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July 2021 Newsletter and Training Tips
 
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Welcome to the July 2021 newsletter for TEAM!
In this Newsletter:
Article: Strive for Balance!
TEAM Obedience Program Updates
Article:  Be the Turtle!
New TEAM Nosework Titling Program  Level Four debuts August 1st
Article:  Hide Placement and TEAM NW

Strive for Balance!

by Denise Fenzi

If you have followed me over time you may have noticed themes that might feel contradictory. On one end of the scale, I talk about emotions and relationships. Developing warm and playful interactions with your dog. Creating a relationship so that your learner wants to interact and engage with you.  Encouraging your learner to rely on you as a valuable resource.  Seeing the big picture of training –  the wide-angle view.  Reading body language as a function of your learner's joy. Flexibility. Letting go of expectations.   Celebrating time spent with your dog over specific accomplishments achieved. Having your own doggy friend!

And on the other end of the scale, I talk about very specific details of good training.  Things like breaking your training down into small pieces and focusing narrowly on a task. Setting up a well-designed environment so your learner can win and build confidence in themselves.   Focused intent.  Crisp training.  Goals and progress. Structure.  Getting behavior!  So much for your doggy friend.

Where you are focusing at any given time is likely to be more on one end, the softer and more playful side, or on the other end, the crisper and more defined side. And the fact is, you need to fluidly flip back and forth according to what is happening in front of you – what your dog needs at that moment to bring out his or her best self.  The more experience you develop, the easier it is to blend these concepts, presumably because you no longer consciously think about the process.

My goal for trainers is joyful engaged training within a goal driven structure.  So how do we get there?

Here’s my best solution: Videotape your work.

When you watch your video, ask yourself if it would be fun to be trained by you. (Thank you, Julie Daniels!) Would you stay engaged because it was interesting, regardless of the motivators available?  Do you feel warmth and enthusiasm coming from your trainer?  Is your trainer smiling at you?   Is a sense of mental awareness and “puzzling through” adequately present to give you the sense of playing a game together?

Now let’s look at that video again. What would you accomplish if you were being trained by you?  Could you easily decipher a goal for the session?  Is the setting such that you can focus on what your trainer wants you to learn?  Is your trainer’s communication about what they want clear?   Are there elements in the training set-up that make it hard for you to focus on training or to progress?

All good questions to ask yourself!

Regardless of where you are weak or strong as a trainer today, training dogs is the way to improve. If you don’t train then you’ll get nowhere – that is one thing I can virtually guarantee. Thinking about training does not improve your skills, nor does setting up sessions in your head. You really do have to do it, and then look consider the result.  It’s better to practice something – even if you’re a little too heavy on one end of the scale or the other, than to fret about it and therefore do nothing at all.

We are fortunate in that dogs are hugely forgiving learners, so while you learn to blend these varied skills, it’s extremely likely that your learner will hang in there with you. Just keep in mind your goal: balance and fluid change over your session. If you keep at it, someday you will naturally provide a balance of warmth and engagement while holding a high standard for progress and crispness within your training sessions.

Enjoy your training, regardless of where you are in your journey.

TEAM Obedience Program Updates

Did you know?!  We made changes this year to allow TWO videos, edited together after the fifth exercise, for TEAM Levels 1&2 including the Plus Levels.   We have removed the requirement to have a Level 3 Plus or Honors to move onto the upper levels.   The Obedience program levels 4-6 are when the foundations become magical fun exercises and we look forward to seeing more handlers in these levels!  We have also renamed the original TEAM program to TEAM Obedience to avoid confusion with the newer TEAM programs and to make room for future sport options.  We still believe the original program levels 1-3 provide an excellent foundation for multiple sports.
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Be sure to check out the updates on the TEAM Obedience Website.

Don't forget to join our friendly, supportive Facebook TEAM Players Group!
Be The Turtle!
TEAM Cooperative Care Program
by Deb Jones

One of my favorite sayings to students working on cooperative care is “be the turtle!”  What do I mean by this? I mean that slow and steady is the way to success. Taking your time and moving slowly is the way to lasting change.  Pushing ahead too quickly usually ends up with stalled progress and regression.

Turtle on a rock looking upwards.  Caption above turtle reads "be the turtle"

It’s hard to maintain your motivation to train when you don’t see fast obvious progress.  That’s totally normal. Conditioning for husbandry work is often sneaky in terms of results.  It may not look like anything is happening for quite a while, but then, voila!, one day you see it.  It’s really hard to keep going when you’re not even sure you’re on the right track, and progress can be pretty low-key sometimes.  

Much of our cooperative care work focuses on classical conditioning.  You are developing new responses rather than training behaviors, and often success is seen as a lack of response rather than an action.  We are often working to keep our dogs just under threshold, so no reaction is a very good thing. Changes in emotional responses can take hundreds, maybe thousands, of short repetitions.  That’s a LOT of reps! And it’s typically better if you spread your training out over time rather than lumping sessions close together.

Taking the long view when doing husbandry work is a very good approach.  Commit to being in it for the duration, and that you cannot predict quick progress.  To be honest, sometimes I’ve seen amazingly fast progress, but that is never my expectation.  My assumption is always that it’s going to take a slow and steady approach to make progress. I might be pleasantly surprised, or I might be correct.  Either way, I am going to be happy with how things go.

Something I always tell people is “some training is better than no training.”  This is not an all or none type of activity. Any tiny little bit you do is better than doing nothing at all.  Often people feel they are behind before they even begin, so they don’t ever start. For example, their dog already shows extreme fear of the vet and they have an injury that requires a visit.  Is there even any point to beginning a training program now? YES! Definitely, yes! Every little bit you do is a deposit in your husbandry bank account. While it may seem like you’re only adding pennies while you’re withdrawing hundreds of dollars, it’s still a step in the right direction.  And over time those tiny little deposits build and accrue interest.

Like the turtle, moving slowly still leads to progress.  Moving slowly but steadily leads to steady progress. Cooperative care training is a lifestyle, not a race.  You’ll always be doing some sort of husbandry work, it’s never totally done. What you do depends on your individual situation and what your dog needs at any given time.  No matter what happens cooperative care training is never a waste of time. Every tiny session leads to success.

TEAM Nosework Program Updates

Thanks for the wonderful support and enthusiasm since the debut of the TEAM Nosework program in December 2020.  Starting August 1st we will be launching our new LEVEL FOUR of the nosework program!

Be sure to check out the updates on the TEAM  Nosework Website.

Don't forget to join our friendly, supportive Facebook TEAM NW Players Group!
Hide Placement: One way the NW
TEAM program tests your training!

by Stacy Barnett

Training dogs in Nosework is a bit different than training dogs for other sports.  In Nosework, the hides primarily train the dog, and the handler emphasizes what gets reinforced.  Hide placement shapes a dog’s searching behaviors, which means that how you set your hides will affect how your dog will search in the future.

Dogs Learn through Patterns

Dogs will repeat what was successful in the past.  This means that how you set your hides will sculpt your dog’s expectations.  Your dog’s expectations will affect how they approach the search.  For example, if you were to do five searches with the hide on the left, on the 6th search, the dog is liable to start searching on the left.  The more that the pattern is reinforced, the more hard-wired it becomes in the dog’s search patterns.

Like it or not, we tend to set hides in patterns

Just like our dogs, we too are pattern driven!  Your hide placement may have minute patterns built in that you aren’t even aware of!  Some of these patterns may be side influenced (whether you are left or right handed).  Some may be due to types of hides you tend to set….  maybe you set hides on chairs or wheeled objects as examples.

This means that when setting hides you want to keep them non-obvious

In NW TEAM, one of our requirements is that the hide location is not directly in front of the start line or on an object that is the only obvious obstacle in the search area.  The reason is patterning!  Dogs understand that objects frequently have odor on them and a savvy dog might be visually drawn to an object before even starting to search.

When a dog searches, they use both their eyes and their nose.  The two senses are constantly working together to problem solve when searching.  This is very smart of the dog to do!  However, in Nosework training, we want the dog to emphasize use of the nose.  When the dog is too strong visually, you might find that the dog “fringe alerts”, meaning alerts away from source, by catching odor, seeing the object, and then drawing an (incorrect) conclusion.

In NW TEAM, we test the dog’s training by assessing the dog with various hide placements

Hide placement challenges in NW TEAM have been chosen so as to check your dog’s flexibility in problem solving.  In some cases, we specify certain objects in part because we know that those objects are easily available, therefore making the search easy to set up.  In all cases, the team is asked to showcase their training.

Curious? Let’s walk through a few NW TEAM examples!

Exercise 1-1: Interior Threshold Hide Under Chair

In this exercise, the hide placement tests whether your dog will pay attention to the area near the start line.  If you have placed most of your hides deep into the search area, this exercise will be more difficult.  We use a chair for this exercise to help by providing context (hides are often on chairs), however the chair is to be set in a non-obvious way so the dog still needs to use their nose to work the area.

Exercise 2-3: Corner Container Hide

In this exercise, the dog works an “L” container setup with the hide on the corner.  This hide placement tests how methodically the dog works containers.  Very often, we see dogs (and handlers!) cut corners when searching.  We can use this exercise to encourage the dog to be more methodical by increasing the value of the containers on the edges of the dog’s natural path of motion.  We do that through hide placement!

Exercise 3-4: Deep Accessible

This exercise really challenges the dog’s sourcing skills.  Through hide placement, the dog is encouraged to continue to push into the search area and work until reaching the hide.  We test the dog’s understanding of source with this exercise as dogs who don’t truly understand sourcing are liable to alert before reaching the hide.  This is truly an exercise in trusting the nose!  By working these sorts of setups, our dogs start to work harder to get to source and the team’s confidence increases as a result.

Exercise 4-5: Exterior Ground Crack Hide

In our newest level, Level 4, the challenges get even more, well... Challenging!  In this exercise, we really test the dog’s use of their nose rather than searching with the eyes.  When a hide is set in a crack in the ground, the dog will react to odor and then have to problem solve, using only the nose, to find source on a non-object.  This is an excellent test of the dog’s understanding of driving into a scent cone!
TEAM Nosework Exercise 4-5: Exterior Ground Crack Hide
As you can see, hide placement really showcases the dog’s skills!

By utilizing varied hide placement, we can be thoughtful in our training.  Hide placement is our tool to stretch the dog and to develop searching habits that allow for efficient and effective searching.  Ultimately, hide placement helps the team come together because it gives the dog the tools to drive the search and the handler a point of reference to understand what is occurring in order to best interpret the dog.  Remember to maintain variety and watch out for patterns in your hide placement that might over-emphasize the dog’s utilization of their eyes in searching.  By working through the NW TEAM levels, you can test how well you have been setting your hides in training!

Upcoming TEAM Classes at Fenzi Dog Sports Academy

Workshop:  Nailed It! with Deb Jones starts August 1st.
Workshop:  Precision Heeling with Denise Fenzi starts August 1st.

Courses starting August 1st!  Registration open until August 15th.

TEAM Sports Foundations Level One with Heather Lawson

TEAM Sports Foundation - Level 2 with Laura Waudby

Introduction to Nosework with Stacy Barnett

NW120 - Introduction to NW Search Elements with Julie Symons

Check out our full Nosework Schedule Here

On Demand Video:  Cooperative Care: How to Prepare Your Dog for Visits to the Vet & Groomer with Deb Jones
Copyright © 2021 Fenzi TEAM Titles, All rights reserved.


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