Last night I taught a different group of agility students than I normally teach. One great thing about their class, major rounds of applause every time someone ran a sequence correctly, or made their front or rear cross happen. A momentous occasion! Right on! Weave poles-party time, excellent!

A couple people in the class, challenging, frustrating issues with their dogs. Kinds of things that can really fry your brain. Dog out of focus and blurry and maybe going off to sniff things, or not stay with the handler, and the more fried the people brains, the more fried dog brains. Some pent up brain frying, coming out in that class.

Here’s a thing I noticed though. The handlers that didn’t let their brains fry, kept trying and kept it together for their dogs, rewarding for the little things, big successes. The handlers that handed me a laundry list of all the things their dog couldn’t do or why it always did this, who had their dogs so pinned down as to why they were such failures, their dogs didn’t much improve. Just got more fried, to the point they didn’t really notice their dogs got better when they upped the reward schedule and made it easier.

Or else they just flat out wouldn’t increase the reward schedule, and just kept trying to shove their square dogs into round holes out there. Shove and shove and shove, instead of backing up, and thinking creatively. I know whenever I have training trouble, I have to really think about it and come up with a plan. I may not always exactly solve the problem, but I know when something isn’t working, you have to think different to make a change. But some of their dogs, thought they were doing chores. Agility shouldn’t be a dog’s equivalent of cleaning the bathroom.

I asked them to try a homework assignment. Teach their dog a funny trick they could use to regain focus, and signal fun. Emphasis on the fun part. Use it to rev their dogs up, use it to fix a blooper of a run and reboot with. Lighten things up, get their dogs’ tails wagging again and make the agility really fun. Maybe no more sad, draggy, robotic weave poles. Use it during class time to keep the dogs’ attentions. Because, HELLO, this is supposed to fun. And I think not all the dogs in that class got the fun memo part.

Some of the students, thought this was a great idea. Some of them, told me why it wouldn’t work. A lot of reasons why. Some of them, just thought that was a dumb and useless idea. Didn’t have anything to do with agility. Doing a funny trick? Hello, they just need their dog to get over that first jump. Who has time to do a trick?

I wish I could show them all, each one of my dogs that took so long to get from square 1 to square 2. Ruby, the dog that hated other dogs, and thought agility meant run across the field to steal food out of people’s purses and sniff in the grass. I spent a lot of brain fry time in Ruby’s very first agility class, then someone showed me that whole clicker training thing, and BINGO. Good god. Ruby, Steeplechase Queen, the dog that anyone can run now and who runs always at lightening speed. A different dog morphed out of the evil, feral terrier I started with and her whole life changed for the better. Otterpop was mean and wanted nothing more than to bark her head off at each and every person that came near her. She’ll always be a little crotchetdy, that’s just her nature, but the power of the fun dog training created an agility dog that tries her hardest and amazes me with her ability to know exactly what I’m asking. Maybe not when I’m spazzing out during Masters Gamblers, but our goal is that she outthinks my spazzing out now. And can be near people without batting an eye. Usually. A work in progress. But who thinks training is more fun than anything else she knows, and always tries her hardest.

Training Gustavo has been unlike any kind of dog training I’ve ever done. I may have called untrainable. Under my breath. To myself, maybe sometimes here. Poor buddy. I feel bad when I think that and just need to go wash my brain out with dishwashing liquid. When I think that, it’s my brain starting to fry and I’m just not being creative enough. Have to make training u-turns all the time, and I know he’ll keep challenging me at every stage in his career and make me find better solutions again and again. But he has never, ever thought that anything in his training is less than one giant frat party and the beer never stops flowing.

Every different dog, always different. No one training solution going to work with everbody. And to stay one step ahead, always have to think different. What’s most important for the thinking to work, is that the dogs think they’re at one helluva knock down, drag out fiesta every single time they step out there, and that the party never ends. Agility can be hard sometimes for people to learn how to do. But if the dog’s tail isn’t wagging, it just ain’t going to happen.