Hey all, here's another quick post from the Ring Confidence Facebook group:
I was recently talking to somebody whose dog had started trialing in agility and seemed to crush their first trials! They were responding well and blew through the novice level courses. And then things started to fall apart.
This is a story I hear quite a lot and across a variety of sports. Many dogs do tend to do well in their first trials if they are not a dog who more obviously seems anxious.
Some dogs notice the very first trial that things are different than practice. And there really are a lot of things that are different from the amount of people and pressure to the stress in the air to the rewards off our body, etc. And some dogs will notice that but are still able to handle it okay for a few trials until they tell us that it is too much.
I wanna look at a few of the common reasons why it can start to become too hard for the dog.
- Rewards at a distance/duration- let’s look at this more obvious reason first. The dog truly realizes that there are no rewards in the ring and is no longer optimistically hoping! The difference between practice and trials might even start to be exasperated by nervously feeding a lot outside the ring, not even consciously thinking about why you’re handing over a cookie in that moment. Or your strategy for the ring entrance is to try and set down the reward container without them seeing and save one last cookie to shove in their mouth right before you enter!
- Routines are different - this often bleeds a little bit into the reward at a distance part because so many times we use our cookies to help manage the dog and the stuff that happens before the run starts. Do you enter the ring iand always use a cookie to get your dog to the setup spot, or reward after their sit? Do you practice what the role of the judge and stewards are and how they will be interacting with your run? Do you practice waiting to go into the ring? There is a whole bunch of stuff here that we need to make sure we actually train the dog about what to expect any trial and make sure that the dog is regularly seeing these pieces outside of a trial! Some dogs do figure this out on the go, but other dogs can get more and more stressed by how different it is than practice.
- Our connection isn’t always there- we often break connection with the dog and look around at the judge, the stewards, or the course itself. And while this likely still was true in their first trials, there is a good chance that we didn’t notice their little breaks in focus when we were disconnected. Were you relying upon the leash to get your dog to the set up spot? Were you starting to need extra cues to get them to line up?
- We get stressy - we look, smell, and sound differently to our dogs when we’re at a trial. We might even move differently, pacing more with our body outside the ring, or hypervigilant about our space bubble? Less trusting of the skills we have taught our dog? This again can be easier for the dog to ignore in their first trials if they are generally a confident dog. But if they at all feel uncertainty in their runs, either about what they’re doing or about the lack of rewards, then this can start to really stand out to them as a predictor that their turn isn’t going to be as fun as they expected!
- Skills getting harder- sometimes we don’t notice the early problems our dogs are having until the work starts to get harder. And this might be simply because small mistakes at lower levels aren’t always “punished” in the way they are at the higher levels. Refusals are often not counted in agility. You might be able to get by with multiple tries at the weaves, and only 6 instead of 12 in some organizations. Or in obedience, there aren’t a lot of exercises where the dog is working from a distance until we get past novice. Even if your dog normally practices at a higher level than what is going to be in a trial, if they are struggling to do the work under the arousal and pressure of a trial, it is going to get worse quickly and bleed into other exercises.
These are just the top 5 reasons that come to my mind when I am looking at dogs who initially start out well and then get worse, either gradually or pretty suddenly!
For many of these reasons, developing new routines can be a great answer. It isn’t a fast process, but teaching the dog what to expect, and what to do, will really increase their ability to access that routine under pressure!
Do you have a dog that started out great for a few trials and then got worse? What do you feel was the biggest reason for it, and what is the thing that seems to be helping the most?
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