Weavepoles - Starting Out With A New Dog

Armed with the Action Cam and Camcorder & tripod, Tarot and I set out to work the Weavepoles last night.
When I started training in Agility in 1996, the main method for training this obstacle was to keep the dog on lead, hold it straight up, and guide the dog through the lines of poles. This may or may not be complimented with "wire guides" that created a weave chute.  As you can imagine it was not very effective and can take even longer to perfect, which was why this obstacle was not included in the AKC Novice courses.
When we changed clubs, each person in class brought different ideas and from there we tried the "Weaveomatic", Guide Wire/Lead, Buddy helper, and Channel methods.  To this day, I honestly think we indirectly trained solid poles by experimenting, but now the standard is the Channel Pole method.

Channel Poles are specially designed so every other poles pulls away from the base's center-line.  For inexperienced dogs, you want that open wide so they get use to the metal clicking under their paws and learn to stay inside.  As the dog becomes more comfortable, the poles are slowly pushed inward.
The reason I like this better than other methods is that the dogs learn to separate their legs and begin to have weaving motion, even when the poles are wide open.  The video I took last night shows Tarot starting to do just that, especially during the last attempts.
I really look forward to seeing how this works for her.  Niven was originally trained this way, but changed stride when the poles were closed to early in training and AKC went to 24" spacing.

In a class environment there would be two of us working this stage.  One person would hold the dog and the handler would go to the other end to call the dog through.  While it is great to have Tarot sit at one end, she has to learn how to run that center-line with me along side, not baiting her at the end.  For this, we use targeting and my offhand purchase a few years ago of a Target Ball has been that second person for me.

  Video is less than a minute.  For my own video reference, I started with the extreme wide poles and brought them in with each pass.  Tarot was having fun and seemed to have no problem transferring from me to the Target Ball.

Next week we will start with eight inch width and see where it goes from there.
Enjoy!
Joyce