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Puppy Antics and Ring Training Part 4 Free Baiting Your Dog In my last few columns, I discussed baiting and hand stacking, your dog. In this column, I am going to talk about free baiting your dog in the ring. As mentioned before, much of what I’ve learned was from trial and error. To this day, my 12 year old Golden knows what buttons to push with me in order to get me to put bait in front of her. If I’m hand stacking her and don’t present bait before her nose in a short period of time, she posts back, knowing that she has me trained to put bait in front of her to entice her to lean forward. This is not something you want your dog to do and can make getting a good picture pretty hard to do! But if you are dealing with this, getting a friend to hold bait in front of them and just outside the picture area helps! Anyway, as mentioned in the post about teaching a dog to stack, you do need to teach the pup without bait and teach them to hold that position without bait to bribe them. It is too easy to think a dog is trained to stack when in reality, they are simply distracted by the bait they are nibbling on and don’t think about moving for that reason. This dog is not trained, and I’ve had the bad experience of having a pup like this that was all over the place looking for the bait when the judge was trying to look at her mouth! So proofing the hand stack is essential and very important for that first look of your dog when you first come in the ring and are in the class line up. That first impression can be very important! So back to freebaiting. This is something you will train over time and separately from hand stacking and getting the dog to stay. Freebaiting is actually sort of an ongoing fun thing to do with your puppy that you shape over time. Early on, you just want to get expression (ears up) and an effective way to do this is to teach them to catch food you toss to them. Popcorn or cheese bits work well as do other things. Usually a dog will have his ears up when you are playing this game and you can do it for short periods of time several times a day. It is fun and easy for both of you. I’ve found that if you don’t do this with a pup starting very early, it is much harder to train that dog for the ring when older, so please don’t discount the importance of these play training sessions. If you have a dog that just lets the treat hit him in the head, then picks it up off the floor, a little competition can really get things progressing in the right direction. I typically play this game both one on one and with a group of dogs. In the group sessions, the novice dog soon learns that if they don’t catch the food tossed to them, someone else will be ready to scarf it up almost before it hits the ground. This makes them become quire adept at the game of catch, and quite attentive as well! So once the pup is catching well and has ears up, you will begin shaping behaviors. Many times the dog will have their rear legs up under them ready to leap for the food. This is ugly! You need to step towards the dog, or back a step and coax them into a better stance, then reward them with the treat. You can attach words like “step” or “fix it” or whatever works for you. You also want to train the dog to stand “4 square”. First you will get the front feet set, then shape them to get the back feet squared up. Some dogs naturally stand with their feet 4 square and that is wonderful. Others have to be trained to do so. It takes time and patience… sometimes a lot of time and patience… to get freestacking perfected. It is used primarily when you are in the lineup of dogs as each are getting their individual exam. It is also used when you come back to the judge following the individual gaiting pattern. Standing 4 square is also an indication of a dog that is properly put together and many judges will have you freebait your dog to see how he wants to stand naturally. An example of a fault a judge may see on the free stack is a cowhocked dog that is otherwise handstacked out of it. However most cowhocked dogs don’t move well going away from the judge, either, so they can usually pick this fault up other ways. There is another tool you can use to get a dog to stand 4 square and the product most commonly known for this is called “Happy Legs”. It is basically four small platforms the dogs’ feet are placed on to teach them to stand still and square. I have not used this product but have heard people state they have had success with this technique. Some people have even concocted their own versions of this with techniques as simple as duct taping food cans down at the right position for that dog. Here is the Happy Legs website: http://www.happylegs.com/ I hope some of these ideas will help you in training your dog to free bait effectively in the ring. In my next column, I plan to discuss gaiting your dog. |
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