Bernhardt is one of the mixed breed dogs that the AKC has selected to post pictures of on their Instagram account that displays different disciplines. They shared photos of him in the early stages our career doing Air Retrieve; photo credit to Mark Baer. It is a feeling of pride and humbleness to be featured, but foremost happiness for all Staffordshire and Pitbull crosses. These dogs need to come into the right hands and have a job. It is the skill, feel, and willingness of the handler to never stop learning that forms the animal. One has to take pride in the actions taken to work with them. One can never stop trying to understand them and only those that can accept their own limitations and who are realistic when it comes to their own talent can truly create something of value.
Defeat or Victory – humans emotions showing animals
This is a brief type up about HUMANS DISTRESS and ANXIETIES performing in MEN MADE outings with their ANIMALS
.Most people are perfectly capable to enter a basic or even advanced training relationship with their animal. They find rewarding emotional feedback in it, lots of their techniques are rather intuitive and feel based, rational responses based on their own observations knowing what works and what does not. They keep working with their partner, experiment in playful ways, even try new things and some day they decide to enter a show, attend a clinic or consult a trainer – either to see how they rank or to receive feedback to improve or to get the missing piece of the puzzle. They – the humans – volunteer to invite a third party – another human – into their team – to judge, to measure, to set conditions, lay out rules, oversee their work. And – the animal that day, that moment, that scenario, that quest, REFUSES to COMPLY. Not that it has not worked before, you had it of course tested, prepared, properly imprinted, it had even been shown before. It just won’t do it and NOW WHAT ?
No matter how bad or sad that feels the one thing you must know is that your animal really has no clues about how embarrassed you might be so – Stay calm,assess the conditions you are under and do never let your partner know what you think. By pointing it out you will create a very NEGATIVE training condition you will turn into someone very strange, scary, uncomfortable – a pool of negative energy one either runs away from or shuts down to.Do not surrender towards changing your training that got you here that same moment. Do not try to fix it right away. You can revisit after the show is over if you must.
So if possible wrap up and walk away calmly, excuse yourself skillfully to not sour your partner. Than check – Soundness, Environment(Lighting),Training and or Teaching Style, Time of Day, Length of outing, Work amounts applied, Stress Factors (Shipping,Weather) Familiarity and think of any other that will come to you. Clear every position.Make a plan to replicate something very close to the conditions you had faced when things did not work and enter it by KNOWING IT WILL WORK. If you than had fundamentally trained correctly and your performances have some substantial references that it did work before – it will work again.
Victory in animal training means to conquer your emotions and stand up for your friend that trusts that you make good decisions.Sometimes you just didn’t and they will tell you so – all you have to do is LISTEN and eventually you can even see them WALKING on WATER.
Interactive and Spiritual Control
or why CONTACT does not mean CONNECTED
By working in depth with animals that are meant to perform you eventually come across the most amazing and fulfilling training scenario. You begin to realize that your spiritual energy transmits from one body to another, that a tiny whisper, a wink of the eye, a gesture of your hand cause performing energy to the eventual maximum of possibilities. All you did was a whisper to begin with. A tickle, A thought. And that delivers a piece of art very powerful yet enjoyable for spectators to look at wondering how did this just happen.
Lately i ran into a scenario in the horse world where a rider in desperate ways of wanting to learn was willing to spend a financial fortune to discover something as simple and individualized as it can be – FEEL and SPIRITUAL ENERGY. On a made horse. The rider liked the Connection – meaning the head of the horse dropped on picking up the rein. Nothing else just that part seemed most important. The submissive part of that animal was intriguing. Now – that is not what one truly should look for nor something one should throw gigantic sums of money at. One must be aware that animals have feelings they sense any emotional irregularity or negative energy but also find great comfort in the opposite. They can quickly emotional turn away from you and all there is left is mechanical SUBMISSION almost without spirit.
What needs to be worked on is the WHISPER, formation of an equality in spiritual energy , enticing signals clear and easy to understand, so that the outcome of the training is a consistent one that does not need any reins, any gadgets, any leashes, spurs, chains, collars or whatever instrument of human creation.Animals are a society too, they have their own rules,laws and tribal roots and their own evolutionary imprints they follow. We have the responsibility to discover, adopt, understand and support them in OUR desire to compete – we follow those principles and they give us the greatest gift and miracle there is – they give us SPIRITUAL CONTROL .
Number One –
or why WINNING must NOT be IMPORTANT
I remember that a little more than a year ago i kept asking myself looking at the seasonal leaderboard of our jump division how do you get to be on the number one spot hitting the exact 19 feet 11 average using 15 jumps or more to earn an invite for finals. That year we finished in 22 nd with 19 feet 10. And this year as of yesterday we do rank in first in a tie leading a field of currently 303 – yes Three Hundred and Three dogs. And the season is just half way over. And not only that – we also won a direct qualifier producing the high score at Westrover’s National qualifier in Alabama. So we hit the jackpot – twice!
But how did we get here ? By not thinking about the distance jump at all, shifting focus towards the new very dog friendly low body impact discipline of Hydro dash, some Air retrieve on the site just trying to form a well rounded versatile canine triathlete.Changing the whole throw technique towards place and chase equal to LESS human and MORE dog. Working on performance fun, stressing soundness and physical fitness and backing off hard work to just get somewhere. Feel and fun and soundness. And so “the” Bernhardt delivered – all natural just by himself ( you really can’t make him do something he doesn’t want to ) with some guidance.Of course on top of that we got the little necessary Luck that created jump sequences that like a miracle added up perfectly to put us in the lead or as humans would say WIN.
In the end one just realizes how fragile the human mind can be when it comes to competing having animals involved. Those just do not care about WINNING, they care about evolutionary survival. And that means very clearly – Showing animals can never be a survival boot camp for them. They trust our judgement, they serve our interest , they look up to us and want to PLAY with us because we are fun. And feel good. And so we better keep it that way. The dedication towards our animals is what in the end we can than call personal victories – It’s the animals that MAKE US WINNERS !! It is there way of saying thank you.Our very special thanks goes to Lucy Hoeppner that applied all her magic art of bodywork helping Bernhardt to be loose elastic and flexible to keep on dealing with the challenges of dog agility. It needs a sophisticated team to groom an athlete. I do highly recommend her for horses as well having felt what she can do. There are results and that’s what matters !!
Vision and Foresight
or THE TRUE MEANING OF A VERY TALENTED ANIMAL
There is a German saying ” when you work with a lot of limited or poorly trained horses you eventually want recognize exceptional talent nor know how to work that ” For that i personally always assume that any animal comes with a great amount of natural talent and want miss one when i see it. All can be brought to their best potential and will shine one way or the other. In reality all animals are plenty equipped to perform at most or almost any level of human desire – they just have to run into the right person, somebody that understands the game from scratch or one that is willing to learn.
Almost on the day one year ago a than 11 months old puppy started at his first dock diving event ever with his very green handler who did not know anything about the sport engaging in. There were funny throws, fumbles, stumbles, the puppy got loose, there was no plan or concept and plenty nerves – on the human side. The puppy however showed something that is embedded in the expert commentary on this video – He showed NATURAL TALENT – and NO NERVES jumping 8 feet 9 inches. In reality it is almost always the case that our horse or dog is way ahead of us in training because nature had given them all the ability to do so. Showing and/or training are nothing but a replication of natural given talent, the demonstration or execution of that is based on trainable pattern recognition.The trick should be an easy flow on a small command.
We, the humans just ever so often fail to keep up with the very simple complexity of nature by not having our priorities in order and by giving into our emotions and social pressured way of thinking way to easy forgetting about the ultimate important part – to observe, feel and interact with the animal.
So next time things don’t go so well just be aware – you might be behind for whatever reason unrelated to your partner. And when things go extremely well you have to think about how to preserve and protect the talent and to keep the correct time frames of training as your priority.After all i have seen and learned in only one year competing on the national dog dock diving circuit i must say a huge big thank you to dockdogs organizer and host Thomas Platts who was a very genuine, patient, never tired to help and explain teacher for a back than absolute beginner like me. A part of Bernhardt’s great success with invites to all national finals. He saw him first and i was lucky.Thank you for making us better !