Obedience for Agility

This class provides obedience foundation for all, as well as for those looking to move on to agility classes. You will need a good level of obedience to be able to move into the fast moving agility classes. However, obedience for agility focuses on behaviour that is useful in everyday situations. We strongly recommend that dogs enter this class as a preliminary to moving into the realms of agility. During the obedience lessons we teach a variety of behaviours using positive re-enforcements.

To ensure success we always suggest that you work with your dog in very small steps, to give them the best possible chance of getting the behaviour right, and therefore gaining a reward. If we set them too difficult a challenge, and they fail, and continue to fail, they will become de-motivated and lose all interest in us and our attempts to work with them. Because of this, we always suggest that you set yourself and your dog small and achievable tasks.

The more they get them right, the more they will enjoy working with you, and therefore the more you both will enjoy agility!

We always use an approach of positive reward based training.  This basically means that we reward the behaviour we want, and ignore the behaviour that we don’t want.  Try it for yourself, it really does work.

When learning a new piece of equipment or a new behaviour, we will help you break the behaviour down into very simple small steps. We all like to progress rapidly and learn lots, but by explaining the small steps involved, we can make sure that your dog gets the most positive experience possible. We call this approach backchaining, which fundamentally requires you to look at the behaviour you want to end up with, and work backwards until you get to the smallest basic step required to get the behaviour.

If your dog starts getting things wrong, or does not seem to understand what you are asking him/her to do, take the activity one step back to a level that you know they can achieve easily. In this way, you can get him/her going again, and get his/her brain hooked into what you are asking them. Then slowly move the activity forward again, but in a much smaller step than previously attempted, to ensure success.

So when you are in your first session, we will be asking you to reward your dog when they have produced the behaviour you have asked for.  Do not give them the reward “just for trying” or when they “almost got it” unless that was your specific intentional step in the back chaining sequence. Otherwise they will learn a different type of behaviour to the one you are trying to teach

.If they don’t get it right, don’t tell them off, or shout at them, just take them straight back to the start, and quietly ask them to do it again – followed hopefully by success and a great reward

!Our obedience for agility class focuses on:

• Handler movement

• Some introduction to agility equipment

• Allows an opportunity for dogs to develop their brain skills; in fact, you could say it is a mind gym for dogs!

Classes are held on a Monday afternoon and evening and cost £10 per class, payable on a monthly basis in advance.