know she was doing this so it was a nice surprise.

Saturday Standard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTC65_eRJDM

Sunday Standard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9jl6jW48kk

Congrats Heather. I watched your runs on Facebook this AM. Very nice and you ran very smooth. I love your communication and distance on the obstacles. It was awesome!!

Nice job! I know you have tons of dog sports up there, but it's always nice to have another venue to be able to compete in.

that was a joy to watch! I just discovered this site and it's wonderful to see other Dutchies, can't miss the bark. LOL I thought you ran very smoothly and Vada appeared very in tune with you! Congratulations!

Nice run!!! You two will fly through Novice. You'll have a MACH in no time at all if you guys continue to run like that! Great job!

Thanks!

We run at the Masters level in USDAA and Levels 4 and 5 in CPE so we're not really Novices. Just new to AKC. I thought these courses were tough Novice courses. Lots of boxes. My dogs are not green so I was not worried but if I had a green dog they would have probably had off courses.

Ahahaha, the handling makes SO much more sense to me now! I was watching all the front crosses and contacts... thinking you'd done an AWFUL lot of training before deciding to trial with her!

Beautiful runs- and I agree, they were tough novice courses at the speed you take them! If ya slowed down to a typical novice dog pace, they might flow a bit smoother. lol.

Do you find yourself doing a lot of front crosses? I've always found myself handling from the back more with the zippy-fast dogs. I guess I need to do more contact zone work, so I know I have time for a front cross before the dog jets off to the nearest obstacle to keep busy. I'd love to get Koenig into agility. It's just so dang expensive!

Have you found much conflict in training agility and schutzhund? I've always wondered...

LOL - slow is not a concept that Vada understands. My BorderJack is smaller and a bit slower to I am appreciating the buffer I get in handling him. With Vada I have to be PERFECT or we get bars down. She is making me be a better handler. I still have a ways to go though. My puppy will be trained to jump differently too so hopefully that'll help her.

I don't trust my distance as much as I should as I think I tend to worry about getting to position and I forgot to support the dogs path so I get pulls off of jumps. So I FC when I can and there are places I think I should be able to but I tend to fall back on RCs more. I have recently learned to truly properly execute a RC so I like doing them now but they are still challenging.

Yes, agility can be expensive! Especially with multiple dogs.

LOL - funny timing. I was at a Schutzhund seminar on Friday. A friend of mine asked if I was going to do SchH with my puppy. I said yes. She said just SchH or other stuff too. I said other stuff of course. She then told me that agility ruins dogs for SchH. Well, Vada does both and has her SchH3 and did well at SchH so I don't think she was ruined by cross training. We agreed that you have to be a good trainer and be aware of conflicts to do multiple sports. That I can agree with. I will not agree that teaching a dog to jump multiple jumps in a row with turns and different spacing in agility ruins a dog for 1 jump in SchH.

There can be conflicts but I found very little. Sometimes it takes me a bit. In trials for SchH I was getting lots of barking on the heeling. In agility trials I get heeling barking all the way up to the start line. It finally clicked that they may be related. I do swing finishes to avoid going into "blind cross" area but I already did them anyways. The biggest conflict is time and energy and money. And the Schutzhund folks like to poo poo agility folks. The agility folks are just impressed by the SchH as they know the time commitment it takes. Everyone LOVES watching Vada in agility. With her SchH upbringing it's all about power and drive and I think we get less thoughtfulness in agility because of that. She learned to power thru things. But that has balanced out over time. My new puppy is being raised with both sports in mind so I hope I get a good balance of drive and self control.

k9katet wrote:LOL - slow is not a concept that Vada understands.

Nor should she Its agility for goodness sake!! You just have to trust her and your communication and then RC the hell out of courses. LOL. I say this like an expert cause my girlfriend Ashlee is amazing to watch with her GWP. But slowing down is a virtual sin in my opinion. It just makes you work harder.

k9katet wrote:Yes, agility can be expensive! Especially with multiple dogs.

I think of protection sport as WAY more expensive. Annual dues are $65 (in my sport), daily entries are $45-$65 per day and then there are month club dues......

k9katet wrote:LOL - funny timing. I was at a Schutzhund seminar on Friday. A friend of mine asked if I was going to do SchH with my puppy. I said yes. She said just SchH or other stuff too. I said other stuff of course. She then told me that agility ruins dogs for SchH. Well, Vada does both and has her SchH3 and did well at SchH so I don't think she was ruined by cross training. We agreed that you have to be a good trainer and be aware of conflicts to do multiple sports. That I can agree with. I will not agree that teaching a dog to jump multiple jumps in a row with turns and different spacing in agility ruins a dog for 1 jump in SchH.

There can be conflicts but I found very little. Sometimes it takes me a bit. In trials for SchH I was getting lots of barking on the heeling. In agility trials I get heeling barking all the way up to the start line. It finally clicked that they may be related. I do swing finishes to avoid going into "blind cross" area but I already did them anyways. The biggest conflict is time and energy and money. And the Schutzhund folks like to poo poo agility folks. The agility folks are just impressed by the SchH as they know the time commitment it takes. Everyone LOVES watching Vada in agility. With her SchH upbringing it's all about power and drive and I think we get less thoughtfulness in agility because of that. She learned to power thru things. But that has balanced out over time. My new puppy is being raised with both sports in mind so I hope I get a good balance of drive and self control.

I think this is a great point. People in my sport also look down on people who only play agility with their dogs. I think this is completely based in ignorance with a lack of desire to learn. There are SO many nuances in Schutzhund (or other protection sports) and the competitors understand how much goes in to teaching a proper bite technique, a solid guard, a correct and accurate track. etc.... And those people teach their dogs to complete some obstacles at a VERY minimal skill level. They take that obstacle training and compare it to agility - with no regard to the incredible amount of nuances required to truly COMPETE at agility. But then it goes back to allot of what I believe about many hard core protection sport people.......

....and this might get me on moderation.....

...but for many it is a macho competition of a p-n-s on a leash and a venue for showing how tough they are based on how tough their dog is. I say this, obviously, while I compete with my own dogs in that venue. But I think the close minded protection trainers really fall into that category over all.

Christie, it is so refreshing to hear someone from your side of things not bash someone from the agility side. I don't think protection sports folks have any idea at all what it takes to create an awesome agility team mate in your dog. And, you sure can't use compulsion in agility training! At least, not if you want a dog who loves to run courses and be in tune with you the whole time, and who is willing to keep trying when things aren't going just right.

Heather...dogs understand context, IMO. They can tell the difference between being on an agility course or field with a lot of jumps, versus being on a SchH field with the one jump. Obviously, you only train SchH on the SchH field, and same with agility...they get it. (Don't you just love people who know everything about what dogs can and can't understand, without ever having invested the time and energy in actually finding out? )

A friend on Facebook made a comment about sissies doing agility or something. His girlfriend and I jumped on him and asked if he had ever tried it. After that he did try it. Now he tells everyone how hard it is and how much training is involved. LOL It was nice that he was open minded and gave it a try.

I think a dog has to have better jumping skills to do agility than SchH. I think learning jumping skills for agility can only improve a dogs jumping skills in general which will only benefit the 1 jump in SchH.

I get tired of the DS breed bashing in the sport too. Some people just don't think before they speak and make themselves look stupid. They are GSD people and I think they are secretly jealous.

k9katet wrote:I get tired of the DS breed bashing in the sport too. Some people just don't think before they speak and make themselves look stupid. They are GSD people and I think they are secretly jealous.

Breed bashing sucks, regardless of the breed or the sport.

I know someone, for example, who HATES any dog with short hair, and only likes GSDs. And, it's not just a personal preference, but she has to bad mouth anyone who has the stupid nerve to even consider getting anything but a GSD.

One day, I asked her why she was so negative about short haired dogs? Her reply...she can't stand to see a dog's balls or other rear end equipment. I couldn't believe it. So, pits, dobies, dutchies...anything with shorter hair back there and she'd disparage the owner.

Talk about stupid!

>>>>One day, I asked her why she was so negative about short haired dogs? Her reply...she can't stand to see a dog's balls or other rear end equipment. I couldn't believe it. So, pits, dobies, dutchies...anything with shorter hair back there and she'd disparage the owner.



Now that is a first for me!!! Never ceases to amaze me what some dog folks come up with. And ditto to Christies comment about the macho male appendage contest! I've witnessed that too many times to count when I was active in SchH.


Denise Gatlin

A close friend has a Mal trained in scent detection be it narcotics, human remain cadavar (water and land) or live searches. But there are some schools of thought and some strong opinions that this is not possible. Her dog proves that wrong, time and time again. The handler is of course very diligent and an excellent dog trainer. She uses different one word commands for the different venues and substances. She is a quiet person so I love when we go out on a search and one of those loud mouthed uniformed male officers say it cant be done and she just quietly proves him wrong!! Cha-Ching!


Denise

GSDNanny wrote:A close friend has a Mal trained in scent detection be it narcotics, human remain cadavar (water and land) or live searches. But there are some schools of thought and some strong opinions that this is not possible. Her dog proves that wrong, time and time again. The handler is of course very diligent and an excellent dog trainer. She uses different one word commands for the different venues and substances. She is a quiet person so I love when we go out on a search and one of those loud mouthed uniformed male officers say it cant be done and she just quietly proves him wrong!! Cha-Ching!


Denise

I love it, Denise.

I find so often that people just resent it when someone really puts the time and effort into achieving great success with a dog. They will also act as if you just lucked out and got this fantastic dog, and resent that, too (they conveniently forget about the nurture part that goes with the nature part ).

Your Mal friend sounds like someone I'd really like!

GSDNanny wrote:A close friend has a Mal trained in scent detection be it narcotics, human remain cadavar (water and land) or live searches. But there are some schools of thought and some strong opinions that this is not possible. Her dog proves that wrong, time and time again. The handler is of course very diligent and an excellent dog trainer. She uses different one word commands for the different venues and substances. She is a quiet person so I love when we go out on a search and one of those loud mouthed uniformed male officers say it cant be done and she just quietly proves him wrong!! Cha-Ching!


Denise

I know that this is somewhat unrelated - but it reminded me of an awesome question I was asked.

I was explaining to some people that the dog I was demonstrated has been trained to find and alert on 4 odors of narcotics: marijuana, cocaine, meth and heroin. She was an active alert dog, who indicated with a scratch.

So someone chimed in, "Oh that is so cool. Does she scratch once for pot, twice for meth, three times for coke.....??"

I know that this is somewhat unrelated - but it reminded me of an awesome question I was asked.

I was explaining to some people that the dog I was demonstrated has been trained to find and alert on 4 odors of narcotics: marijuana, cocaine, meth and heroin. She was an active alert dog, who indicated with a scratch.

So someone chimed in, "Oh that is so cool. Does she scratch once for pot, twice for meth, three times for coke.....??"

LOL that is hilarious - and relatively normal. I used to get asked all the time when I had Mason, my SAR dog - if he could find their missing cats/dogs etc...

[
Your Mal friend sounds like someone I'd really like![/quote]


You would really love my dog friend. I call her the 'real dog whisperer'. She has an aura (?sp) about her when it comes to dogs, even the toughest. She has several that were on the verge of being 'discarded' from LE because the officers could not handle the dog and yet she (ONLY her tho) can take them anywhere and with no problems. What a gift!


Denise