Well, maybe you can’t completely train a running dogwalk in your living room. But when Francoise (Sassie) Joiris found herself in a position where she could only get access to a dogwalk once a week, she decided she needed a creative solution.
Sassie is a professional animal trainer who has done extensive film, television and print work with her Norfolk Terrier Stamp. In addition to Stamp, Sassie has a Whippet named Boing that she also trains in agility. Sassie was unsatisfied with Boing’s Dogwalk performance and was having a hard time progressing as quickly as she wanted to because she couldn’t get Boing on real equipment often enough. But Sassie didn’t want that to be an excuse.
“I always swore I wouldn’t be one of those people who used where I live as an excuse for my dog’s shabby performance. Sometimes I do feel a little put upon since I live in an apartment and my dogs generally only get to work at a real agility facility with contacts etc. once or sometimes twice a week, nevertheless, there are always ways to get around problems.”
So she ended up with the setup that you see above. She has Comfort King agility matting over an 18 x 6 foot section of her living room for cushioning and traction.
Recent Dogwalk Training With Boing
More Running Contact Training
Here is another video from a different angle where you can see the entire setup.
There are more pictures and discussion of her training on Sassie’s blog. In particular, these three recent posts discuss her running dogwalk training.
- June 21, 2009 More videos and pictures of the setup
- June 22,2009 More video and a fair bit of comment and discussion.
- June 25, 2009 Watch for the cat distraction. Can your dog handle that?
Boing is being retrained from a stopped contact so there are always added difficulties in that situation. Sassie is using a modified combination of the Roukas-Canova method and the Trkman method and has had this setup for about three weeks now. You can definitely see the progress with the extra training time.
Quoting Sassie:
“I’ll have to see what the long term result is, but I think it’s going to have been worth the effort.”
I think Sassie is an inspiration for us all to look honestly at our training and make sure we are doing all that we can do, in order to get the results we want!
There is more video of all sorts of agility training on Sassie’s YouTube Channel. You can learn about more Sassie and Stamp at Sassies’s web site.
Tags: Canova Method, Dogwalk, Mixed Method, Training, Trkman Method