Building Confidence and Drive after a Switch

If your dog is struggling to continue driving after you have cued a turn away, or in my case a “Switch”, here are some tips! 

If my dog is struggling with continuing to drive to the next piece of equipment after a Switch (or any turn) I want to first break down that skill by asking myself some questions about the skill itself. 

• Does my dog fully understand what a Switch cue is? 
• Have I worked on my Switch from all handling positions and with each piece of equipment? 
• Have I proofed my dogs understanding and confidence with a Switch by adding distance? 

Most of the time when I see dogs who are having difficulties pushing forward after a Switch, they do not fully understand all of the fundamentals of the skill itself. I like to break the skill back down to a foundation level and work with the dog from there. 

I also want to make sure that the dogs rate of reinforcement is very high, and not move forward to more difficult exercises even though I may be working with an Elite level dog who “can” work those harder sequences. 

If I am looking to create more drive after my Switch, I am going to start back at my foundations of how i taught the exercise, and before I move to a harder set up, I will go through these steps. 

• Set up foundation exercise for teaching the Switch Cue
• High rate of reinforcement for the dog performing this base exercise. I am not looking for speed, or accuracy or the turn here, I am building confidence and understanding of the base skill. 
• When I have reached my goal for the base skill (this goal will vary with the dog, but as an example, the goal I had for Wall-E when I did this was him performing the Switch with no head checks, and my handling distance at 10 feet) 
• Now I will increase the difficulty by creating a goal for more precision with the skill. Depending on the dog, this could be asking for a tighter path, or increase in speed. 
• I will start again at my base skill (so if i added distance, like I did with Wall-E, i will move back to being closer to him while I increase precision) 
• When I am increasing their precision either for a cleaner turn, or more speed, I will still be rewarding every Switch they do, but I will be giving a higher reward for the Switches that meet my goal. For example, I may reward with a toy for every Switch, but for a Switch that meets my goal I will reward with the toy along with lots of engagement/play and possibly food jackpots as well.

I will continue through these steps as I increase the difficulty of the exercise and continue to add layers of precision to the skill. 

I will be creating a thread in the Fluid Motion Open Community for discussion, as well as continuing this training series in the January Fluid Motion Newsletter!