[00:00:00] Hey there. If you're an agility nerd, you're in the right place. You're listening to fostering excellence in agility. I'm Megan, your resident agility competitor, coach, and mentor. And this podcast is where I break down all things agility and guide you on your path to excellence. Are you ready? Let's go.
Okay, okay. Today we are talking about bar knocking. Whether your dog knocks a lot of bars or just knocks a bar every now and then, I think that you will get something out of this episode today. First, we have to cover Why do bars [00:01:00] fall in the first place? Basically, the answer is the dog hits the bar or the wing or some part of the jump with enough force to bring the bar down.
That may seem obvious, but I think it's important as we move forward because we have to be able to explain this to the learner in order to control it. Okay? So let's go further. Why does the dog hit the bar? Well, first one, they didn't jump high enough. Maybe they slipped. So it could have been a surface issue.
You know, the dirt could have moved from under them. The grass could be a little bit too long or a little bit too wet. Maybe the turf is a little bit Worn or in need of maintenance. We just don't know. Dogs can slip. [00:02:00] Maybe the hair on their feet is too long. Maybe their nails are not at the appropriate length for the surface.
Dogs slip. They make mistakes. Uh, third option, maybe they're reacting to late handling. Maybe they're trying their best, but over the bar, they're getting very valuable information and they are supposed to react to that information. And so they do, and it causes them to knock the bar. Maybe they don't have enough education about jumping.
Maybe they don't have enough natural ability with jumping. Or maybe they are simply out of condition for the jumping task that has been put in front of them. This could be because they are out of condition for the sport of agility, maybe they have an injury. We don't really know until we do some sleuthing, some [00:03:00] investigating.
So what do we do about it? So number one, uh, especially if bar knocking starts kind of out of nowhere, or it seems surprising, physical examination, right? We're going to go looking for. A physical reason why the dog might be knocking bars all of a sudden. But this is also the same place that I would start if a seemingly healthy dog just can't seem to get over bars.
We need to look and make sure that the dog's physical conditioning is setting the dog up for success with the jumping. This is something that, over the past 25 years, my story has changed. Uh, for the first, uh, I don't even know how many years, [00:04:00] but for a long time, I held the belief that if the dog was in good physical condition and could see, so the physical condition does include the eyes, that they probably will be able to get over the bar with minimal training and minimal conditioning.
They'll, you know, you teach them how to do things and how to follow the handling and they'll be fine. And the dogs that came to me and came into my life supported this story and this belief. So I was able to hold onto it for quite a long time, but of course the sport has evolved and the dogs that I. Was presented with changed and the teams that I was working with changed and my own self care journey changed and I stopped thinking of myself as well.
I'm young and I'm capable so I can do this without any additional [00:05:00] training or conditioning. So my whole story has evolved to now include. Not only fitness and conditioning for both myself and my dog, but also more targeted jump training. Not so much that I have a very specific jumping program that I'm going to run every single dog through no matter what.
I think all of you know me better than that than to have such a cookie cutter recipe for every dog that I see. But it's not off the table for me like it used to be. So now, fitness and conditioning are non negotiable for me with my agility dogs. But the jumping education that they receive I'm not going to [00:06:00] put the same amount of effort into training extension with a dog like Sprint as I am with, say, my Terrier, Shrek, right?
The things that come more easily to them, I'm not going to put as much training into it. I'm going to Keep the scales as balanced as possible, but I'm always going to be open to more specific jump training rather than just relying on. The natural physical cues that I know that dogs respond to naturally and now I fully understand that It's not enough of an education for them to understand how to follow the handling and have natural ability I want them to have the whole picture.
So that's just a little side note of how My thoughts on jumping has changed over the years But it does go back [00:07:00] to the same, to the, the same point that I have always believed in is that if we have a bar knocking problem, we want to start first with the dog's physical condition. It's going to be up to every individual to define problem.
Because if it's not a problem for you, then you're probably not going to put in the effort of going through this list of solutions that I'm going to lay out in the rest of this episode. So if your dog's not knocking, You know, one or two bars a weekend. Maybe you're not thinking about it very much, and it's not a problem for you, so you're, you're not going to go through, uh, much effort, if any, at all.
But if that is a problem for you, maybe those one or two bars a [00:08:00] weekend are happening on, on runs that are really important to you, and so you are going to put in the effort to make changes to this. It may be, it's 10 bars a weekend. It's completely up to you to decide what is a problem and what isn't a problem.
That's not for me to decide, but we do have solutions for you. So the first one is kind of, if it's not a problem for you, it's a nothing burger. Dogs make mistakes. And I am very quick to put this. out there for most dogs and in most situations. That, yeah, it can be frustrating when it's a bar in a very important run or it's a bar that was a surprise to you.
But generally speaking, I'm gonna start here. I'm gonna go, eh, dogs make [00:09:00] mistakes. This is kind of a nothing burger. I'm gonna need more evidence that this is a problem before I put in a lot of effort. Second, I'm, also need to accept. Or decide, sometimes, bar knocking is out of our control. Okay, sometimes, you know, this does kind of fall under the umbrella of dogs make mistakes.
And we have to accept that. How much we accept that, that depends on the type of person you are. We also can't completely control the quality of the surface when we get there. We can control if we choose to run our dog on that surface or not. So a lot of these things, uh, sometimes we can, you know, look at a video and analyze it to death and just decide this was something that neither myself or the dog could control.
So [00:10:00] I'm going to let it go. Third, I feel Very, very strongly that we cannot hold dogs responsible for knocking bars if we are not holding ourselves responsible for appropriate timing of cues and consistent handling. So a very common progression that I see is a handler with chronically late timing. The dog is always getting the information on the landing.
The dog's turns are maybe a little bit wide, maybe the dog is a little bit frustrated, but the dog is clearing the bar because he's jumping every single jump, kind of an extension, and then getting the information on the ground. As we start to change this, It's counterintuitive, but [00:11:00] I sometimes start to see the dog knocking bars because now the information is starting to come sooner.
Instead of it coming really late, the dog has already landed. Now the handler is starting to give the information earlier, but now the dog is already in the air. And they're over the bar, and we're getting information. And because that information has been chronically late, the dog has learned that I need to react to it as soon as I can get it.
So this habit of the dog's is still active, even though the handler's habit is changing. So we know that Good timing is that the dog doesn't have to process information while they're jumping, that they get all the jumping, uh, all of the information about how to jump before they take off for that current jump.
So we're only, uh, talking to them with our bodies or our verbal cues between the obstacles. Preferably, proactively between [00:12:00] the obstacles, rather than reactively after the obstacle. But as that changes, as that handler starts to go from very late, reactively handling, to starting to get sooner and sooner, we can actually see regression in the dog's behavior so it looks, on paper, because that's just the normal progression of things.
So we have to know the history to know if this bar knocking Is the dog's issue or is this a handling issue? Usually as we progress the timing, we might see other problems. Like we might get some refusals because the dog has never really experienced early proactive handling cues. So we might start, we might stop seeing bar knocking, but we might start seeing refusals and we just have to know what's going on in that dog and that handlers teamwork to actually understand [00:13:00] why these bars are falling.
But again, I, as a handler, need to commit to appropriate timing of cues consistently before I'm going to hold my dog responsible for keeping the bars up while figuring out my handling. So that's where I'm always going to start after that very big deep dive into injury and physical condition, going to make sure that the handling is adequate.
I'm also going to make sure that my dog's commitment and keeping commitment skills are good enough for me to have adequate timing, because that's a pretty big cycle, uh, that can happen. If the dog has a lack of commitment, then that is going to [00:14:00] feed directly into Untimely handling. So we, we want to make sure that just the core handling skills on both the handler and the dog's part are adequate.
And then I'm going to dive into the education of those jumping skills. So, if the timing is adequate and the dog is committing and keeping commitment, but the dog isn't changing the way that they jump, isn't able to You know, adapt their body to either a slicing effort, or maybe they're hitting the wing, or they're not collecting.
I need to do a deep dive into their education of that movement. Uh, this, you know, choose your expert. And go into a [00:15:00] deep dive with them from there. Uh, it really depends on who you admire in the sport for their expertise on jumping and I'll put a couple of resources in the show notes. I personally, uh, I have for a long time followed Linda Mecklenburg and her genius, uh, when it comes to jumping and dog agility, and also I'm very lucky to have locally Dr.
Leslie Eyde of the Total Canine for all of my sport med needs for the dogs, but also working with her online via her Jump Into Shape. Those are kind Those are my two experts in my corner that when I'm seeing A lack of education and a dog. Those are the two resources that I'm going to go to, to try and fill in this [00:16:00] hole.
Obviously we can think about issues of motivation or arousal when it comes to bar knocking and I mean, that's certainly going to be more complicated. I don't think that bar knocking is going to be the first problem to solve. If we have issues of motivation or arousal. Because there's tons of things that we can do before the dog ever even sees a jump to fix those issues.
So that's gonna be a different story for a different day. But if everything else is looking really good, and this is the problem, That is kind of eating at you. This bar knocking problem. I'm going to say first start with a physical deep dive. Make sure that that [00:17:00] dog is not compensating for some minor injury that they're not masking any sort of pain.
It doesn't have to be like muscle pain or Something like an injury. It can be an illness that's causing internal pain, or, um, we can't really ask. the dogs about brain fog or headaches, but you know, I assume that they get those things as well. So if we're having some abnormal behavior, we're going to first rule out anything physical, and that could be not just injuries, but health as well.
Then we're going to analyze our timing, our handling. And also the dog's ability to commit and stay committed because those two are so closely [00:18:00] connected. We can't have good timing without good commitment. Now we're going to analyze the dog's education of those jumping efforts, and sometimes it's a really easy thing to find.
If your dog isn't preparing for a slicing effort, and that's why they're knocking the bar, it's really easy to go back and ask yourself, okay, what specific exercises have I done for This, this jumping effort, and if it's nothing, because we were banking on natural ability, which is fine with me, that's, I'm fine with that as a starting point, but natural ability isn't enough, we need to fill in those gaps with education.
And from there, everything should start to change, especially if you're working with [00:19:00] an expert, they will be able to see things that you may not be able to see. You ready? But they'll teach you how to see them and they'll teach you whatever fitness and conditioning exercises that might be necessary to fill in those gaps.
And they'll have the jumping exercises necessary to fill in those gaps. I know that when this comes up in my coaching program. I will definitely give the information that I have, and I will point out the things that I see, and then I will also point them directly to the experts that I find the most valuable.
And the beauty of the coaching program being a membership is that I don't have to have worked with every person out there in the sport of dog agility because my members have probably worked with people that I haven't worked with, you know, especially in the day of all of this online [00:20:00] education being available.
So even if I. don't have the expert that that person needs, another member can come in and be like, well, I worked with this person on this specific issue and we made so much progress and we can make those recommendations from there. So it's really liberating for me that I don't have to be the sole expert on all things dog agility.
I can know a lot about a lot of things. And I also know where the end of my lane is and where another expert's lane would begin. And I am very quick to encourage my students to go out and seek the education of someone that's better suited to help them. So, if you are working with someone, either online or in person, and you're not seeing the [00:21:00] progress that you need to be seeing, I'm encouraging you to talk with them, ask for some different resources, talk to your friends, ask for different resources, because I'm pretty sure that someone out there can help you solve this problem.
Before I round this out, I want to also share how I would kind of address these things. As all of these things kind of get cleaned up, so I've, you know, the dog is physically healthy and in good conditioning, the timing is good, the skills are good, the education is robust, and now, now we have something for both of us to be responsible for, and I need the bars to stay up.
The biggest thing. That I see is a lack of consistency with this [00:22:00] issue is that sometimes people do stop for the bars coming down Sometimes they don't stop for the bars coming down and it really depends on the type of dog you have How I would react but I do know that if I intend to react for bars falling I need to commit to reacting every time a bar falls And I'm also going to throw out there that we might need to be paying attention to any time the dog comes into contact with the bar or the wing, even if the bar doesn't fall.
Because if we go back to that original definition, or that answer of why do bars fall, the dog hits the bar with enough force. The dog hits the wing with enough force. That's the only thing that the dog can control, [00:23:00] I guess, is contact with the bar. And so that is the criteria that I'm usually looking for.
And like I said, it really depends on the temperament of the dog. And if they care that they're knocking the bar, I will say that the less that they care, I think the more important it is to uphold that criteria. Not that I want them to. be afraid when they knock a bar or run away when they knock a bar.
I'm not looking for that at all, but if they don't know that they're doing it, if they aren't aware, I think that's what I mean. Um, for example, my border collie shock, she is what we refer to as the wrecking ball. Around the house. She will push anything over. She will push you over. She will, you know, get her head stuck in a baby gate trying to get out of it first.
She is a wrecking [00:24:00] ball. Um, she was not a bar knocker when in agility at all, but she would have been the type that if she had crashed through a jump, she would have just kept going. She would have not noticed at all. So, if I felt like knocking bars was a problem with her, I would have needed to be very consistent in stopping her every time she touched a bar because if she touches a bar or touches the wing and then gets to keep running, it is being reinforced.
So that's something I really have to pay attention to with dogs like that is, are they even aware? Versus Sprint, my nearly three year old youngster. She cares very much. She doesn't want to touch anything. She's, um, the opposite of a wrecking ball. Um, she is very aware. Of things that [00:25:00] move or that might move.
Um, so she's, she's not going to be one that crashes into a jump and then just keeps going. She is going to be the one that if she crashes into a jump, you will be able to see her response. She will be upset because that's who she is. So, with a dog like Sprint, I don't have to make her aware of it. I don't have to, um, stop her every time.
I know she knows that she hit it and that she already found that very aversive and upsetting enough. So she's one that I can, uh, usually let things go. If she knocks a bar or she touches a wing, um, it very rarely happens twice in a row. And so I don't have to be as on top of it. Uh, but that [00:26:00] does mean that I have to know my dog's temperament and just how they respond to these things naturally and, and go from there.
So with Shock, like I said, I never had to make, make it a big deal. Um, but, That sort of personality, that sort of wrecking ball personality, I would have had to stop for every contact with a jump. And with a dog like sprint, I am very relaxed about it. When she does come into contact with a jump, I'm not paying much attention to it until it's the same.
Mistake, uh, especially more than twice in a row, so if it's very clear to me that she can't figure out how not to, then it's very obvious to me that she doesn't know how, and that's where education needs to come in. [00:27:00] So, that's just something to think about, there's a lot of in between with those two types of dogs, wrecking ball versus, I don't, teddy bear, I don't know what the opposite of a wrecking ball is, but.
There's a lot of temperaments in between those two, and there's a lot of individual feelings about this topic in between those, and I still go back to it's not a problem if it's not a problem for you. So I want you to keep those things in mind as you work through any sort of bar knocking that you may have with your agility teammates.
Alright, before we go, I do have a question from a community member. So, let's get started with that. Uh, I have a two year old mini Aussie Corgi [00:28:00] mix, and she's always been a very timid, fearful dog. We've been doing agility for about a year with her, very slowly trying to build her confidence. She's pretty good with the A frame and the dog walk because they don't move.
Even though the height scares her a little bit. The teeter, however, is a blood sucking monster. She is absolutely terrified. I would love to hear your thoughts on how to build confidence and bravery in scaredy dogs. Alright, Shantae, this is a pretty involved kind of issue, so we've got a lot that we could cover.
So I'm going to try and break things down. Kind of some more questions that I would ask myself if this were one of my own dogs or a client's dog. So first It's, I, I think I know the answer, but first, I would ask, is this dog kind of scared and timid all the time in life? So, where can we start to [00:29:00] build bravery more in general?
Um, my friend, colleague, training partner, coach, Sarah Strimming, is, Kind of my go to person on creating brave and empowered dogs. And I do know that she is offering a webinar on, uh, building bravery in dogs coming up soon. So I will drop that information in the show notes as well. So that's one place to start.
I remember very clearly when I was raising my Parson Russell Terrier Shrek that, you know, he did not show. Very many concerns with life at all, but he had this game where he would turn, uh, you know, a food dish into a skateboard and he would ride it around the house and he'd pounce on it and it would slide, but it when it would hit our metal baseboard heaters.[00:30:00]
He would immediately, it would scare him, right? It, he would, it would make a really loud sound and that would, you know, end the game and he would run away and he was frightened. And I immediately said, we aren't training the teeter until you're not afraid of that game anymore. So I'm going to look for adjacent concepts in their everyday life.
So. And work on building the confidence around those things before I even address any sort of agility behaviors that are related. Um, another example, a client a long time ago, Was white knuckling on the keeter. Absolutely did not enjoy the movement of it at all. I mean, the dog was doing it because they were really lovely dog, but they were very afraid.
Um, through [00:31:00] talking to this dog's owner, we also discovered that the dog kind of reacts the same way to the lazy boy, rocking chair. That's in the living room that they sort of freak out when it moves. And. My dog Sprint can kind of relate to this too. She was not very confident with the rocking chairs in the house.
Um, and so we address those things. We build confidence in movement and loud noises away from agility. So that when we do address the agility specific behaviors, they already have some education. on the subject and also they have some trust in the process of learning new things with you. So those are the things that I would be starting to think about is how can we build bravery around heights and moving things and Sounds away from the context of agility, because unfortunately, it's a [00:32:00] lot harder to change their mind about something that we can't actually change.
So the teeter is the teeter and the teeter will always be the teeter in every sort of agility context. So we can't Do a whole lot to split that behavior down other than minimizing the movement. Uh, so using props or adjustable teeters to make so that it only moves a tiny, tiny bit. And when the dog starts to trust that and is confident on that, we can increase the movement a little bit more.
Um, and the same for reducing the sound of the teeter. So putting soft things under both ends so that when it drops with the dog on it and it hits the ground, it doesn't make a sound. And also when it resets itself, that the approach end doesn't hit something and [00:33:00] make a sound. So we can do all these things to separate out the movement from the noise and slowly increase.
Both of those over time as the dog shows me that they are confident, but all of this will go a lot faster if they are confident with those concepts out of the agility context, it does, uh, it just so happens that my own, uh, border Collie sprint, who I talked about earlier in the episode, she got, I don't know, two thirds of the way through her teeter training.
When she decided that the teeter was also very scary and she was not going anywhere near it. Um, and I had to rehab her entire teeter doing exactly what I just said. Looking for ways to bring out her bravery more so in real life. And also working with very small changes in the teeter. increasing the [00:34:00] drop a little bit at a time, increasing the noise a little bit at a time, and that entire rehab process is outlined in my teeter training program that is available for self study on my website, and I will include those details in the show notes as well.
Do know that it is possible But it is a long process and one that you have to 100 percent go at the dog's pace. She is in charge of this, and I wish you the best of luck.
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, there are several ways you can leave me positive reinforcement. One, leave me a five star review. Two, share with your fellow agility nerds, or three, share your thoughts with me on social media. Be sure to follow at FX agility on Facebook or Instagram.[00:35:00]
