E73: 수 얼스비(Sue Ailsby) - 기초부터 랠리 링까지

And a lot of the behaviors in rally are really foundation behaviors for all dogs, like sit and down and come and walking on a loose leash and brief stays. A lot of people try it because it looks easy and then give up because they don't have a swing finish or the attention they need from the dog. Since those are behaviors that make life with a dog easier anyway, I just want to spread the love. One of the things I really like about rally is how casual it is. It's great to qualify. It's great to get a good score. It's really great to impress people with a good run, but it's easy to fail too. So failing becomes sort of normal. Like you're not in there going, I lost more than two points, so I'm a failure and my dog's a failure. Out of non-qualifying performances, if out of 10 non-qualifying performances, I'll bet my dog has screwed up twice and I've screwed up eight times. After one of my performances, a judge stopped me to address the audience before I left the ring. She said, that was truly one of the best one, two, three step backwards I've ever seen. I hope you were all watching. It was so good. Unfortunately, that wasn't the exercise the sign called for. So this is not a passing score. That's so funny. People come in and say, you know, but what if I fail? No big deal. Everybody else has failed. Why shouldn't you? Right. You mentioned in there that it's kind of friendly and fun. And I think that that's certainly one of the things that most people kind of find about rally that appeals to them, right? Um, it's a little more friendly maybe than some of the, uh, traditional obedience venues for lack of a better way, I guess. They tend to get kind of competitive sometimes. A little bit, a little bit. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about kind of some of the similarities and differences between the two sports. If somebody is maybe debating which one they want to compete in or which one they want to compete in first. Okay. Um, you don't have to decide between rally and obedience because practicing for rally, if you're aiming for obedience, you can practice for rally and it's not certainly not wasted practice. And if you're doing obedience, you're learning stuff that you need to learn for rally anyway. So you can start working on one or the other or both at once and decide later what you want to do. If you, if you just want to do one of them, obedience, um, the difference is in the focus of the sport. Obedience competition is about precision. Rally is about lots of different behaviors in a flow more, more like you'd use for going for a walk. As a former rider, I'd say obedience is like dressage.

Can you make this movement perfectly? And rally is like Western trail class. Can you do this behavior here? And then that behavior over there, can we get through this course together? It's the togetherness that, that brings on a good performance. So you're working on a team basically, which you are in obedience too. But I think it, it comes a little more naturally in rally. Some people start in rally and then move into obedience or, or like you said, you kind of got your obedience titles first and then you went back and did the rally titles for fun. Kind of interesting how they they're different, but similar, you know, I can't talk about kind of a sport, right. Without getting into foundations. I feel like every interview I do, that's kind of the word that comes up over and over and over again. You know, I'd love to kind of hear your take on that for, for rally, what skills you consider foundation skills or what, what are some of the skills that dogs need before they begin training for rally? One of the things that I really like about being part of the FENSE Academy is that none of the instructors do things exactly the same way. And yet more than any other group of instructors that I've ever met, the FENSE instructors believe in foundations right across the board. You don't start with fancy stuff. You start with the foundations and the fancy stuff grows naturally out of it. As a foundation to begin rally, I'd like the dog to know what the clicker is for. A general understanding of sit and down and focusing on the handler. And a dog who has those skills already is going to progress really for any sport. Focus is a foundation. When I don't have the dog's attention, I'm not working on anything but focus. If we're doing a pivot, I'm trying to teach her a pivot, and the dog's brain is on a kid walking by, we're not working on pivots. The fact that I wanted to work on a pivot is really irrelevant. We're working on focus. Until we have focus, there's no other work happening. Focus is the primary indication of teamwork between the dog and the handler. I'd rather walk into the rally ring or any other ring with a focused dog who knows nothing else than with a dog who knows all about the sport behaviors but isn't on my team yet. That's something a lot of people kind of overlook. They do train at home or, you know, whatever, and they get a lot of skills on their dog, and then they go out in the real world and they can't replicate those behaviors because they're kind of missing that piece of the puzzle. To kind of put aside the dog for a minute, though, I know that you also talk a little

bit about handler skills, and you mentioned earlier that goofing up in the rally ring, there's a good chance it wasn't the dog's fault. What are some of the things that handlers need to teach themselves in order to do the sport? There are sport-specific things and there are training-specific things. I'll talk about the training-specific things first. First, pay attention to the dog. Look at the dog. Think about the dog. Ask the dog. Believe the dog. Respond when she asks you questions. Take her questions seriously. You don't understand her question? That's okay. She doesn't understand you half the time either. But she's still in there trying. Let her know that you're trying too. If she keeps asking you a question and you keep giving her the same old answer, you're not answering her question. Because if you did, she wouldn't have to keep asking it. And it drives me crazy when some dog is sitting there, I don't understand you. What are you doing? And they keep going, sit, sit, sit. It drives us all crazy, actually. As to what the person as a handler needs to learn in rally is the rules like you do for any sport. But the hardest part is walking into the ring and having to read the signs. The judge is not telling you what to do. You walk up to a sign on the course and the course, the sign will say, sit, down, sit. That means you have to get your dog to sit and down and sit back up again. When you've done that, you walk on to the next sign. And it can be really hard to remember to take your dog with you, to read the sign, to get the dog to do what he's supposed to do before he does something he's not supposed to do. It gets really complicated. And for that reason, once a week we have a practice course in the class based on the behaviors that the dog's been working on that week. Yeah, I certainly imagine getting in there and trying to read on your feet and stick with things. It can throw you for a bit of a loop sometimes if you forgot what comes next or misread a sign in your haste or because of nerves. And since you're doing this all on your own, you think about walking on and suddenly you realize you walked past the previous sign. And then you either skip it and don't qualify or you have to kind of back up and hope you can see what it says on the sign or try to remember it. Or it's really not as easy as it looks without practice. I know in the syllabus for the class, you have a comment in there about mirrors and you recommend students invest in a few cheap mirrors and wanted to ask kind of how that comes into play or what that's about. That's about looking at your dog.

Your eyes are five feet off the ground. Your dog is 18 inches off the ground. And there's no point in wondering later why the judge took five marks off for crooked sits when you have no idea whether your dog's sitting crooked or not. And you can't see from where you are. If you have a mirror five feet away from you, you can actually see what the judge is seeing from feet away. So you can see crooked sits. If you can see a crooked sit, you can work on crooked sits and maybe not lose those five points or lose them if you, that's the nice thing about rally. If you want to say, you know what? My dog's having a good time. I'm having a good time. I don't care about those five points. Then you don't have to work on them. But at least you know that they're happening. So the rally one class is the first in a series, right? So I was curious how you've broken down what people need to know into the different classes and what specifically kind of falls into that rally one class, what students should expect to learn the first session. The first class is about foundations, back to foundations. The behaviors that we meet in a novice level rally test are really based on basics, foundations, focus, learning how to handle courses, training for the dog and the handler. In the second class, then we get into advanced competition behaviors, healing while walking backwards instead of forwards, drop on recall, around and over and through different objects. The two dozen different ways to change healing sides and turn around. That's where it really gets to be fun. How do those skills then kind of progress as students go through the series? That's one of the things I like best about rally. Every behavior in the advanced levels is based on the foundation behaviors from the novice levels. It was really well set up that way. You and your dog are healing. You and the dog do a 180 degree turn to the right or to the left. That's novice. In an advanced level, the question is, can you turn left while your dog turns right or vice versa? If you can do that, can you do it twice in a row? And as you may have realized, my middle name is foundations. So my training is all about getting the novice stuff solid so you don't have to be desperately trying to get a more advanced behavior later. The advanced stuff, as I said, should flow naturally from what the dog already knows. So we start with an easy behavior and then we make it more difficult and more difficult as you go up through the levels. I believe when I was reading over the description, you also said that there's a lot of crossover between the different venues. Is that right?

So you kind of cover skills that are the kind of cross venue, right? Right. It's not specifically for the rally, different rally that we have in Canada or in the United States or people in Europe have taken the class because they wanted to do online rally. I went through as many different rally venues as I could find, read the rules, picked out the behaviors. And there are places where in one venue you have to stop before you do this or, but that's a rule change. That's not really relevant to how the dog is trained. We're pretty much using behaviors that are across the board. So it should be useful for anybody, no matter where they are. So anything else you want to share about the class or either what you're covered or, you know, who should take it? We've had classes where most of the dogs already had a rally title or two. And we've had classes where very few of them had really any training at all. So what we get is what we'll handle. We'll go with the flow and hope we can show everybody how much fun they can have in the rally ring. Awesome. So I've got one last question here for you, Sue. What's a lesson you've learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? Oh, I'm always getting reminded of things that I forgot. I don't want to be boring, but I have to go back to foundations. My Portuguese water dog has been on bed rest for three weeks. And yesterday I discovered she has completely forgotten the idea of stay. She's seven years old. She has titles in five different venues and she can't remember how to stay. My giant schnauzer, we've been camping for two weeks. He's been walking with my husband on leash in the forest. And he has completely forgotten that he used to have a beautiful loose leash walk. I would be absolutely hysterical about both of these problems right now if it wasn't for the foundations. My porty has water trials coming up in a month for which I have to travel large distances. The giant schnauzer puppy weighs 100 pounds and I just had shoulder surgery. I need those behaviors. The good part is that I've put a lot of effort into foundations. I know that I can shoot back to the beginning and I'll have those behaviors back in less than a week. I don't have to get all excited about it and, oh, oh, oh, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? I'll have them back in less than a week. So the one thing that I always am reminded of is do not forget your foundations. That's it. And I think that's a good reminder. And it's nice to hear that I'm not the only one who struggles sometimes occasionally with the dog who seems to forget that they have a skill.

So my German shepherd's notorious for that particular bout of memory loss. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Melissa. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with Dr. Jennifer Summerfield to talk about behavior medications, kind of chat about them before she has a webinar on those the following week so you guys can get a sneak peek. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.