Thursday – Do It When I Cue It!
Stimulus Control for Agility Dogs. Rachel’s popular seminar offered in person! Full description, below. This seminar is a great choice for auditing!
9am - 5pm, limit 8 working
Working Spot - $250, Audit Spot - $125
Friday AM – Teenage Skills
The teenage portion of an agility dog's career can be difficult to navigate. There is so very much to learn! While their bodies may look like grown dogs on the outside, on the inside there is still so much growing occurring, and so there is still a lot that the dogs can not do safely in training. These months are a great time to work on conceptual skills and the very beginning of obstacle foundations. Strategic training allows us to teach the dog all of the skills they need to understate to perform obstacle sequences, but without actually doing obstacles themselves. This workshop will focus on concepts and skill building. Teaching commitment, duration behaviors, how to prioritize verbal cues, stimulus control, and behavior chains. Appropriate for dogs 6-12 months. The dog must be able to work off leash around other dogs. It is highly encouraged that the dog know how to go around a wing or cone and how you stay for a brief amount of time.
9am - 12:30pm, limit 7 working
Working Spot - $175, Audit Spot - $75
Seminar Descriptions:
Do It When I Cue It - To exhibit stimulus control over a behavior means that when we cue X, the dog does X. For example “tunnel” means take the tunnel, not grab your toy. This means that Stimulus control is a concept that is built into every single thing we train our dogs to do! Breaking start line stays, leaping contacts, racing into tunnels, all of these can be attributed to stimulus control issues.
The same dogs who exhibit these behaviors in the competition arena often exhibit similar behaviors with their reinforcements. Snatching toys from their handler, staring at the handler's hands in hopes of treats, or running away from their handler to obtain reinforcement elsewhere. Dogs who display stress behaviors such as sniffing, barking, spinning, biting and disengaging are often doing so because of a lack of understanding of the control of their reinforcements.
It is no coincidence that these behaviors are often displayed in the same dogs and is because dogs who don’t have stimulus control on their rewards are unsure of how to obtain them and this is exhibited by the dogs frustration and inconsistency in performance of behaviors
Rachel’s stimulus control has helped many teams address their control issues and now is aiding handlers and dogs how to obtain stimulus control on thei reinforcements and how this control will help with and apply to the rest of their agility behaviors. It will discuss the difference between stimulus control and impulse control. How to obtain stimulus control through positive reinforcement
Rather than negative punishment. The mechanics of using different reinforcements, clean training, how to apply stimulus control to our trained behaviors, how to maintain control in the ring and so much more.
About Rachel:
Rachel was introduced to the world of dog sports early in life. Raised by a family heavily involved in conformation, obedience, and agility, Rachel began competing as a young child. By her teenage years she was teaching dog training with her local training club. While conformation and obedience were her introductions to the training world, agility soon became Rachel’s grand passion. As a young adult, Rachel trained dogs semi-professionally for both sport and to address behavioral issues. It was during this time that she started to seek out and study the science of positive reinforcement based training, motivated by her studies in college. In 2010 she obtained a Bachelors of Science in Psychology, having focused heavily on the study of behavior modification and learning theory.
Over the next decade, Rachel was married, moved with her military husband across the country and back again, and had two children. Throughout, she continued to train and compete in agility, as well as instruct. In 2015, while living in San Diego, California Rachel started her own agility training school, Strategic Dog Sports. At the completion of her husband's military career in 2016, Rachel moved back to Texas and took a full time job at What A Great Dog in Richardson, Tx. to teach agility professionally.
Her love for science and her consideration for the feelings of the dogs she works with has continued to motivate Rachel to seek out new and progressive training methods to apply to her agility training. It is this zeal for learning that Rachel attributes to her success with a wide variety of breeds she has personally trained, including Beagles, Belgian Sheepdogs, Catahoula Leopard Dogs, Labrador Retrievers, Border Collies, Chihuahuas, and Belgian Malinios, as well as her ability to help students and their dogs with issues from behavioral to elite performance.
ACCOLADES Along with numerous Championships in multiple agility organizations and countless podiums and wins at Regional Championships events, Rachel's major accomplishments include: *2014 Steeplechase National Champion with Vixen
*2014 Grand Prix National Champion with Vixen
*2016 Silver Medalist Grand Prix National Finals with Vixen
*2018 UKI South Central Cup Overall Winner with Vixen
*2018 UKI South Central Cup Overall Winner with Glory
*2018 US Open Bronze Medal National Finals with Glory
*2018 US Open Silver Medal National Finals with Vixen
*2019 Performance Speed Jumping National Champion with Vixen
*2019 Steeplechase National Champion with Glory
*2019 Performance Biathalon National Champion with Vixen
*2019 Biathalon National Champion with Glory
*2020 IFCS World Team Member with Glory
*2022 WAO Team USA Alternate with Glory
For more information about Rachel, you can visit her website at: https://strategicdogsports.weebly.com/