03/10/2024
1/2 Day Seminar/Working Day Topics on April 5th
AM - 8:30AM - 12:00PM Competition Handling
PM - 12:30PM - 4:00PM Multi-Hide Strategies
@ DOGGY DAY OUT 17808 WILKE RIDGE LN, PFLUGERVILLE TX
Instructor - Jason Heng, CPDT-KA, CNWI, NACSW CO & Judge
AM Seminar - Competition Handling 8:30AM - 12:00 PM
Limited Working Spots - $95 per Team
Competition Handling – excelling at competitive environments. Necessary leash skills, on/off leash decisions and working out of challenges. We will cover two main themes; the most common leash skills – how to get better at executing them in completion, and how typical search environments cause competitors to miss hides or add time to dog problem solving a particular hide because of how we typically handle.
We will have a broad number of search setups to challenge each team’s leash skill – emphasizing typical leash skills; adding/removing slack, short/long lines, collar vs harness, changes on the leash while in motion, navigating obstacles, going back on leash, sensitivity/elasticity of dog, and more. In addition, exploring search environments necessarily force changes on the handler part – where the handlers are generally not aware of changes their handling style. We will cover how the search setup, changes how you handle and how to combat these unseen challenges so you don’t miss hides or cause the dog to search longer and harder to problem solve a hide.
PM Seminar - Multi-Hide Strategies 12:30PM - 4:00PM
Limited Working Spots - $95 per Team
Multi-hide Strategies – handling searches with multiple hides create a number of choices for teams, typically having us lean into strategies like search area coverage or patterns, re-rewarding, cues to moving on(“find another”), on/off leash decisions, walk-through planning. These strategies can result in thoughts of; “I got stuck an area”, “Maybe I should have gone on-leash”, “I think I left on hide behind”, “My dog wasn’t searching”, “my dog couldn’t lock it down”, “I ran out of time”, “I didn’t get to the whole area”, etc. These typical handler sayings highlight our difficulty in strategy changes required during the search rather than lamenting after.
We will push on these typical strategies– to establish some alternative “first principle” strategies for each team, focusing on what we know in each search to determine the best strategy. This doesn’t remove the need to pattern, re-reward or not, back a on/off leash decisions but it instead focuses the decision on the search you are IN – executing these first principle search strategies helps us focus on being present in each search and providing our best skills to that search.
Each team will have a broad multi hide search scenarios that will give the team practice making a strategy change. Our goal is to be saying, “I went back on leash and got the another hide”, “We got everywhere”, “My dog worked out of that distraction”, “I called finish with plenty of time”, “I found all the hides”.
http://www.hengten.com/nosework.html
