Yardwork

(This post is part of the A to Z April blogging challenge.)

Part of the hangups I have about dog training include the things I learned training bird dogs. And a lot of what I learned is that every minute with your dog is a training opportunity. That means most of the behaviors you build will be the things you practice most at home. In the method I grew up learning, those skills taught at home that carried over into the field were called yardwork.

Yardwork was everything you were smart enough to practice. Retrieves, starter pistols, standing steady to wing, recalls, heeling... all of it was the time you put in before you ever left your property. Yardwork shows up "on the road" or in the field.

The more I learn, the more value I see in yardwork. I may now call it foundation work because for most people the yard vs the field is not a big goal, but it's the same basic idea. I put in my time, effort and attention on the things that will be our building blocks. We get those foundations solid and reliable, we hone our communication and skills, and then we go practice what we know.

Not the stuff we've just figured out, but the stuff we mastered months ago. The stuff we know cold. That's the stuff I ask for in new places on outings where my dog may not have a history of success. And by asking for a simple sit or heel when we're practicing sit pretty and heeling around obstacles with food and human distractions, my dog has a good chance of having a success. That foundation in the yardwork means that when I ask for eye contact, my dog isn't trying to remember the meaning of the word. We'll have done it so much it's almost muscle memory.

By building on those successes and rewarding them, I have a dog who's taking that foundation we started at home, and they're laying that same foundation out and about. It's not always smooth. Sometimes it takes a good long while to generalize the idea that when I say "down," I do truly mean hocks and elbows on the floor when there's a lot going on. Sometimes something snaps into place easier than I would have expected- like Keeper and paws up on big pots at the garden center, or benches at the hardware store.

There's a lot of variance in how a dog handles stress and distractions, but if I've really put in my time in the yardwork, it means my dogs do things that I take for granted. Duncan traveled for a few hours in the car, hopped out, greeted the evaluator and his dogs, played with other dogs who showed up for the test, and then passed a CGC without any formal classes. We'd never been there, and the evaluator had never had anyone come out and pass when they said they'd done the training themselves before.

Not everyone puts in the time to proof a dog's knowledge with distractions. There's nothing wrong with being more relaxed with your dog... I just have a history of yardwork, and building training piece by piece. I've also been blessed with dogs who liked the training. It's a lot easier with a dog who thinks it's a fun game to do figure 8s and about turns, or to recall with all speed for petting.

I do think that without the foundation work, it's hard to read your dog easily. Without knowing them and their responses, an outing can go from mildly stressful to overwhelming and negative if the dog has no skills to fall back on. In trying to cushion my dogs from that, I fall back on the basics. Which means, I suppose, that all the people I learned from put in a sort of yardwork on my brain, and I fall back on it in my own times of uncertainty.