Jumping For Joy

Last summer (when the weather was a lot better!) I taught Saffy to jump over some small obstacles. I’ve never done agility before with a dog, but teaching her was a lot of fun.
It took a long time to get her to make the first jump- in fact I had to put jumps across the whole width of the garden so that she couldn’t run round the outside! Because she was a bit unsure, I didn’t want to force her to do anything so I gave her time to sniff the jumps and see what they were. The way I finally got her to make the first leap was actually to stand at one end of the garden with her and throw a tennis ball over the jumps. She was so distracted by the thought of retrieving the ball; she leapt over the jumps without thinking! After that I gave her loads of encouragement to do it again, backed up with some food rewards. At the start I had her jumping over blocks which I think helped because we could progress very gradually from jumping on and off the block, to jumping straight over.

Over the course of a few days, I was able to have fewer jumps across the width of the garden and Saffy was choosing to go over a jump for a reward, rather than run around the edge for nothing. Once she had learned to follow a treat over a single jump, I began to link a few jumps together at a time into a course. Again doing things slowly I was rewarding her with a treat for each jump to start off with, and then moving onto only rewarding her at the end of a course of three or four jumps.

Once she had mastered jumping easily, I tried to come up with some other obstacles that I could make from things in the garden. Now that Saffy was jumping confidently over poles, the wooden blocks were freed up and I could make a sort of raised platform to walk along. I also used some of the poles placed end up (and supported on cricket stumps) to make some poles to weave in and out of. Obviously they aren’t quite like the weaving poles used in agility competitions but it was still fun teaching Saffy to walk in and out of them. I did want to have a go at teaching her to go through a tunnel, but the one that we used to have had been thrown away.

After all this practising, I have tried Saffy on the agility courses at the Dogs Trust Harefield open days and I think the practice has paid off- she’s confident at jumping and weaving, but is a bit nervous about getting up high or going through tunnels which are both things she’s never had a chance to try.

It’s been so enjoyable teaching Saffy something new and I feel like we’ve learnt together and developed a really good bond from this. It’s rewarding to run round a course with her and have her follow my instructions, I think we’ve both achieved a lot!

PS Look out for a future blog post on how I made the jumps!
PPS Apologies for the bad quality of photos- they were taken on a rather grey, frosty day with a not very good camera. When I get a chance to check my other computer I will see if I can find some better examples