Myth: You need to teach your dog a lot of verbals to be able to handle your dog from a distance

Janita only uses these verbal cues:

• Forward
• Dog’s name = turn towards me
• Obstacle names for tunnels, weaves and contacts
• Go around = take the backside of the jump
• Shhh-sound = slow down

When handling agility courses from the dog’s point of view, the same applies in “walking agility” as when Janita is running with her dog: she’ll always do her very best to be the best possible team mate for her dog. This means among other things that she will handle her dog proactively, giving the dog the information she needs to find the correct obstacle as early as possible, and having the dog land towards the direction where the next obstacle is: even when using verbal cues for obstacles, Janita will only use them to support what her other handling elements already tell her dog. Most of the things in these courses Janita’s dog would do, even if she were quiet.

Myth: Your dog needs a lot of training before you can handle them from a distance

If you teach your dog a solid foundation and are consistent with the way you train and handle your dog, your dog can already understand your handling from a distance, you might just not know it yet! Dogs are masters of body language, and they can read our handling just like they can read each other from far away.

Janita says: “We train ourselves on average 1-2 times (normally once a week, corona has given us more time to train twice a week). In addition to that, our dogs run freely in a forest one hour a day. So 5-6 days a week they don’t train ANYTHING, not even tricks at home. How is it possible my young dog can do so much already? Because I try to be the best possible teammate for my dog by trying to see each course from her perspective and positioning myself and handling the way I can help her as much as possible to read the course.”

Many of the demo dogs in these videos had never before done anything so that the handler is only walking, including Janita’s Naxu.

To be able to handle your dog from a distance, the dog needs...

• A reward he really, really likes
• To be comfortable driving forward, away from you and past you
• To stay committed to an obstacle even if you start moving to an opposite direction
• To know all obstacles you have in the sequence that you are training. What does “knowing the obstacle” mean? You’ll find out by practicing the exercises of this course!

Myth: Your dog needs to be a border collie to be able to clear distance handling challenges

If you have found a reward that your dog really likes, any dog can be taught to run further away from the handler. We have several different breeds of dogs running the courses as demo dogs on the videos. For some breeds and some individuals running further away from the handler is more natural than for others. If your dog has been used to you rewarding him from your hand a lot, and have been using your own motion to get your dog motivated, you might need some more training as opposed to dogs who have been trained to run away from and past the handler also as a part of foundation training.

You get what you reward. If you want your dog to have higher obstacle focus, reward it behind the obstacles. If you want higher handler focus, reward from your hand. If you want to know more, watch Janita’s “This is how I train - Rewarding video.