After getting home from a great seminar about dog health (stretching and strengthening, with a strong focus on the abnormal stressors to an agility dog's joints), I suddenly realized how inappropriate the behavior I was encouraging is for a pup of Gimme's age (three months). I was about to email the breeder about some thoughts I had and, I kid you not, just as I sat down to email her, there in my inbox is an email from her on the exact same thing. Great minds think alike.
Gimme is a real jumper and bouncer and I know we don't need to worry about it when they do things on their own, because its not a repetitive stressor. But we should set their environment up to make sure it doesn’t become a repetitive stressor. I initially thought to reward the cute behaviors from time to time, just to keep them in her repertoire, but not enough that she repeats them to any great degree. I subsequently decided not to reward them at all - "airs above the ground" is her default, so I feel confident the behaviors will be there when I want them.
I found I needed to change how we do the food bowl self control exercise. Gimme's reaction to not getting the bowl right away is to do the razzle-dazzle (jumping straight up). And to make it worse, that is in the kitchen on linoleum. I've been positioning her where she doesn't have the room for jumping and that seems to do the trick.
Now that I'm freshly re-sensitized to this issue, I am shocked at all the respected agility people that are really pushing agility prospect puppies with little evident concern for the safety of their joints. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the internet to see what other agility people are doing and there seems to be a recurrent tendency for people to fast track their puppies teaching things that are real joint stressors. I don't intend to do that with mine. One instructor is teaching tight turns to puppies. Between the 30-40 repetitions in class and all the practicing at home, that really concerns me. Just yesterday another respected agility person posted a video of her new puppy playing an indoor chase game with her adult dogs. The chase circle involved a jump, that while doable for the puppy, was set up at the puppy's elbow height!
I'm thinking canine genius Gimme and I will have to do another creativity session and find some other cute (and much safer) behaviors to put cues on. I encourage everyone to really think about what they are doing with puppies.
As someone I love and respect just said, "Go slow to go fast." There is so much we can do to further our end goals without risking injury to their joints. Let's all give our kids time to grow up.
Some good sites to look at, include:
www.caninesports.com/SpayNeuter.html
www.agilityability.com/bone-growth-and-health-in-agility.html
www.woodhavenlabs.com/documents/PuppyPlay.pdf
2 comments:
I agree! I see a lot of people out there who really should know better doing things with a puppy that makes me cringe. Unfortunately, a lot of times they get positively rewarded for it. Things like competing wit the puppy as soon as they meet the youngest eligable age and people gushing over how well the puppy is doing in competition at that age. It's a little hard to stomach.
I think part of the problem with these risky behaviors is that too often the reward is more immediate and the punishment is too far in the future.
That's probably why my butt is so big. The reward of eating chocolate is so immediate and the damn weigh-in day is usually a couple days off.
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