Hey all, here's another quick post from the Ring Confidence Facebook group: (Sorry, y'all! I posted it last week but forgot to post it here for my non-Facebook users!)

Stop feeding on your startline.
And yeah, there are a thousand asterisks around that. But what I want to talk about today is that when we are specifically working on trial prep behaviors, we need to stop rewarding in the middle of a chain.

If you get into the ring, get your dog set up, and then instantly pop a cookie into their mouth right before you lead out, then this is a massive difference that you're doing in practice that you cannot do in a trial.

And it doesn't mean that I never do it.
It definitely doesn't mean that the dog always needs to be working a long time before the reward. Nor does that mean that we shouldn't break skills down and reward the little pieces.

But I want you to be incredibly conscious of when you feed your dog.

I tell my students that anytime they reward their dog in a training scenario, they better make it a reward event! No feeding in place. When we're doing our Ring Confidence games, I tell them to make it a party! I want them, at minimum, to have the dog MOVE when eating that cookie!!!

And then, if they're in a situation where they're not just wanting to work on the ring routines, then they can go ahead and set the dog backup again and continue with whatever work they wanted to train. Without a cookie at the setup 😊

I was particularly thinking about this from an agility and rally perspective. But if you do obedience, this matters a lot too in your "exercise finished" moments. If you always reward the dog after the end of an exercise, then this becomes a huge contrast to what will happen in a trial and a big source of stress.

If you find that your dog stresses at specific moments in a trial, I want you to think about what you do in practice that is different. Do you use the cookie to tell the dog that they were right? Do you always manage certain parts by having your food or toy readily available?

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Up your game in obedience!

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