Puppy Antics and Ring Training

By Jennifer Krawsczyn

Bringing up a new puppy for the show ring is always fun and challenging. Some of them are very easy and seem to get the hang of things quickly. Others challenge you more and it takes some ingenuity to figure out how to convince them that they should not do certain things. The trick is to make them do it right but still enjoy being in the ring.

I can’t say I’m the best trainer. In fact, I’ve tried to train one dog to do things that I realized were only confusing her and I could see it was making her not like to show. With this dog, I knew it was best to stop trying to communicate this with her as all I was doing was making her afraid that she was doing something wrong! What she was doing was actually pretty minor and more my problem than hers as no one else seemed to be seeing what I was, or atleast not as anything significant. In fact, my obsessing on it seemed to be making it worse!

The last thing one wants to do is be extremely strict with a dog and make corrections that end up leaving you with a dog that associates the ring with getting in trouble. And this is really bad when the poor dog doesn’t realize what you are trying to make them do differently.

I currently have a puppy that is nearly 11 months old. As with each of the dogs that I’ve shaped for the breed ring, she has had her own little nuances that are uniquely her own. Having just shown her at her fourth show weekend, I feel that she is starting to get the hang of it and knows what to do in the ring. I guess I’ll see if I’m right this coming weekend, or if it will be another show to train! Most importantly, though, I do believe she enjoys the ring! So little antics and a bad presentation here and there are just part of the learning curve, it seems. My main goal is to keep it fun while helping her learn just what she needs to do for me to reward her in that ring!

Each and every dog has presented me with a slightly different personality and some were by far easier to train and show than others. I was fortunate that my first dog was pretty darn easy! In the next few columns, I plan to focus on some of the things we do with our dogs in the ring as we are training them, some of the things I wish I’d done differently, and some of the things I think are really helpful. I hope that some of them will be helpful to some of you as you work with your own future hopefuls and I hope that this new year brings you wonderful and happy moments as you spend time with your dogs, both in and out of the show ring