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[00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Welcome to fostering excellence and agility, the podcast. I'm your host competitor, coach and mentor Megan Foster. I help agility enthusiast focus on the small details of training and behavior while still having a clear understanding of their big picture goals. Join me as I take you through key elements of dog agility, training, competing, and teaching, and how you can take action today to start improving your skills within the sport.
Let's get to. Welcome to episode five, where I am going to give you some tips and best practices when it comes to splitting, we've all heard the phrase, be a splitter, not a lumper. And I'm going to break that down for you. So I'm going to split that apart for you today in this episode, so that you can start applying it to your training as soon as you finish listening to this.
So splitting [00:01:00] behaviors. Is breaking them down into small enough pieces that the dog can access the correct answer easily so that there is no guesswork. The dog always knows how to win the game and that way your training can progress as quickly as possible. How I do. Typically depends on what I'm working on, but what I always want to do is I want to work backwards.
I want a very clear picture of what I would like the behavior to look like in competition. And so that gives me a really good understanding of the context that I would like this behavior to function in what distractions it needs to. Oh, hold up under what positions I'm going to be in, what I'm going to look like when this behavior is happening, what the environment around my dog is going to look like when this behavior is happening [00:02:00] and so forth.
So I want a very clear picture of what the finished product is going to look like, because that gives me a huge understanding of all of the generalization that I'm going to need to put into this behavior. And then I'm going to look at. Seeing seeing if this behavior can be broken down into several behaviors.
So for example, a the Teeter behavior that I love training so much, I have split into moving across a moving board is one behavior stopping in for on is a second behave. And releasing on a specific verbal cue is kind of the third main behavior to the Teeter. So then when you are completing the obstacle with your dog is run across the board, stop in the foreign physician and release when the magic word is, uh, said to the doc, right?
So I can then split those [00:03:00] three concepts apart and teach those three behaviors separately where the dog has no context of that. They belong together. So I can teach the dog how to move confidently and quickly across the board that moves. Or like a wobble board or a tippy board, something that they can just really get comfortable with things that are moving underneath them.
I'm going to train that behavior and acquire that skill separately. I'm also going to acquire the four on behavior separately, and I personally use backing up and shifting your weight back onto the board to teach that behavior, but it can be taught in so many different. And then also I want to teach my dog, the concept of staying put until they're released.
So we have these three different behaviors that then are going to get split apart even further. So we can then start breaking down the behavior [00:04:00] of going across the moving board. So I might mark and reward for the dog, looking at the moving board. Touching the moving board, one foot on the bore, two foot on the board, three foot on the board, four foot on the board walking across the board.
So I can split those behaviors down into small pieces so that no matter what my dog gives me in this situation, they are going to win. So I can progress that very quickly because I can see a lot of behaviors that are a correct answer, and I can progress along those correct answers to get me. Where I need it to look like.
So a confident dog walking across the entire board, and then I can put a cap on that until it's ready to be put together with my foreign behavior and the same thing with that four on behavior and the release mechanics. I can split that into very small pieces so that no matter what the dog gives me, they're going to win.
And I'm going to [00:05:00] progress along those behaviors. Until I'm ready to combine them all. So really when I set out to train any behavior, I'm looking to see how many individual behaviors are going into this and are all of those individual behaviors. Well-known and can I split them apart further? So this.
Usually happens when we're acquiring a behavior. I need to find the variations in that behavior that are acceptable. So just like my example before with getting on the moving board, I need to know that. One Paul on the board is acceptable, but lying down next to the board is not acceptable. So then I can set up my training session so that one paw on the board is more likely to happen.
So that's usually in the case of I'm going to put the board between myself and my dog. So then the dog has to come towards [00:06:00] me. They're more likely to put a pause on it. And then two pause, three, pause, four pause. Right. So put, setting up your session is. Just as important as seeing the splits and the behavior and the variations of behavior that you need in order to progress.
But once you have the behavior acquired, this is usually the simple, the more simple tasks when it comes to agility behaviors. Once you have that behavior required, you've got a dog that's moving over a board they're stopping in for on, and they're waiting for. Are we done? Are we done with the splitting?
Are we done with the training? What else is there to do? And that's when we want to talk about splitting the variations in the conditions and those conditions may include handler distractions, reinforcer, distractions, distance, or duration, [00:07:00] maybe some things within the environment or other people standing by other dogs standing.
Other people and dogs engaging in exciting activities. These are all part of that big picture that we started this conversation. So we all need our dog to perform the acquired behavior in a variety of conditions. And when we clearly define what those conditions are, we have a better understanding of splitting those conditions.
And we need most of this if we're going to transition into competition. But the cool thing about variations in conditions is that we don't necessarily have to do Teeter. In public with people in dog standing by, because we can split that piece apart. We can say, well, I can't bring a full Teeter, but I can [00:08:00] bring a station and I can practice my dog moving onto the station and waiting for a release cue.
With people coming in and out home Depot, I can practice my release mechanics. I can practice my dog stopping on a station and waiting for release, which is a huge concept of the Teeter outside of the dog park. So you can split the conditions to make them work for you, and you can take pieces and different variations of that before.
And dogs are amazing at generalizing when we bring the different concepts to different contexts. So generalizing is just a concept obtained by inference from specific cases. So if I've previously trained my dog to stop on a station and wait for a release and I've trained that. In my house, I should be able to [00:09:00] go outside to my yard and repeat that and then go to a, an empty parking lot and repeat that and then go outside home Depot and repeat that.
So we don't necessarily have to rehearse the entire picture, the entire. Ring routine as it is with all the equipment and all the re-engaging, but we can take pieces of those behaviors, the concepts that build those behavior and put them into different conditions. And when we do that, when we build. A lot of different variations into our training.
We are expanding the dogs fluency and we are expanding the dog's ability to generalize similar concepts, similar things that they already know. They're very good at. We give them that ability to do them in a, in novel [00:10:00] locations, in a variety. Of situations, but we, they need to be able to fall back on concepts that they know and understand.
Okay. So a couple of examples that just happened with me recently, I was working with a client that the. Dog was breaking commitment to a reverse spin. So the handler would start to give the cue completely on time. The mechanics were great, but the dog was breaking commitment. The handler's position happened to be on the takeoff side of the job.
Like you usually would be when you are queuing a turn. So the condition. Of the handler's position was too much of a distraction to the dog's ability to maintain commitment. So what we had to do was we removed the speed so that we could set up the training session to kind of [00:11:00] control as many variables as we could.
And I placed the handler closer to the landing side of the job. So now everything is the exact. But the location is going to be supporting more extension. So a landing site location is going to be supporting the dog to commit and stay committed to the obstacle. So we put the dog in a familiar concept of take this jump to work through the unfamiliar bit of I'm going to disconnect from you.
When I do this reverse spin, I have to look away to complete the reverse. So then over very, very quickly, actually, within a few reps, the handler was in the original location. They were able to complete the river spend. Well, before the dog took off the dog completely understood what was happening and we got to success very quickly.
But it was because we could find that split and the one variable. So we didn't want to change the timing. We didn't want [00:12:00] to use a pre place reward more than once. This dog is very experienced and has very good obstacle, focus and commitment skills. So we wanted to progress very quickly. So the quickest way forward was splitting the handler's position and bingo.
It worked really, really well.
Second example I have for kind of splitting and changing the conditions around what's happening is a young dog learning a channel weaves. So once we give the dog. The skill of going back and forth through a wide open channel of weeds, that behavior isn't really changing, and it's not going to change for a long time until the weave poles are close enough together that the dog has to start changing their body, changing their behavior, and actually start weaving.
So one, we are going to change the width of that channel [00:13:00] every single time that that dog sees the weaves. And they're going to be. In perceivable changes, we're going to change by a quarter inch, half an inch so that the dog doesn't go, Hey, now wait. That's different, but we're going to change it ver pretty quickly.
So if the dog is seeing at once a week, we're going to change it every single week. Because when you start with wide channel, that looks nothing like the finished product. So that's, we've split that behavior down massively. But we've split it down so much that it doesn't look anything like the finished picture.
And when you split something down that far, you should have massive amounts of success and you should be able to progress very quickly. And that's generally just a rule that I keep in mind. Is that the smaller, I break it down. The further I am from my finished product, the faster I want to progress because I don't want my dog to get stuck.
I don't want the dog to learn. [00:14:00] A two foot wide channel is weaving, right? However, while we're making those in perceivable changes to the width of the channel, what we are doing and that the dog is noticing is we are changing. All of those other conditions constantly, we're changing where the handler is.
We're changing how we reinforce. We're going to change the distance that the dog has to travel, to seek out the channel and that the handler is from the channel itself. So we're going to be manipulating all of the conditions, every single rep, because the dog. Rely on that. The answer is the same every single time.
So the dog can generalize that when I see this thing, this wide open channel, I see this big, huge piece of equipment that is a ginormous queue. I can generalize it. The answer is the same, regardless of the conditions around. And when we are training and observing, [00:15:00] if we notice any difference and the dog's behavior, like does the dog slow down or does the dog not want to reset for another rep?
If we notice anything? Different about the loop. We can look back and go, okay, what were the conditions surrounding that loop? All right. Can we split those conditions even finer? You know, do I need to take smaller steps and in difference in the distance from the obstacle. So instead of moving two feet away from the weave poles at a time, maybe I need to.
Work in one foot increments and things like that. So that's where we have to go back to our skills in loopy training to make sure that we're not taking on too big of bites and our splitting that we're not kind of glossing over. Specific conditions just because the dog is still doing it. Right. And I put right in quotation marks, because anytime that we are training, we [00:16:00] have to be aware that we are always kind of after that finished product.
So again, I'm going to keep this channel we've example with this young dog, the dog is running through the channel with a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of forward drive. So, if we start to see that there are no longer kind of moving through with a lot of enthusiasm with the focus forward and that level of confidence, even though they're doing it right, I don't want to see confidence and enthusiasm loss for the sake of progression.
So if I do see that I'm going to look at the variations and the conditions that I can maybe split down more so that the dog is able to access. The correct behavior and the optimal level of enthusiasm and confidence.
I tried to make that [00:17:00] as simple and cut to the chase as I could, because I think I could talk for a long time about splitting behaviors. But the main thing that I want you to think about is that. Most of the time, I feel like we are really, really, really good at acquiring the behavior and even splitting the behavior down small enough that we acquire the kind of finished product really easily and really quickly, where I think we need to spend most of our training is splitting those variations and conditions.
So going from your backyard to your training class, to the trial, Is not adequate splitting, in my opinion. I think there needs to be a lot more nuance to that where we do have to put in a little bit more effort to take our equipment places or go to other places with equipment. Or like I said, take concepts [00:18:00] of those skills and bring them to novel environments.
I think we should spend a lot more time in this area, especially in agility so that when you were doing. C's the weevils or the Teeter or their start line in a new situation. They have a lot of previous information to draw on. They have a lot of practice generalizing. They have a lot of practice going, oh, all of these things, all of these cues are exactly the same.
The setup is exactly the same, but all of this stuff around me is different. But that's never mattered before, so it doesn't matter now. And they're still able to access that correct answer. So that's kind of the takeaway I want you to take with you on this one is that we need to focus more on splitting the variations in the conditions that we're asking our dog to perform in and working through as much as we can and [00:19:00] taking any opportunity that we have to practice these things.
So obviously I just talked about how so much of that helps us in training and I just sorta touched on it and how obviously it helps us in competition, because if you show up to a new location and your dog is like, oh yeah, the routine has been set. I see the obstacles. I see that my ring entry is the same and my start line and routine is the same and they can go, oh yeah, I know.
I know the answer. They're going to feel more confident. You're going to have much better success rate in the competition ring than if you only had practice and rehearsal of all of these things at home and at class. Right? So it's just the difference. It doesn't even matter if you go to class every week, it's not going to build as much fluency and that.
The variations and conditions [00:20:00] because dogs, habituate to the dogs that they have in class, the people that they have in class. So even though it's a new night, a lot of dogs are like, yeah, but these are the same people and the same things and same everything. And so the more that we can introduce them to novelty and differences in those condition.
The easier it is for them to show up at a trial where everything is different and constantly changing and they know, yeah, I know what I'm here for. People let's do it. And if you are coaching or helping people or modeling behavior for four people, I would say that, you know, Encourages students to build training groups together.
So if you go to class with some people, if you have students in the class together, maybe encourage them to meet up outside of class at a dog park, taking some of their skills to. Uh, public park or the dog park or some pet friendly store so that they're practicing, [00:21:00] observing their dog's behavior and novel environments.
And that's valuable information. Like you don't have to go to a dog show to generalize your dog's behavior at a dog show. You don't have to inter a dog show to find out if your dog's behavior has generalized to this location or not. There's a lot that we can be doing. And. For a lot of people that out there, maybe new to the sport or new to dog training in general, they don't know any of this.
They don't know to go do this. They don't know that they need to practice outside of their weekly class. And they don't know that they don't need massive amounts of equipment to get it done. So if you are coaching, if you are mentoring people, if you are teaching people, I would add that to your curriculum notes, to just suggest to people how they.
Practice without access to agility equipment, how they can practice without access to a facility [00:22:00] without having to go to a trial without entering a trial. Okay, next. I want to answer a question from the synergy experts community on mighty networks. The question is from Nikki and they ask, I heard about the technique of teaching a two on two off by teaching the dog to back up into the.
I'm finally there with my border Collie puppy, but I'm at a loss as how to turn it into a full two on two off behavior. I can have him put his feet at the end of the plank and I can have him back up into it. But what do I do when he is walking to the end of the plank to have him stop in the right position?
He won't actually be backing up onto the dog walk. So his backup cue won't work. Okay. So Nikki, the backing up into position is a. Strategy for getting the dog to be thinking about the behavior as a rear foot behavior. So that, so it connects the dog's ability [00:23:00] to maintain contact between their rear feet and the board.
So this is very similar to what I was talking about in the very beginning of this podcast episode about splitting the, the finished behavior into several concepts. So if we're talking about a two on two off dog walk, your, the, your concepts are moving across. The entire three pieces of the dog walk with speed and confidence, then they're stopping in two, on two off, and then there's waiting for the release.
So basically you've acquired the two on two off behavior via backing up. So your dog understands to back up until their rear feet have made contact with the board. Now that needs to be attached to the other two concepts of the behavior. One, it needs to be attached to waiting for a specific release queue or the next obstacle queue, obviously.
And also it now needs to be transitioned into coming from [00:24:00] forward, right. Coming across the full, the full boards. Um, so when I'm, when I'm usually doing this and I don't mind this as a strategy at all, I do use backing up into. For my Teeter behavior. So when I'm doing this, I alternate. So I am sitting in front of my little wobble board, and first I let the dog back up into position and then I mark and release them off to the side.
So now they have to find that same position. From a sideways approach and what you'll start to see carried over. You're obviously going to lose the very precise backing up because that's not what we want in the full picture, but what you should see is that the dog is really understanding that it's their rear feet that needs to move to stay in contact with the.
Okay. So regardless of your position, they're trying really hard to cement their rear feet at the end of the board. And so then I mark and reward them often [00:25:00] front so that they can back up onto it. And then I mark and reward so that they can to the other side, so that they can start to generalize the concept of two on two off and cement your rear.
To the board from different positions. And then with the dog walk, I could just start moving them further and further back. So I could put them at the, in the middle of the down ramp and have them come towards me. I would be in the front and then I would have to start generalizing my position. But first you need to connect those three pieces.
So that's where you need to start getting the backup behavior transitioned into a two on two off behavior. And what, like I said, what you should see is that the concept of maintain rear feet in contact with the board is what the backing up has taught the dog. Even though it's not a part of the final behavior.
Best of luck and definitely send [00:26:00] us an update in the mighty network.
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