Podcasts about disc dog

Send us a textWelcome to this episode of the Sexier than a Squirrel podcast, the podcast that brings you real-life dog training results, and sometimes human training ones too!In this episode, Lauren is joined by super Pro Dog Trainer and Disc Dog expert Ben to talk about the wonderful world of frisbee. Ben is something of a pro at this impressive sport, and the conversation combines his passion for Disc Dog training with his love of Cattle Dogs and his experience working with rescue dogs.Ben's passion for this energetic sport is infectious - and by the end of the episode you may just find yourself wanting to give it a go with your own dog! Listen as he explains how Disc Dog is a sport that goes beyond simply tossing a frisbee to being a fun, rewarding relationship-building game anyone can enjoy. Together, Lauren and Ben dive into everything you need to know to get started in frisbee training, from considering how to play safely and avoid injury to pro tips for refining your throw - even if your aim is a little hit or miss!When it comes to Cattle Dogs, Ben definitely has a soft spot for this sometimes misunderstood breed. His amusing anecdotes paint a vivid picture as he shares stories of how these highly focused dogs sometimes use their natural herding instincts in surprising ways, occasionally focusing on other things that move, including their owner's rear end! For anyone with a Cattle Dog, Ben's tips on harnessing this natural drive are invaluable.Ben's journey into Disc Dog training started with a rescue dog, and he shares the joy and challenges involved in training rescues for this sport. His first rescue, the dog that started it all, taught him the value of patience, trust, and how frisbee became a powerful way to build their relationship. Since then, Ben has welcomed more rescue dogs into his life, discovering just how much these dogs thrive with the structure and engagement that Disc Dog training provides. He also shares tips on creating a supportive training space that helps rescue dogs feel secure and excited to learn.Finally, Ben and Lauren dive into the games-based approach to training and how it overlaps beautifully with Disc Dog training. Ben explains that games can be a powerful way to build foundational skills, from focus to recall, all while keeping training fun and engaging. Training this way helps dogs stay in tune with their handler and makes learning a seamless part of playtime. Whether it's through a simple game or an advanced trick, Ben's approach to Disc Dog training ensures that every training session can be a fun, skill-building experience.Tune in now for a dose of fun, expert tips, and Ben's contagious enthusiasm for this spectacular sport!Support the showIf you're loving the podcast, you'll love our NEW Sexier than a Squirrel Dog Training Challenge even more! Get transformational dog training today for only £27!Want even more epic dog training fun and games and solutions to all your dog training struggles? Join us in the AbsoluteDogs Games Club!And while you're here, please leave a review for us and don't forget to hit share and post your biggest lightbulb moment! Remember, no matter what struggles you might be facing with your dog, there is always a game for that!

Raphaël Bosch (AmorGos) es una eminencia en el trabajo de olfato canino y va yendo por el sendero del aprendizaje continuo. Ese camino empezo hace unos 14 años y ha pasado por el adiestramiento de perros de trabajo, la competición canina (Disc Dog) hasta el mantrailing. Se encuentra cómodo en el mantrailing y ahora es instructor certificado de la International Mantrailing Academy (IMTA K9). Raphaël imparte cursos y seminarios de mantrailing en España y Europa. El vigésimoprimer tramo del quinto viaje de Pongamos que Hablo de Perros es una conversación en el que Jonás Thulin sigue a Raphaël en el sendero ese...

Karen and Robby get to know Eventer Laura VanderVliet. Laura talks about how she gave up horses to work in the Corporate world and how she found her way back to start her own business. Laura is a USDF Silver Medalist and is hoping to achieve Gold this year!Please support our sponsors:https://cowboymagic.com/https://manentailequine.com/https://exhibitorlabs.com/https://www.triplecrownfeed.com/https://www.fairfaxandfavor.com/https://www.turtleneck.biz/Save 10% off your Redingote purchase, use "MLE10" at checkout!https://landing.redingoteequestrian.com/mleCall Patricia Scott of the https://kathybarryagency.com/ at (484)319-8923Sign up for our mailing list!https://mailchi.mp/b232b86de7e5/majorleagueeventingllc?fbclid=IwAR2Wp0jijRKGwGU3TtPRN7wMo-UAWBwrUy2nYz3gQXXJRmSJVLIzswvtClECheckout the Major League Eventing store!https://www.majorleagueeventing.com/shop

I am really excited to tell you the story of a very talented Whippet named Ashley. This dog has my heart for two reasons. First, he was an incredible Disc Dog and two, his fame began on the green grass at Dodgers Stadium and I love the Dodgers. You don't want to miss this one. SOURCESAshley Whippet - Wikipedia https://web.archive.org/web/20070415080805/http://www.laalmanac.com/sports/sp09.htm Disc dog - Wikipedia Ashley Whippet and His Great Leap to Stardom - Los Angeles Times "The Surest Jaws on All Four Paws": Ashley Whippet, Dog Frisbee Pioneer | Mental Floss 

This episode is all about playing disc dog! In this interview with Sara Brueske, we talk about how to get started in the sport and what competitions look like. Guest Sara Brueske (she/her) has been training dogs since she was a young child, and has experienced a large variety of breeds and sports during that time. After graduating as a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner in 2011, she jumped into the professional dog training world. She began teaching group classes and private lessons at On the Run Canine Center in Minnesota. At the time she was also competing in agility, disc dog as well as fostering for local rescues. In 2014, Sara was hired by Purina as a dog trainer to perform dog sport shows at Purina Farms in Grey Summit, Missouri. Her number of dogs quickly grew to fill the need of the job. Currently she has ten dogs of varying breeds and origins including a boston terrier mix, several Australian koolies and Belgian Malinois. Sara and her dogs work to convince people to do more with their dogs, teach about responsible pet ownership and to get involved in the dog sport community. After six years working as a full-time performer, Sara now teaches on the topic of dog sports full time. While disc dog and tricks are some of her specialities, she also is passionate about creating clear communication between handlers and their dogs as well as teaching how to build a solid foundation for any sport. Sara's biggest joy in training is watching a handler and dog become partners and grow as a team. Currently, Sara trains in the sports of disc dog, agility, IGP, mondioring, scentwork and dock diving as well as being a trick dog enthusiast. She actively competes in agility, mondioring, dock diving and is planning on trialing in scentwork soon. Want to know more about Sara? You can find out more on her website at https://zoomdogtraining.com/home/ Like the podcast? Don't forget to rate, review, subscribe and share!

DREAM ON FLY

The Sound of DiscDog is a live training & QnA session in Clubhouse.Get the full lesson here:Check out all of the PVybe Clubhouse sessions on the Pawsitive Vybe Clubhouse landing page: https://pvybe.com/clubhouseThis piece is brought to you by Patrons of Pawsitive Vybe. We rely on our patrons to create consistent and relevant content for disc dog enthusiasts and the general public. Become a patron and support our work while gaining full access to all of our content with some special goodies to boot: https://patreon.com/pvybe★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Ron & Obi work on the cued Drop & successful Catch in this Sound of DiscDog session on Clubhouse.The Sound of DiscDog is an audio only live-training QnA session on Clubhouse where we experience the sounds of dog training and lend our imagination to interpret and explore the training session. Get the full lesson here:Check out all of the PVybe Clubhouse sessions on the Pawsitive Vybe Clubhouse landing page: https://pvybe.com/clubhouse★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Ron & Epic work on a bit of lost history with this Frontside/Backside Vault on a Sound of DiscDog session on Clubhouse. The Sound of DiscDog is an audio only live-training QnA session on Clubhouse where we experience the sounds of dog training and lend our imagination to interpret and explore the training session.Get the full lesson here:Check out all of the PVybe Clubhouse sessions on the Pawsitive Vybe Clubhouse landing page: https://pvybe.com/clubhouse★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Ron & Epic demonstrate some sequencing ideas, namely using the next cue as the marker for the current behavior in this Sound of DiscDog session.The Sound of DiscDog is an audio only live-training QnA session on Clubhouse where we experience the sounds of dog training and lend our imagination to interpret and explore the training session. Get the full lesson here:Check out all of the PVybe Clubhouse sessions on the Pawsitive Vybe Clubhouse landing page: https://pvybe.com/clubhouse★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Ron & Epic lay out some clear instruction on vault cuing in a Sound of DiscDog session on Clubhouse. The Sound of DiscDog is an audio only live-training QnA session on Clubhouse where we experience the sounds of dog training and lend our imagination to interpret and explore the training session. Get the full lesson here:★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Ron & King work on an intractable chewing/mauling disc behavior in a "Sound of DiscDog" session on Clubhouse.The Sound of DiscDog is a live training & QnA session in Clubhouse.Get the full lesson here:★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Ron & Epic warmup in this Sound of DiscDog session from 03.29.21.The Sound of DiscDog is an audio only live-training QnA session on Clubhouse where we experience the sounds of dog training and lend our imagination to interpret and explore the training session. . Get the full lesson and documentary video here:★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Ron & Obi do some work on catching and dropping in this session of the Sound of DiscDog on Clubhouse. The Sound of DiscDog is an audio only live-training QnA session on Clubhouse where we experience the sounds of dog training and lend our imagination to interpret and explore the training session. Get the full lesson here:★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Description:  You've seen the flashy performances disc dogs put on — this week Sara and I talk about the training behind the show, and what the options are for getting your own dog started!

El Disc Dog o frisbee es una excelente actividad, Guillermo Valencia, MVZ y adiestrador además de director de RedStar pero products nos habla de la liga mexicana de disc Dog, anímate y vuela con tu mejor amigo. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/xhk9/message

Ron Watson on Disc Placement in Disc Dog Freestyle. Full Lesson with video on the Pawsitive Vybe Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson on Disc Dog freestyle intangibles. Full Lesson with video on the Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | You Are the Way on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Gary calls in to discuss halftime shows and records falling with Yuri and the Hero Cup for 2020. Compliments of k9disc.com

Ron Watson on Disc Dog Vault Timing for Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from the Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog on Reframing Flatwork.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | Try Not Trying to Not? on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | Tao of Pressure on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson on disc dog drills or forms and how to purpose them towards Routine Building.

Ron Watson on Shifting Focus and Purpose for Routine Building.

Ron Watson on playing games with purpose to enhance Routine Building.

Ron Watson of Pawsitive Vybe on Routine Building Disc Management for the Handler.

Ron Watson talks about Disc Management for the Dog for disc dog freestyle Routine Building purposes.

Ron Watson of Pawsitive Vybe on Disc Management for the Team in relation to Routine Building.

Ron reads from the Pawsitive Vybe Daily Flow | Of Emotion and Patron Support

Ron reads Xs and Os Revisited, a series about shapes and flatwork in the game of disc dog freestyle from the Pawsitive Vybe Disc and Dogs Blog

The full program on Routine Building as requested by the Pawsitive Vybe Patrons over on the Pawsitive Vybe Patreon Page. Part 1 - Thoughts and Ideas on Disc Dog Freestyle Routines - 0:00 Part 2 - Practical Routine Building - 18:51

Ron Watson of Pawsitive Vybe delivers some practical thoughts and ideas on disc dog routine building. Practical is as practical does. Tactics and actions for building a disc dog freestyle routine in this Patron driven content series from the Pawsitive Vybe Patreon community.

Ron Watson on some practical aspects of creativity in Routine Building

Ron Watson reads Creating Competence from the Pawsitive Vybe Disc and Dogs Blog. This is part of Pawsitive Vybe's Patron's Choice project where content is created by popular demand.

Ron reads a Patron’s Choice piece, Skills Demonstration and Demonstration of Skill, a practical Routine Building piece requested by Pawsitive Vybe's Patrons.

Ron Reads a Patron's Choice piece from the Pawsitive Vybe Dog and Discs Blog on questions to ask before routine building

Ron Watson on some various performance approaches to disc dog freestyle. This content was chosen by PVybe Patrons over on the Pawsitive Vybe Patreon community. You should sign up, it's good Karma.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | Intent, Purpose, and Satori on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson of Pawsitive Vybe adds some perspective on some of the philosophical underpinnings of disc dog routine building. To get the answers we need to ask the right questions. Questions are posed and ideas are explored in this Patron driven content series from the Pawsitive Vybe Patreon community.

Ron Watson on some component elements of Disc Dog Freestyle Routines. This is part of the Patron's Choice series from Pawsitive Vybe's Patreon community. This series is about "Routine Building" and this is the 2nd installment.

Ron Watson on some various performance approaches to disc dog freestyle. This content was chosen by PVybe Patrons over on the Pawsitive Vybe Patreon community. You should sign up, it's good Karma.

Ron Watson talks about some things to keep in mind when choosing a song for your disc dog freestyle routine. This is part of the Pawsitive Vybe Patron's Choice series from Pawsitive Vybe's Patreon Community.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | There is No Faking Flow on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | Balanced Throwing on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | Try Not Trying to Not? on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | Try Not Trying to Not? on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | Try Not Trying to Not? on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | Balance for the Dog on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | Exploring the Depths on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | Easy Cheetah on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a Why I Play the Game | On Competition, Coaching, Creativity, and Feeling Cool in Disc Dog Freestyle from the Pawsitive Vybe Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | There Is No Way on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

Ron Watson reads a passage from his book, the Tao of Disc Dog | Learning vs Performance on Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog.

www.DogCastRadio.comDaniel Schulof investigated dog diets, and which led him to feed his own dogs differently, write a book and start his own dog food company. Heather Smith, who competes, judges and trains around the world, discusses Disc Dogs and accessibility. Plus the DogCast Radio News, which is all about - you guessed it, dogs!

www.DogCastRadio.comDaniel Schulof investigated dog diets, and which led him to feed his own dogs differently, write a book and start his own dog food company. Heather Smith, who competes, judges and trains around the world, discusses Disc Dogs and accessibility. Plus the DogCast Radio News, which is all about - you guessed it, dogs!

I asked Jeff Scheetz to be on the show, not because of how well accomplished of a musician he is, although that will be next time. But to talk to about disc dogs dogs. Turns out he's a world champion and runs www.kcdiscdogs.com.

Ron & Jack head off to the UpDog Discussion Group over on FB to answer a question about "What constitutes a catch?"

Jack & Ron discuss how clubs can use divisions and levels to maintain competitive parity while keeping things fun.

Jack & Ron are back in Episode 2, our first planned live episode, covers UpDif 2020 Qualifications status, What constitutes a throw? and some secret strategies of the Sugar Rush.

A discussion about the future of the show and a dress rehearsal for the real deal... special guest: DRINK!!!

Sound Bytes a recurring segment on the acoustics of UpDog.

Ron & Jack talk about Level 2 Games in the UpDog Challenge.

Summary: I got an email a few weeks ago from a listener, asking if I’d consider doing a podcast on doing sports with rescue dogs and/or dogs who join the family as adults. She suggested a number of excellent questions, so this will be the first of two podcasts where we’ll look specifically at rescues and training for adult dogs, with plans to do sports with those dogs! Next Episode:  To be released 10/26/2018, an interview with Mike Shikashio to talk about working with dog-dog aggression. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we’ll be doing something a little bit differently — I got an email a few weeks ago from a listener, asking if I’d consider doing a podcast on doing sports with rescue dogs and/or dogs who join the family as adults. She suggested a number of excellent questions, so this will be the first of two podcasts where we’ll look specifically at rescues and training for adult dogs, with plans to do sports with those dogs. For this episode of the podcast, I’m here with Sara Brueske. Sara has been training dogs for over 15 years; she became a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner in 2011, and jumped into the world of professional dog training. Sara and her dogs work at Purina Farms in Missouri, where they demonstrate the sports of disc, agility, and dock diving for the public in over 200 shows each year. She has a mix of purpose-bred dogs and rescues, and also frequently fosters dogs who have sports potential. She and her dogs also compete nationwide. Currently, she is active in the sports of disc dog, agility, mondioring and dock diving — plus, she’s a trick dog enthusiast. Sara has recently re-entered the world of competitive Disc Dog and was the 2016 overall UpDog International Champion as well as the 2017 UpDog Freestyle Champion. She believes in positive reinforcement not only for dogs, but for their handlers, and her biggest joy in training is watching a handler and dog become partners and grow as a team. Hi Sara! Welcome back to the podcast. Sara Brueske: Hi Melissa. Thank you for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. To start us out, can you remind everyone just a little bit about your dogs and what you’re working on with them? Sara Brueske: Sure. I have a lot of dogs, and every time I listen to your podcast, everybody lists off their dogs and what they do with their dogs. I’m not going to do all of that because I do have twelve dogs. Like you said, I have a mixture of purposely bred dogs, as well as rescue or rehomed dogs that were rehomed later in their lives. My smallest dog is a 6-pound Papillion named Rush, and he does all the sports everybody else does — he does agility, Frisbee, and dock diving, believe it or not — all the way up to I have a couple of Malinois that I do a few sports with. Creature is my youngest Malinois, he is training in mondioring. Famous does mondioring as well as dock diving, Frisbee, agility. I have a few Border Collies, a Border Staffie, I do breed Australian Koolies as well, so four of those. And I have a Labrador Retriever. So lots of dogs. Melissa Breau: How many of that current mix are rescue dogs or dogs that you have as adults? Sara Brueske: I have five of those twelve that are either rescue or rehomed dogs. I want to touch on that a little more before we get into this. I lumped those dogs in together, whether they were adopted from a shelter or a rescue organization or if they were privately rehomed, and so five of my dogs have been acquired through one of those means. Edgar — I have a Boston Terrier/Shih-Tzu mix — I adopted him from a local animal shelter when he was about 5 or 6 months old. He was turned in because he had had double cherry-eye surgery and his family couldn’t afford that. So I have him, and I have Taboo, my Border Collie/Staffordshire Bull Terrier mix, and she was rescued from a little bit of a neglectful situation — her owner had too many dogs and couldn’t properly care for them. And then I have Kickstart, who was a private rehome, as well as Knockout Nellie, my Labrador, who was a private rehome, and then Zuma, who is my very first Frisbee dog. She’s a Border Collie mix who was adopted from a herding-breed-specific rescue up in Minnesota. She was found as a stray in Missouri. Melissa Breau: You’re kind of in a unique position, since your dogs are your job and they earn their keep. I’d love to talk about how you evaluate potential dogs to determine if you think they’d be a good fit for sports. Maybe you could start by talking a little bit about general temperament. What kind of temperament do you want for a sports candidate and how do you begin to evaluate if a dog has that temperament when you’re meeting them? Sara Brueske: I do a lot of evaluations for potential sport dogs. I am approached quite often by either rescue shelters or private adopters who want a dog evaluated to see if they think it’s a good sport candidate. I do have a bit that I’m looking for versus what a normal, average sport handler could handle. What I’m looking for is pretty excessive as far as the temperament soundness of a dog because of what I do. We do perform in front of thousands of people, a lot of times they’re waving corndogs in our dogs’ faces, there’s a lot of loud noises, it’s an unpredictable atmosphere, and so I really need a very stable temperament dog, somebody who has crazy-high drive for toys or food, one that has nice, natural handler focus where I don’t really have to spend a lot of time building that relationship. So for me that’s really, really important, having those things. So that natural handler focus, food drive, toy drive — I want to see all of those. I would love it if a dog has a natural retrieve and you throw something out and they automatically re-orientate back to me, because that’s less I have to teach them. And I love it if the dog already has tug, because tugging is a huge thing as a reinforcer. Melissa Breau: What other traits do you look for when you’re evaluating a dog? Sara Brueske: I look for, personally, a very environmentally stable dog, one that will perform anywhere, regardless of the distractions. So when I evaluate those dogs for myself, or even dogs that people bring to me, I always try to evaluate them in a new location, somewhere that doesn’t have a lot of distractions, because I don’t really want to put them through the test, but somewhere they haven’t been before, rather than in maybe the foster home’s backyard, or a dog park that they frequent, or something along those lines. I want it to be a novel location for that dog. The other thing I want to do is I want to try to observe that dog. I don’t want to just interact with them right away. I want to see how long does it take for them to seek out attention from me, how long does it take them to stop sniffing one spot in particular, or to stop looking at the birds, or that sort of thing. The other part is — I want to dive back to that handler focus — is I don’t really necessarily worry if they don’t interact with me, the new person, the evaluator, right away. I want to see how they interact with their established handler. This doesn’t work so well with shelter dogs because they typically have many handlers that work with them, but maybe dogs that are in a foster home situation or a private rehome situation. I want to see that they’re engaging easily with their handler, their owner, foster, whatever it may be, or are they fighting for their attention, that sort of deal. Do they immediately engage and start playing with them in that new location. Melissa Breau: You said in there how long it takes them to refocus on you, and stuff like that. When you talk about time length, obviously anybody who hears this is going to go, “What is a really long time, and what is a reasonable amount of time for a dog in a new environment need to absorb things?” Sara Brueske: I was thinking about this before I came on here. It’s such a gut instinct when it comes to these sort of things. I don’t want a dog that takes minutes, obviously. They sniff one spot and they check in with me, and they go sniff another spot and they check in with me, that sort of deal. I don’t want them just head down the entire time. And maybe if I do come towards that dog, I want them interacting with me a little bit. A head check back to me sort of deal, or if I call them over, I want to see some sort of interaction and some sort of reaction to me seeking out their attention. I don’t want a dog that just blows me off because there might be a rabbit smell further out there. Also, if I go out there with cookies, do they come out and do they want the treats right away, or do they take one and then wander away. That sort of deal. Melissa Breau: Are there “red flags” or things that immediately make you think, “This dog would probably not be a good sports candidate”? Sara Brueske: I have a few red flags I tend to avoid personally, and then there’s some red flags I tell a lot of people to avoid. Aggression to handling — this is somebody they know, their handler or somebody they interact with on a daily basis, and that person says, “I can’t really reach and grab their collar,” something along those lines that shows me that the dog might be distrustful of people. That’s a big hurdle to overcome. When you’re looking for a sport candidate, a lot of people just want to dive right into the fun training right away, and so that’s something that would be a big obstacle for them to have to overcome before they start that sport training. I don’t want to see them ignore that current handler, so if that handler is calling to them and the dog is like, “No, I’m going to sniff over here, I’m totally ignoring you,” or they’re not taking food from that current handler, or they’re not out playing with that current handler, those are huge red flags to me. That shows me that maybe the drive isn’t quite where we want it to be, maybe their handler focus isn’t quite where we want it to be, or maybe there might be an environmental issue. We don’t really know in that short amount of time, but it’s going to be one of those issues. A couple of other red flags would be reactivity to dogs or people, combined with low drive or lack of handler focus. So not reactivity by itself. I have a few dogs that are either human-reactive or dog-reactive, or even environmentally reactive, but because their food drive or their toy drive or their relationship with me is strong enough, that naturally overcomes and allows me to have some way to work with that reactivity, so it’s easier for me to overcome that particular obstacle. But if I have a dog that has lower drive and lower handler focus, it’s going to be a lot harder for me to overcome that obstacle in a reasonable amount of time. The other red flag … we all know that dog sports is not just going there and competing with your dog and doing the exercises. There’s a lot more to it. There may be travel, there may be going to classes, there might be a whole weekend experience where your dog is in a crate a lot of the time. So if I have a dog that can’t settle and relax in a crate, or they have a previous history of showing separation anxiety, or escaping out of crates, or any of those type of issues, it’s going to be harder for my dog to adjust in a trial setting, and that’s very important when you’re looking at a sport or performance dog. The same with what I do with shows. If I’m traveling across states to do a show, I need a dog that can do that and relax, so that by the time I get there to the show I have some dog left rather than an anxious dog to work with. Melissa Breau: I think we saw a lot of interesting bits and pieces in there, especially when it came to the reactivity not necessarily being a disqualifier for a dog that you’re evaluating for sports, so long as you have tools in the toolbox right — something so that you can work with it? Sara Brueske: If we look at Zuma, she is my first rescue dog, a dog I trialed in agility, she has a few titles before she injured her shoulders, as well as I competed in Frisbee with her and she still does shows with me today. She is very dog-reactive, but I was able to use some management tools based on her drive in a trial setting for agility as well as Frisbee that it didn’t really impact our performances at all. It didn’t take a long time to overcome that issue because she was so driven to work with me, as well as having adequate food drive and toy drive for that. Now if you look at Edgar, my Boston Terrier/Shih-Tzu mix, he’s pretty human-reactive. He’s very uncertain around people, especially adults, and so that’s very challenging for him to perform in front of a crowd. However, his food drive is off the charts. He is a nutty, crazy boy, and so I was able to help him overcome that pretty easily so that he works in our shows on a regular basis and he does a great, phenomenal job, and he has fun, which is the most important part. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. That’s definitely not to be under-valued: making sure that they’re still having a good time. Sara Brueske: Yes. Melissa Breau: Are there things that immediately make you think a dog is especially trainable, or traits that are “must haves” when it comes to potential sport dogs? Sara Brueske: I think those are actually two very different things. When I think of a dog that’s especially trainable, I think of a dog that is far on the spectrum of, “This dog is going to be really easy,” or “I can get this dog in shows really fast,” or “This dog is going to make a fantastic trial dog for somebody without having to do a lot of additional training on top of the training required for that sport,” versus a “must have.” For must-haves, I kind of mentioned those already. I want to have some drive for either food or toys, preferably both, because it’s a lot easier to manage arousal levels and that sort of thing if you have both of those drives. But depending on the sport, one or the other works great. And then an environmentally stable dog would be nice to have so you don’t have to overcome a lot of anxiety issues, as well as a dog that is OK being crated in a strange situation, or a dog that at least doesn’t have a history of being anxious in a crate, so that you can start from scratch with that. For a dog that’s especially trainable, when I’m evaluating them in that new environment, I want a dog that acclimates super-fast. They know the game of fetch, they’re throwing their ball at me immediately, or at least throwing it at their handler immediately. They want to engage, they want to play, regardless of their surroundings. That, to me, is like the best dog. One that’s focused and engaged with the current handler, one that plays with me easily without even questioning it. They’re just like, “Somebody throw this ball, somebody play tug with me, somebody give me a cookie.” And one that doesn’t disconnect despite the distractions around, so if another dog happens to walk by, they’re not like, “Oh hey, let me go check out that dog.” They’re super laser-focused onto what we’re doing. There have been a few dogs I’ve evaluated that that’s what I get. They walk onto the field, leash comes off, and they are throwing their toys at me, ready to play right away. And there’s obviously dogs I’ve evaluated that don’t connect with me at all, or their handlers, and they’re completely distracted by that new environment. Melissa Breau: We’ll get to this a little bit more later on, but I think that that’s really the key between what people think of as drive versus what’s actually useful drive. But before we get there, I wanted to ask what you think when you’re evaluating a dog. What do you think is likely “fixed behavior” in an adult dog, something that would require a lot of work to modify or change, and comparing that to something that you think is realistically probably pretty easy to modify or change, and how do you figure that out, especially if you only get a brief time to do your initial evaluation when you meet that dog? Sara Brueske: Everybody has experienced at one point, whether you’re working with somebody’s dog, or you have a rehomed rescue dog, or it’s your friend’s dog, or your spouse’s dog, or whatever it is, where the dog acts a certain way with one handler and acts completely different with a second handler. It might be something like, “Oh, my dog only barks at strangers when my wife is walking him, but he doesn’t bark at strangers when I’m walking him.” It’s kind of the same thing when you adopt an older dog. It’s a blank slate. It’s an opportunity for you to start off from the right foot, and if you know that that dog has potential bad habits, like maybe dropping … we’ll take a Frisbee dog, for example. They love Frisbee, but they drop the Frisbee 10 feet away from you, so you can’t ever grab it in a timely fashion. So you know your dog has that problem. The retrieve’s broken with their current owner. There are steps you can take to prevent that from occurring in your new game with your new partner, especially if you know they’re going to happen, and there are steps you can do to train them to do it the right way right off the bat. It’s the same thing with any kind of behavior problem, in my opinion. If you know the dog is really reactive towards men, there are steps you can take right away to set up good experiences with men, prevent the bad habits from creeping into your new relationship, and take that step forward right off the bat. And so, for me, there are very few problems that are fixed behaviors when you’re adopting a new dog. It’s beneficial knowing what those are, but if you don’t know what they are and they crop up and you see them, immediately you can change what you’re doing, because your dog doesn’t have a set routine with you. They don’t have a relationship with you yet, and so it’s your chance to mold that relationship and those habits into what you want them to be right off the bat. I think the only one that really comes to mind as far as one that’s difficult to fix are those crate problems. Once again, it’s really hard to change the picture of being crated to a dog without some serious intervention. So if the dog has bad experiences in a crate to the point where they’re trying to break out, they’re not settling, they’re spinning, they’re barking, all of those anxiety-type behaviors, and you take that dog to a trial or anything like that, that’s a picture that’s always going to be the same to them, and so it’s difficult to take that from their old home, those bad habits they’ve already developed, and then flip-flop that to a dog that’s perfectly able to go anywhere and be crated. That’s one of the ones that I struggle with personally as far as looking past it when I adopt a dog. Melissa Breau: I think when it comes to things like “drive” or energy levels, a lot of the times rescues or shelters may think a dog with a lot of energy necessarily is a dog with a lot of drive and therefore a really good sports dog. Is there a certain amount of reading between the lines that needs to happen when looking at descriptions for dogs? How do you decide if a dog is even worth going to take a look at? Sara Brueske: It’s all reading between the lines. Everybody is so fantastic at spinning things into a good way, or they like to over-share the truth. They’ll say, “Oh, my dog has so much energy, they’re literally jumping off the couch or over the couch,” or “They have so much energy, I can’t keep them contained in the backyard. They love to jump fences,” or “My dog loves to play so much, he plays with other dogs nonstop.” All those things, to me, are red flags. So we have a dog that’s just crazy in the house. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they enjoy playing with the handler with balls or tugs or anything along those lines. A lot of times I’ll ask those people, “Do they love to play fetch?” And the person is like, “Well, I don’t know. I’ve never tried.” And so that’s kind of a red flag there. Now I have this dog that has so much energy, and they never learned to put that energy into a useful game, and so now they created their own games, jumping over the couch, or jumping out of the backyard, or something along those lines. And the one where he plays nonstop with other dogs, he needs a job to do, he never stops moving. Now they’ve created a dog that is hyper-focused on playing with other dogs, and they’re going to learn that if they want to expend all this energy, they have to go interact with another dog. So you get those dogs that are really excited about playing with other dogs, but they have no real human interaction history built up. So those are the red flags to me. But as far as things that I love to see, I want to see somebody tell me that the dog is obsessed with her ball, and once they say they’re obsessed with their ball, I’m like, “I need to meet that dog right away.” “They’re crazy about their ball,” “They’ll play fetch nonstop for hours,” or something along those lines. “They carry the ball everywhere with them,” something like that. Or “He’ll do anything for a treat.” If he’ll do anything for a treat, that’s probably a dog that has pretty high food drive, most likely, and I’m crazy about those dogs as well. The one thing I tell everybody, anybody that contacts me regarding a dog that they think might need a sport home, I say, “Send me video.” I want to see a video of the dog playing fetch, if he knows how to play fetch, or tug, if he knows how to play tug, or taking food and showing off whatever tricks he knows, or something along those lines. I don’t want to see video of him interacting with other dogs unless there is a concern that the dog is going to be reactive or anything along those lines. That doesn’t interest me as much as showing those drives. A lot of times we just want to see unedited videos of that — two minutes unedited of trying to play with this dog is all I want to see. Melissa Breau: I think most people, whether they’re adopting from a rescue situation or a rehome situation, or unless you’re walking straight into a shelter, it’s probably pretty possible to get those two minutes of video footage in this world of smartphones and whatnot. Sara Brueske: It absolutely is. And even when I’m contacted by shelters, a lot of the time they’ll say that they have a dog that’s crazy about toys, “Why don’t you come out and evaluate?” Most of the time they can get us video, even 30 seconds of them playing fetch with the dogs — they’re doing that anyway — and with our cell phones nowadays it’s really easy to get that. And generally they have some sort of play area. Even if it’s inside, we can evaluate dogs pretty well as far as that goes. Melissa Breau: Let’s say you get a dog, you don’t know their training history, you don’t really know anything about their history, maybe. How does that impact what you do with them in terms of training, and how does that process compare to what you do with a brand-new puppy who obviously has a clean slate? Sara Brueske: It is exactly the same as a new puppy, because even if you get a new puppy and they’re a clean slate, they always have those built-in fears and anxieties and drives and happinesses and those sorts of things that are individual to that particular puppy. If I adopt an older dog, even if they’ve had previous training, I don’t necessarily want to know it, because — and I have done this before, I’ve adopted a dog that is fully trained and knows Frisbee or whatever it is along those lines — it’s not trained the way that I would train a dog, and so if that behavior falls apart, I don’t know how to rebuild it in the way the dog originally learned it. So I’d rather just retrain the behavior from the ground up and hope it goes quickly, if they already know it, with my way of training it, so that I know how to fix it when it starts to fall apart, or I know how to maintain it as we go throughout my dog’s career. So if I adopt a dog that maybe has done a pet agility class in the past, where they’ve gone on the agility equipment, I wouldn’t handle that dog any different from a dog that I was adopting that was … or a puppy. I would teach it all from the ground up right away. Melissa Breau: I know that you have a pretty involved puppy protocol that you go through with new puppies, too, which I imagine that that would give you a really good sense probably pretty quickly with a new dog, even if it’s an adult dog, of where their strengths are and where their weaknesses are and where they might need some work, and give you a really good sense of what they need and what they don’t need, and where their balance is or isn’t, so to speak. Sara Brueske: Exactly. I guess the benefit of adopting an older dog, if it comes from a private rehome or a foster situation is, like I said earlier in the podcast, knowing those bad habits. So if we’re talking, like, a Frisbee dog, we all hate it when our dog drops the Frisbee 10 feet away from us and we’re in a competition and we have to run and grab that Frisbee and we’re wasting valuable time. So if we know that our dog has a tendency toward bad habits like that, we can just avoid those and make sure that we set our dogs up for success to counteract those bad habits right away, if they’re an adult dog, versus a puppy, we don’t know what bad habits are going to be inclined to do genetically as far as that. So if I have, like, a Border Collie that loves to stare at something rather than move towards it and tug, I can fix that right away by my play style with that adult dog, versus a puppy, I wouldn’t know if they were really inclined to do that behavior. Melissa Breau: It’s funny because you keep bringing that up, and it’s like, hmm, were you sitting there watching when I was training Levi this morning? I want to shift gears a little bit. I know that in addition to your own dogs, you foster, and typically the dogs you foster are dogs that are likely going to be good sports prospects. I was hoping you’d share a little bit about that. How do you wind up with the dogs you do? How did you become a foster home for those specific types of dogs? I think a lot of people think that maybe fostering dogs would be a good way to find one that’s a good fit for them and their sport and whatnot. Sara Brueske: Yes, fostering is definitely a good way to go. It’s a hands-on experience. You’re helping the dog out, you’re helping the rescue out, or the shelter out. Worst case you’re giving the dog a good experience, hopefully you’re giving the dog a good experience, by fostering them, and you’re learning more about that dog, But I am always one for foster-to-adopt. I think that’s definitely a good way to go. My network of adopters is just sport-dog people. I don’t have a good network of adopters that are looking for a good pet. All the people I know in the world of dog, they all do agility, fly ball, disc, diving, they’re all looking for their next competition dog, and so that’s why I really focus on sport candidate fosters versus just whatever dog is in the shelter, because I’ve had dogs that have had lower drive that I’ve tried to foster before, and it takes me forever to find them a home, versus most people when they’re looking for a pet, they go to specific shelters or rescues, and those dogs get adopted and they get the appropriate eyes on them right away. And so I look for the dogs that I can place relatively easy, the ones that other resources like shelters or rescue groups don’t have the network towards, and so it’s my little niche area that I can make sure I get those dogs the right eyes on them right away. A lot of times the rescues I’ve worked with in the past they’ll contact me and say they have a candidate that they would like a foundation on, or maybe further evaluated, or they just don’t have an appropriate foster for, and I’ll take that dog there. Sometimes individual people will contact me. They’re struggling with their dog and they want to rehome, but they don’t have the resources, they don’t have the knowledge of where to go, so they’ll contact me that way. A lot of local people that come out and watch our show and know that we work with a lot of rescue dogs, they’ll contact us when they know of a dog that needs a home that they think is a little toy-crazy or nutty, or sometimes I just see a dog that’s shared on Facebook, and I think it’s a very interesting dog, and I’ll offer that I can foster and maybe put a foundation on it, and sometimes they take me up on it and sometimes they don’t. So they kind of come from all over the place. Melissa Breau: As somebody who has fostered and owned a wide variety of dogs and breeds, are there similarities that you see? Differences? Anything we haven't gotten into? Sara Brueske: I think it’s just your typical breed differences. Anybody who has taken any of my seminars or classes, I always say, if I say something like, “Your dog’s doing that because it’s a Border Collie,” or anything along those lines, it’s not a bash on the breed at all. Or “Your dog’s doing that because it’s a Cattle Dog,” or because it’s a Koolie or a Malinois, those are just the traits you tend to see. So depending on the breed, there are definitely things that you see that are similar from breed to breed to breed, and when you see an outlier that’s always a cool thing because it goes against the normal grain for that breed. I think I tend to like a certain type of dog, and so I tend to gravitate towards those dogs, dogs that are just kind of crazy and off the wall, crazy about their toys, but other than that there’s such a big difference between breeds and dogs that it’s pretty crazy. I love fostering, so I get to know so many different dogs. I get a random itching to foster some random, weird, scruffy dog that I see, and I’m like, “I need to have that dog.” And part of it’s really cool for me because it gives me that hands-on experience with that breed that I wouldn’t have experienced another way. So yeah, I definitely want to foster the Golden Retriever puppy that I haven’t had the chance to work with one-on-one before, or some other random breed. It’s a learning experience always. Melissa Breau: One last question to summarize all of this stuff. If somebody is listening and they’re looking for a new sports dog, and they want to go that adult dog or rescue route, to bring it all together, what advice would you give that person? Sara Brueske: If I was looking for a new sport dog or had a close friend that was looking for another sport dog, I would definitely point them towards either breed-specific rescues or sport-dog-specific rescues. Just a situation where the dog is in a home, and that foster home has had a chance to properly evaluate them in a bunch of different situations, and that they know that dog’s tendencies, there are not going to be any surprises that crop up on you as far as that goes, and it gives you a good chance to really evaluate that dog versus a dog coming from a shelter situation. I’m not saying you can’t find great dogs at shelters. You absolutely can. I’ve found some amazing dogs through shelters — a bunch of my fosters, Edgar, tons of dogs from shelters. But if you’re kind of limited as far as resources and that sort of thing, having those dogs that are in a foster home is really the way to go as far as that goes. There are a few dog-sport-specific rescues, Epic Sport Dog Rescue is one of them, and then breed-specific rescues like Midwest Border Collie Rescue or All Herding Breed Rescue of Illinois, or any of those that tend to get those type of herding breeds or whatever breed that they’re looking at. If they’re looking at Labs, look at a Lab-specific rescue type of a deal. And just get the word out there. If you are already in a sport, tell as many people as you can that, “Hey, I’m in the market,” and just be prepared to wait for the right dog. So get the word out there, contact as many different people as you know on Facebook, and say, “I’m looking for this, these are the requirements I’m looking for,” a 30-pound dog that might be good at Frisbee or agility or whatever it may be, and just see what comes your way. There’s also a lot of really great Facebook groups as well. Adoptable Performance Dogs, Adoptable Sport and Working Dogs, both of them are groups on Facebook where a lot of people will cross-post dogs that are available for adoption. Melissa Breau: Thank you so much, Sara, for coming back on the podcast. This was great. Sara Brueske: Thank you so much for having me. Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We’ll be back next week with — and I’m sorry, guys, I’m probably going to butcher his name until I talk to him and find out how to pronounce it — but we’ll be back next week with Mike Shikashio to talk about working with dog-dog aggression. If you haven’t already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today’s show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Ruby Welsford is a founder of the UK Disc Dog Association and runs workshops and demonstrations nationwide. Ruby’s dog Betsy Boo the Amazing Frisbee Dog is also her owner-trained assistance dog.

Tournament directors Jakub Kostel & Dexter Struz update us on FPA World Championships 2018 in Trnava and what to expect. FPAW is part of Trnava Frisbee Games while will also include Ultimate, Disc Dog, and Disc Golf events. Continue reading The post Episode 74: Trnava Frisbee Games Promo Interview with Jakub Kostel & Dexter Struz appeared first on FrisbeeGuru.

Summary: Sara Brueske has been training dogs for over 15 years. She became a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner in 2011 and jumped into the world of professional dog training. Sara and her dogs work at Purina Farms in Missouri, where they demonstrate the sports of disc, agility, and dock diving for the public in over 400 shows each year. She and her dogs also compete nationwide. Currently, she is active in the sports of disc dog, agility, mondioring and dock diving -- plus, she's a trick dog enthusiast. Sara has also recently re-entered the world of competitive Disc Dog and was the 2016 overall UpDog International Champion as well as the 2017 UpDog Freestyle Champion. Sara believes in positive reinforcement not only for dogs, but for their handlers as well. Her biggest joy in training is watching a handler and dog become partners and grow as a team. Next Episode:  To be released 6/1/2018, featuring Heather Lawson, talking about all the ways you can use a chin rest, platforms and the "fly" cue! TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Sara Brueske. Sara Brueske has been training dogs for over 15 years. She became a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner in 2011 and jumped into the world of professional dog training. Sara and her dogs work at Purina Farms in Missouri, where they demonstrate the sports of disc, agility, and dock diving for the public in over 400 shows each year. She and her dogs also compete nationwide. Currently, she is active in the sports of disc dog, agility, mondioring and dock diving -- plus, she's a trick dog enthusiast. Sara has also recently re-entered the world of competitive Disc Dog and was the 2016 overall UpDog International Champion as well as the 2017 UpDog Freestyle Champion. Sara believes in positive reinforcement not only for dogs, but for their handlers as well. Her biggest joy in training is watching a handler and dog become partners and grow as a team. Hi Sara! Welcome back to the podcast. Sara Brueske: Thank you so much for having me. Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat. To start us out, I know it's a big crew, but can you just refresh listeners' memories a little by telling us a bit about your dogs and what you're working on with them? Sara Brueske: Sure. I have a lot of dogs. I actually have thirteen dogs, and yes, they are all house dogs. They sleep in my bedroom with me, they hang out on the couch, they watch TV, they do everything normal dogs do. Quick rundown of what I have: I have a couple of Malinois, a little Papillon, a shelter Boston Terrier mix, a couple of Border Collies, a Border Staffie, and a bunch of Koolies, Australian Koolies, and I actually breed Koolies as well. We're working on a whole bunch of different things. The Malinois are doing mondioring as well as dock diving right now. Famous my Malinois, also does Frisbee. The rest of the dogs do diving, they do agility, they do disc dog, they do pretty much whatever I get intrigued by. Sometimes it's scent work, sometimes it's tricks, sometimes it's the flavor of the month, the cool thing people are teaching. They do everything, really. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. I know you're a pretty big proponent of teaching lots of tricks, and I wanted to ask you what you thought of as the benefits of doing lots of trick training. Sara Brueske: There are so many benefits to trick training. My biggest one that I try to preach a lot is I treat tricks kind of like throwaway behaviors. I don't mean that in the term that tricks aren't important to teach, and they're not really cool to teach, and they don't have their own purpose, but the behavior we can teach to get all the kinks out of our training. They can teach concepts. If I want to teach a head target for heeling, for instance, and I want to shape that, I might start with some simple trick like a head target on a piece of glass so I can smush my dog's face up against it. I might do something really cool like a chin rest, or the head down, or “look sad” trick where the dog looks super, super sad. If I want to train something like, for instance, a really nice foot finish for heel work, I might teach my dogs to back around backwards around me first, because that gives them really good hind-end awareness as well. So there's a whole bunch of really cool tricks out there that can teach our dogs concepts for competition behaviors, and that way we're not really experimenting on the final behaviors that we want to have. I'm not going to work out the kinks on head targeting while I'm teaching the actual head targeting from a heel position, and for that reason that's why I call those throwaway behaviors. They're also really cool because they teach us about our dogs, and they teach our dogs about us, and they teach body awareness and balance and control. I mean, they're pretty cute, too. There's a whole bunch of cool tricks out there as well. So tons of reasons why we should do trick training with our dogs. Melissa Breau: You mentioned a little bit as you were talking about how you use one skill to teach the concept for another skill. Are there “foundations” for tricks the same way there are for other sports? And I'm pretty sure you're going to say yes, but I won't go there all the way. If so, can you share some examples of what that looks like? Sara Brueske: I feel like I should just say no now just to throw you off your track! “No, there's no foundations. You treat the behavior just as it is.” There's always foundations for every behavior we teach our dogs. The way I teach tricks, and the way the upcoming tricks class is going to be situated, is they're going to be broken up into concepts, so front-paw targeting, rear-paw targeting, hind-end awareness, head targeting, and then there'll be some miscellaneous tricks as well. What I do is I teach the concept of that, and then I can branch those into different tricks, and then those tricks can turn into different tricks and so on and so forth. I might start with something really cool like rear-paw targeting, and then teach back up from that. My favorite trick is the fake pee on something, where you tell your dog to go pee on something and they don't actually pee, obviously, but they look like they are. That all comes from the same place as rear-paw targeting, and that's used for wall handstands and actual independent handstands later on. It's all the same idea just branched off one off of another. Melissa Breau: My next question was going to be, How do you build on those foundation skills to create those more complex tricks later on? Do you want to talk about that little bit more, how that progresses, I guess? Sara Brueske: Sure. I'll use a different example here: pivoting. We all know pivoting from heel work, but pivoting is a huge component of a whole bunch of tricks that I use as well. Pivoting is where your dog's front paws are stationary on an upturned bowl, or something along those lines, and their back end rotates around it, kind of like a circus elephant. They rotate around a pedestal using their hind end. I use that for teaching my back-around, and my reverse leg weaves, and my scoot for disc, and even to teach agility weave poles. I can teach that backwards using that same concept. So where I do that is I would start with the dog pivoting around a bowl, fade that bowl, use it on a body cue on me, and then put it on verbal cue from there, and then I'd be able to use it for the agility poles later on as well. So it's a whole process, but it's all that same behavior just used in different ways. Melissa Breau: That's interesting, because those are pretty different end behaviors, backing around you and reverse leg weaves. I could see how they have similar components, but they're definitely different end behaviors. They're very different concepts. Sara Brueske: They're definitely different in the final product, but if you look at what the dog's actually doing, they're just swinging their back end around in different ways, and so therefore to the dog it's the same trick. It's just where they're doing that trick in relation to you, where they stop that trick, where they start that trick, and then obviously with the agility poles, using that as a prop outside of just the handler. Melissa Breau: Is there maybe a particular trick that you usually teach first? Is that something that differs depending on the dog? What are some examples of that? Sara Brueske: The tricks I teach, first I teach my core concept behaviors all at one time, obviously in different sessions, and that goes into my little puppy foundation program that I've developed. So the big ones I want to knock out right away so that I can start using them in different ways to teach behaviors off of them is head target — that one's really really important for me, chin rest, nose targeting, extended moving nose touches, because all that stuff turns into holds and stuff later on, and then to pivot, like I talked about earlier. I want those puppies really working their hind end as soon as possible so they get used to it. And then teaching them to shape with different objects is a huge thing. It's one of the first things I teach them to do, and so behaviors like all four paws in a box is super-important. It's something that … most dogs learn touch within a session, and then we can work with it from there. I think those are the important ones. The other thing I really try to knock out with my young dogs, my new dogs, right away is three different concepts as far as shaping. These aren't really tricks, but I want them to learn to shape in relation to me, the handler. So using a chin rest or a hand touch, for example, for that I want them to learn to shape with an object, so all four in a box, or the pivot work. And then I want them to learn to shape by themselves, so something like shaping a down or a spin that way. Those are really the three concepts I need my dogs to learn right away, regardless of what tricks or behaviors I'm teaching them later on. Melissa Breau: It's really interesting because it teaches them both to operate independently, to operate with an object, and to operate with you, and having a dog that's learned one really strongly before learning any of the others, it's very hard to get those mindsets if they don't learn the three simultaneously. Sara Brueske: Yeah, so going back to that point of what I teach first, I really look at the concepts I need first, and those are the three ones, and I basically pick my behavior based on that. It might be a different behavior for the dog previous to this one, but it teaches that same concept, so I look at that rather than which behaviors I'm actually teaching. Melissa Breau: You mentioned this earlier, but it's also in the description for your upcoming class — that tricks not only teach our dogs how to learn, but they teach us how our dogs learn, as well. Can you explain that a little bit more? What do you mean by that, maybe with an example? Sara Brueske: Sure. I'll start with the first part of that. Tricks teach our dogs how to learn, and so that comes to that whole conceptual learning that I was talking about, things like luring, teaching our dogs to lure, dogs have to learn to lure. Not all of them just follow that cookie in your hand, and not all of them know how to fade that lure. That's a training tool that we have to teach our dogs. Same with shaping. I've already touched on that. Things like reverse-luring or zen hand, all those things need to be taught to our dogs, and tricks are a great way to teach those tools to our dogs. That way, we can take those tools and teach a different behavior later on. As far as us learning about our dogs, every time we teach our dog a new behavior, we're learning something about them. We're learning about their frustrations, or we learn what they enjoy as far as rewards go, how they want that reward delivered. We learn the signs that teach us that our dogs are getting pushed too far. Are they getting to the end point of that session? How far can I actually push that dog? Do they do better with short sessions, like 15-second sessions with a couple of reps here and then switching to something else, or do they do better working on it for six or seven minutes straight, which I don't typically recommend, but some dogs are OK with that. And so tricks, again because they are that throwaway behavior — typically they're not things that we win ribbons or anything like that for, other than obviously the AKC trick dog titles and the Do More With Your Dog trick dog titles. But typically they're not behaviors that need to be done with such precisions that we're worried about screwing them up, and that's why I like using tricks to be able to learn from my dog and figure out how they like to learn. Melissa Breau: Do you have any examples of something, maybe a trick that you taught one of your guys that really taught you something about how one of them tends to learn? Sara Brueske: I want to use Brilliant, my Koolie, as an example because I've learned so much from working with her. She was the keeper from my litter, my first litter I bred. She has a wonderful work ethic, but she doesn't work like her mom does. Her mom is very, very fidgety, very, very fast, very, very crazy, and has a very low frustration tolerance as far as being right and getting that reward. Brilliant is methodical She is very thoughtful with her process. She's slow, but not in a bad way, just slow as in she thinks things out before she does it. Duration is her favorite thing to work on. So instead of really talking about a trick that taught me that about her, I want to talk about the type of tricks that I learned that she enjoys the most. I tried teaching her fun, fast things with food, like wrap around the cone, spins, and leg weaves, things that other dogs enjoy, and they're moving, and stuff like that. It was always slow, and it was getting me frustrated with her, like, “Why aren't you more like your mom?” And so I started playing around with other tricks, tricks that her mom isn't really good at, things that make her think, so stacking bowls, putting this inside that, nosework. All of those things that require a little bit more of a thoughtful process, Brilliant is really excelling at. While she was becoming older and her repertoire is getting larger and larger, it still has all of these other tricks that I didn't teach her mom, and that's because her mom didn't enjoy learning them. So it was a cool insight to her. She knows all of the stuff that her mom does, but she doesn't really enjoy doing those in the same way, but she enjoys the more methodical tricks, and so that's a cool thing that I've learned about her. Melissa Breau: That's really actually neat because it shows how different personalities come with different dogs, and it doesn't even matter that they're blood relations. Sara Brueske: Yeah, exactly. Melissa Breau: I know you do a lot with your dogs — you do a lot of different skills and train a bunch of different sports. How does the trick training that you do benefit or carry over into teaching them some of those other skills? Sara Brueske: There's a lot of ways. I've already talked about the conceptual theory, how I'm teaching head targeting with this behavior, teaching pivots and all that stuff. But I think that the more broad answer to this question is about our relationship. Because I haven't experimented in the behaviors I need for other sports or anything like that, those behaviors, my dogs' emotional response to those other behaviors, and their enjoyment of those behaviors, is always higher. So because my dog comes with the tools ready to learn things like heeling, or ready to learn things like sequencing for agility, because we've done the behavior chains with tricks first before fading out rewards and everything else like that in agility, I feel like that is the biggest benefit with tricks. Being able to use those to prep my dogs for the skills they need in other sports and helping our relationship that way. That way, when I go out there and I start doing our 20-minute mondioring routine without any rewards, my dog's ready to go, our relationship is stronger, they love and enjoy those behaviors without any failures or errors that come with teaching our dogs new things. Melissa Breau: Twenty minutes is a really long time. That's a long time to be showing. Sara Brueske: Mondioring's hard. Melissa Breau: The Tricks and Purpose class — what led you to create the class? Can you share a little bit about it? Sara Brueske: I love training tricks. It's definitely one of my favorite things. When I was 11 years old and I had my first Border Collie, he got washed out of agility because he ended up with a shoulder injury that ended his career before he was even 2 years old. I was 11, so I get home, I train my dog to do tricks, and it's still something that I've always enjoyed. It's something that's always part of my relationship with my dogs. Always in the back of my mind is, What else can I get this dog to do? What cool thing can we play around with? That's why I wanted to share the enjoyment I get from training tricks, and I wanted to show people the other side of trick training, the purpose behind it. I just spent the weekend with a whole bunch of production-sport people. People don't train in production sports, they typically don't cross-train, they don't train tricks for sure. So showing them that there is a purpose, there is a thing to be gained from training tricks, it's something that I wanted to share with the community as much as I can. Melissa Breau: Did you want to talk a little bit about what skills you're going to cover in the class? Sara Brueske: Like I said, we're breaking it down into concepts, and then we're going to branch tricks off of there. My vision for this class is to spend each week, so each of the six weeks, on all concepts. I think the first week is something like front-paw targeting, and then I'll show a couple of tricks you can do along with those things. That way, students aren't required to train a certain trick or anything like that. They can pick and choose those tricks, cover as many as they want. If they want to do all four, then go for it. If you only want to do one, that's cool too, as long as you get that concept of it done. So we do front-paw targeting, we do rear-paw targeting, head targeting, there's some miscellaneous fun ones in there, like we do this really cool trick in our shows, it's math, so you ask your dog a question like, “What is 2 plus 2?” and then the dog barks out the answer. I thought that would be a really cool one to share because it's a crowd pleaser, and it works really well for a bark and hold and IPO or Mondio too, by the way. Melissa Breau: That's actually neat. It's the crossover that most people probably have not thought about. Sara Brueske: Yes. My Malinois are the ones that do that trick because they have bark and holds. Melissa Breau: The other class that you have on the schedule is a disc dog class. Just to give people a little bit of background, how did you originally get into disc? Sara Brueske: I got into disc in a funny little way. I was an agility girl. I did agility. I loved agility with all my heart. I trained my Great Danes in it. I finally got this little Border Collie mix, a little rescue dog, and for some reason I was looking on Craigslist — this is the weirdest story ever; I don't know if I've shared it a lot — but I was looking on Craigslist, and somebody was selling a box of dog Frisbees from the local club — the local disc dog club. I'm like, hey, that seems kind of cool. I should probably go check that out. I always wanted a disc dog. I went and met up with this lady, and she sold me her box of dog Frisbees for, like, 30 bucks. I started throwing them for my dog and I'm, like, this is pretty cool. I watched a couple of videos on how to train different tricks, and I'm, like, yeah, my dog's really enjoying this. This was Zuma, eight years ago, this was Zuma, and I'm, like, this is really cool. I posted on Facebook a photo of her all happy after a session, her tongue was hanging out, and there's the disc with the Minnesota Disc Dog logo on it. Apparently I was friends with some members, and they commented, like, “Hey, we have a competition this weekend, come on out. It's Raspberry Fest in Hopkins, Minnesota. It's a UFO local.” I'm like, “All right, I'll go check it out.” I went, and we won first place in Novice Freestyle and Novice Toss and Catch, and I met some of the coolest people I've ever met in my life that are still my really great friends today, and that's what started my addiction. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. That's fantastic. It's kind of like random. There's nothing more reinforcing than going to your first competition and walking away with those kind of placements. Sara Brueske: Yes, it was a lot of fun. Melissa Breau: For anybody who's never been to a disc competition and isn't super-familiar with the sport, can you share a little bit about what some of the competition skills and games and stuff look like? Sara Brueske: The traditional disc dog format, and there's a few different organizations that have it, is they have freestyle, so that's what most people think of when they think of disc dog competitions. The dogs are vaulting off the handlers, they're doing flips, they're doing crazy routines set to music. That's my favorite thing. But there is so much more to disc dog than just that component. You can be super-successful in the sport without ever even doing freestyle. Then there's the other traditional games called Toss and Catch, or Toss and Fetch, or Distance and Accuracy, depending on the organization. This is a distance and speed and accuracy game, so you're throwing one Frisbee down the field to your dog and they're bringing it back. It's a timed event. You get extra points for distance and for accuracy. That's Toss and Catch. Typically there's a champion for both for Toss and Catch and then there's a champion for Frisbee or freestyle combined with Toss and Catch for an overall champion. So that's really cool. That's the main traditional format. Then there's a whole bunch of distance competitions, so who can throw the Frisbee the furthest. It's not timed. It's just the longest throw wins, typically, generally, in a tournament-style format. After that, there's a whole group of strategy games. Skyhoundz Disc Dogathon started this whole idea of strategy games. You have to get “this catch in this zone,” “that catch in this zone,” or it's a timed trial how fast you get three catches. And then this organization that really rocks, called UpDog Challenge, started … some friends of mine and some other people created this organization, and it's all strategy games. They also have Toss and Catch and they have freestyle. There's personal achievements you can win, it's really cool, there's different world championships and stuff like that. It's really beginner-friendly and it's a ton of fun. Melissa Breau: It sounds that way. For people just getting interested, what skills does a dog need to compete in some of the different games, or what skills could they be working on, maybe beginner skills, for all of this? Sara Brueske: The big one, obviously, is they need to have toy drive. Frisbee drive is obviously what they need to have. There are some organizations like UpDog that allow you to use any Frisbee as long as it doesn't have a hole in the center, so soft, floppy, fabric Frisbees work just fine, or whatever you normally use for any of the other competitions. So Frisbee drive is really important, obviously, since that's the sport. We want the dog to catch the Frisbee in the air, and that actually is a taught skill. UpDog allows you to actually throw rollers, which is a throw that's along the ground. It rolls on the ground, so it's little bit easier, depending on the games. Sometimes it's harder. We also want a handoff, so we want our dogs to bring the Frisbee back to our hand and we want the dog to drop the Frisbee at a distance as well. Melissa Breau: Interesting, because those are definitely different skills, bringing it back and dropping it where it is. Sara Brueske: Yes. It's kind of technical. And then there's a few other behaviors, like go-arounds, where you send your dog around behind you so that you can get a head start throwing the disc and timing it a little better, and little skills like that as well. Melissa Breau: In the class that you're offering, is it for beginners, is it for people who are a little more advanced, what are you covering in the class or how is the class formatted? I know it's a little different than maybe a typical class.   Sara Brueske: It's a little bit of a hybrid class. I wanted to offer a handler's choice in this dog class just because I know I've run the foundation class a few times and there's some students sitting in limbo. We don't ever have quite enough people to do a Level 2 all the way, but I know there's that group of people that want a little bit more. I wanted to do a handler's choice. That way, they can work on whatever they need to work on with their dog. But, at the same time, I always want to grow the sport, so I wanted to add a little bit of a foundation curriculum so it would be more of a bare-bones curriculum based on the foundations class. It won't include all of the things we work on in that class, but it will be definitely enough for new teams to come in, have a good idea of what to work on using that curriculum, and personalize their class based on that stuff. It won't be a class where you have to do everything in the curriculum. In fact, I'm expecting you not to. I'm expecting you to pick things that you want to work on, based on what you need. That way, you can utilize the time in the best way you can and hopefully get more out of the class that way. Melissa Breau: Awesome. It sounds like a lot of fun, and I know at least a couple of people who are looking forward to it. It should be a good one. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Sara! This has been great. Sara Brueske: Thank you so much for having me. Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in! We'll be back next week with Heather Lawson, and we'll be chatting about breaking down foundation skills and using them as building blocks to teach multiple useful behaviors. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Ron Watson reads a piece from the Pawsitive Vybe Disc and Dogs Blog from 2018.

Matteo talks about the evolution of his mindset as he grew his Freestyle skills, going from just having fun to focusing on competing. Matteo shares his memories of the 2009 World Title he won with Tommy Leitner in Berlin and lessons learned (video below). Then, remarkably, he defended his title,… Continue reading The post Episode 50: Matteo Gaddoni –The One and Only Freestyle and Disc Dog World Champion appeared first on FrisbeeGuru.

Summary:   Sara Brueske has been training dogs for over 15 years; she became a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner in 2011 and jumped into the world of professional dog training. Sara and her dogs work at Purina Farms in Missouri where they demonstrate the sports of disc, agility, and dock diving for the public in over 400 shows each year. She and her dogs also compete nationwide. Currently, she is active in the sports of disc dog, agility, mondioring and dock diving -- plus, she's a trick dog enthusiast. Sara has recently re-entered the world of competitive Disc Dog and is the 2016 overall UpDog International Champion as well as the 2017 UpDog Freestyle Champion. Sara believes in positive reinforcement not only for dogs, but for their handlers as well.  Her biggest joy in training is watching a handler and dog become partners and grow as a team. Links mentioned: Disc Dog Discussions Facebook Group Heeling is just another Trick DVD Drinking from the Toilet, What to do when you get stuck (full episode) Next Episode:  To be released 7/7/2017, featuring Laura Waudby. TRANSCRIPTION: Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today we'll be talking to Sara Brueske. Sara Brueske has been training dogs for over 15 years; she became a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner in 2011 and jumped into the world of professional dog training. Sara and her dogs work at Purina Farms in Missouri where they demonstrate the sports of disc, agility, and dock diving for the public in over 400 shows each year. She and her dogs also compete nationwide. Currently, she is active in the sports of disc dog, agility, mondioring and dock diving -- plus, she's a trick dog enthusiast. Sara has recently re-entered the world of competitive Disc Dog and is the 2016 overall UpDog International Champion as well as the 2017 UpDog Freestyle Champion. Sara believes in positive reinforcement not only for dogs, but for their handlers as well.  Her biggest joy in training is watching a handler and dog become partners and grow as a team. Hi Sara! Welcome to the podcast. Sara Brueske: Hi Melissa, thank you for having me! Melissa Breau: Absolutely. I'm excited to chat a little bit.   Sara Brueske: Definitely. Melissa Breau: So, to start us out, can you tell us a bit about your dogs and what you're working on with them? Sara Brueske: I have a whole bunch of dogs. My job kinda dictates that i have more dogs than the average owner. I have 14 current in my household. So all 14 of them are either in training or participate in my job, which is doing shows at Purina Farms. I compete with a handful of them outside of that job as well. So it depends on the dog, what I'm working on with them. My main sports that i do with all of my dogs is agility, disc, and dock diving. And my malinois i compete and train in mondioring as well.   Melissa Breau: Do you want to give us a little bit of an idea of who you have in the household? I know you've got a mix of breeds and all sorts of stuff. Sara Brueske: Yeah, Sure! I'll do the run down. I have a whole bunch - I really like variety. I have 3 australian koolies, which is a little bit of a rare herding breed here in the United States. I imported 2 of them from Australia and I had my very first litter this year, so I have their daughter, too. She's about 11 weeks old now. And then I have 2 border collies, both of them are rescues. I have a border staffy, who is a rescue as well, and a whippet -- a rescue actually from the same house as the border staffy. I have 4 malinois, one of those is actually a permanent foster through the malinois ranch rescue in Tennessee. And I have a boston terrier mix, a papillion, and a labrador. Melissa Breau: Wow, some of those I actually hadn't seen pictures of before; it's definitely a household, huh? Sara Brueske: It's a full household, they're all very very active dogs other than the elderly foster; she's a little bit slow these days, but… Melissa Breau: How did you get started with all of this? Obviously, where you are today -- it probably took a little while to get there, but how did you first get started in dog sports? Sara Brueske: I was actually 11 years old when I begged my parents to let me buy my very first sport dog. I wanted a border collie and i wanted to compete in agility and that was because I watched the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge on TV. So I saved up all my money, and I found a border collie in a newspaper, which is the worst place to get a dog, and we went out and i bought my border collie. And so then I did my backyard training -- we had stick-in-the-ground weave poles made out of PVC, my tunnel was actually a construction drainage pipe that my dad found and gave me, and that's how I trained all my agility and I started competing as a junior handler. He actually got injured, and so I had to stop training him in sports and that's when I figured out about trick training. When he was 7 years old, he knew about 50 different tricks. Melissa Breau: wow. Sara Brueske: So like, high five and wave and spin, and other ones were throwing away my empty soda cans, and turning off the light because by then i was a lazy teenager. Melissa Breau: That's awesome. So I think that just goes to prove that anybody… people don't have an excuse if you could do it in your backyard with sticks and PVC pipe… Sara Brueske: Exactly! And I think my parents always were hoping that I'd outgrow this, go to school and maybe be a veterinarian, but here I am, with 14 dogs and training is my career. Melissa Breau: So agility is generally thought of as pretty positive -- same with trick dog training. Have you always been a positive trainer? Sara Brueske: I actually wasn't -- I was kind of what you'd consider a balanced trainer back then. All my agility training and trick training, that was all done with clickers, so I had read up on clickers and learned how to do that, kind of a self-study, but my parents were very much punishment based and they should be dogs and they should behave as dogs. And so that's kind of the background I have with that. I didn't have any formal dog training, so it's a mish-mash of everything you can imagine… and I actually was that way until I had a great dane and he was not the most balanced - mentally - dog, he was a little bit reactive and he was a big dog, and everyone told me I had to show him who's boss, and everything else and alpha roll him, and come-to-jesus moments and all that. Well, the dog out weighed me and it wasn't working. So that was when I switched and I became a positive-only trainer. That helped him tremendously. Melissa Breau: And I know that now you've done the Karen Pryor Academy, and everything else -- it sounds like that was kind of your pivot moment there… but it sounds like then you went that next step with it, right? Sara Brueske: Absolutely. So when i had that great dane i also actually on the path to becoming a professional dog trainer. I was looking for ways to enhance my education, looking for places to teach group classes, and that's where the Karen Pryor Academy came into place - it was a formal education that I could put on my resume and show people that I was serious about becoming a dog trainer. Melissa Breau: So, I think most dog trainers -- at least professional dog trainers -- would say their dogs are both their life and their work, right? Because of the nature of what you do at Purina, it seems like it takes that to a whole other level. Do you want to just talk for a few minutes about what you do a Purina and what that's like? Sara Brueske: Sure. So my job at Purina is to promote pet ownership and Purina believes that your life is really enhanced by owning a pet, so my job at Purina, at Purina Farms is to talk to the public, promote pet ownership by putting on shows every single day. So my shows are three times a day, 6 days a week. And I bring my dogs with me to work everyday and we show them what you can do with rescue dogs, what you can do with your dog at home, which is really why i like to have a variety of dogs. So my goal at Purina is to hear the audience go, “We should go home and train Sparky to do that.” That's my favorite thing ever to hear. It means they're going to go home and play with their dog -- and that's huge to me. And so, because we do so many shows a day I actually bring between 11 and 13 dogs with me every single day to work. And that means my dogs are with me from the time I wake up, I feed them, we get ready, we all go to work - I work with them all day long, I come home, I unload them, I feed them, and they're with me all evening. My dogs are literally with me 24/7. Melissa Breau: When do you find time to train, if you're working with them so much? Sara Brueske: To train? So that's my job at Purina, is to train them -- between the shows that's the time that I have to train my dogs and work them and make sure they're getting what they get. Melissa Breau: Wow - that's a very full day. Sara Brueske: It's a very, very full day - yes. Melissa Breau: You're basically relying on your dogs for your livelihood; I'm sure that's had a lot of impact -- and like you said, you're with them 24/7 -- on the actual relationship that you have with them. Do you want to just talk for a minute about how you think that's impacted things for you? Sara Brueske: Sure. It's really… you hear a lot of the time people in my line of profession looking at their dogs like they're just part of their paycheck. They have their job - they're tools of the trade. That's very much NOT how I view them. The reason why i have so many dogs is that i don't want my dogs to be burnt out; I don't want my dogs to hate their job. I want my dogs to have fun, just as much fun as I have working with them. You can't do this job and have that many shows to perform in and only have 6 dogs… you'll end up ruining your relationship with your dog. You'll end up hurting your dog. And really their well-being in the long run is the most important part. That's what I care about the most and that's why i have so many dogs. But, I mean, it is what it is. My dogs pour their heart out for me every single day. And I appreciate that so much. But they also really love what we're doing. So I have dogs that love frisbee, i have dogs that love dock diving, I have dogs that love working with me, and that's a big part of it as well. Melissa Breau: I know you mentioned you typically bring up to 13 of the dogs with you each day… how many tend to compete in any given show? Sara Brueske: So we run 5-6 dog shows. And I rotate through those. So I don't like my dogs to do more than 3 shows a day, and I actually rotate days. So for instance, yesterday it was Zip Tie, Nowie and Taboo and Zuma's day to work. I rotated through those dogs for the show, the other trainer covered the rest of the dogs in the show. And then tomorrow, since today was my day off, I'll have 4 different dogs that I'll put in the show again.   Melissa Breau: It's so interesting, just kind of juggling all of it, and managing schedules. Sara Brueske: Yeah, we count a lot of shows. We tally it all up and make sure everybody's not working too much all the time, and it's helpful having other trainers there because we each pull equal weight on any given day. Melissa Breau: So I want to switch gears and talk a little more specifically about disc -- I know that's kind of what you teach at FDSA. I think, like you were talking about having watched agility on TV, I think a lot of people have seen some of the cool tricks disc dogs can do and I think that some people probably look at it and go, “my dog couldn't do that.” So, I was curious what skills a dog actually needs to be able to learn some of those disc tricks. Sara Brueske: Sure. So freestyle is what you always see on TV and in the incredible dog challenge and really, in reality, that's just a tiny little aspect of the frisbee dog community and the competitions. It's actually not even the most competitive, you could argue. There's a ton of different games you can play with your dog in each competition, in each venue. Just like there's AKC agility, NADAC agility, USDAA and they all have different rules and different games, the same thing applies to disc dog. So your tradition frisbee dog competition will have freestyle and a toss-and-catch competition. And the toss-and-catch competition is just like it sounds -- it's a game of fetch, a timed game of fetch where you get extra points for distance and accuracy, so you want to throw in a certain zone, and how many throws you can get off in a minute or the 90 seconds that you have. So really, to compete in toss and catch at the novice level all you have to do is have a dog that loves to play fetch. I mean, whose dog doesn't really like to go out there in the backyard and catch a frisbee, right? So that's pretty applicable to any dog. Oh so you also have your handler, who has to be able to throw… but lucky in like the novice competition you just have to throw 20 yards, which isn't very far. Then there's other venues, such as UpDog, which is my preferred venue, it's just come out in the last 3 years or so. And they really cater to new disc players -- they do something that's called a roller, which is you throw the disc on it's edge on the ground and it rolls and the dog has to grab that. So you don't even have to be able to throw a frisbee to be able to compete in novice. And they have a bunch of strategy games, each kind of tailoring to each dog's individual strength and each handler's individual strength. So that's kind of cool; they're really starting to incorporate the idea that anybody can play frisbee with their dog, which is really interesting. Melissa Breau: So, in your classes at the academy, what are some of the common things or tricks that you wind up teaching? Sara Brueske: So all the tricks that we wind up teaching in the academy classes, the tricks themselves, are for freestyle. There are some that apply to the other games, such as the flatwork and stuff like that -- and that's just moving your dog around the field and connecting with your dog. That's where I really like to lay my emphasis with my classes, it comes from my agility roots - it's a lot like handing in agility. But the tricks themselves, for freestyle, we teach a whole bunch of different things. We do dog catches - which is where you literally catch your dog, with or without a disc. We do rebounds, which is where… it's kind of like a flyball box turn, but on your body, so the dog hits you and then jumps off. And then leg weaves, which is really good for any sport because it's a nice warm up, and then we also teach things like stalls, where they actually jump up onto a part of your body, and hang out there for a while. Melissa Breau: That's kind of neat. Sara Brueske: Yes, it's very exciting. Melissa Breau: So If somebody's trying to decide if they should take the class, are their any skills they need or their dog needs to start to do some of those tricks? Sara Brueske: We teach all those tricks actually with food, first. So if your dog has food drive, then you're pretty much golden for it. You can actually wind up taking the class and teaching those tricks for food and not ever touching a frisbee if you want to. But ideally, if you want the whole frisbee aspect of the class then your dog should have some sort of toy drive or disc drive, because I don't hit on that a whole lot in the classes. There are plenty of other Fenzi classes that build on toy drive, and I want to make sure that mine focuses just on the frisbee aspect of it. Melissa Breau: If someone was just interested in getting started, what's that first step -- where should they start out? Sara Brueske: The first step, which is what i always recommend to anyone looking at any sport, find a local club, find some local help that can give you hands on help because that hands on help is going to be priceless. And hopefully there's somebody there that's actively competing, and who has gone to the world's level to help you out. That's where I would start. There are a whole bunch of places on facebook that you can look - disc dog discussions is a group that you can check out and they have a whole bunch of different clubs that participate in that discussion group, so you can always post where you are and somebody will chime in to give you some contact information. After that, the online class at Fenzi is a pretty good one for foundation, and there are other online classes as well for disc dog foundations currently. Melissa Breau: Awesome. And kind of the way that we end every episode -- our big three questions -- what's the dog-related accomplishment you're proudest of? Sara Brueske: So I thought long and hard about this question. I have a whole lot of accomplishments that I'm very, very proud of. But the reality of that is that I get to experience something that a lot of people don't get to experience -- forming a new relationship with a whole bunch of different dogs. So in the last 4 years I've had 14 different dogs plus many fosters and dogs I've raised come through my house. And all of those dogs I've started in training and formed relationships with. My most favorite accomplishment i've ever had is with each of those dogs is when that dog really kind of has that light bulb moment and goes, “I really do enjoy working with you. This is fun, this is a game!” That's what I'm most proud of. Melissa Breau: That's definitely like that golden moment, that everybody is looking for, right? To form a relationship. Sara Brueske: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Melissa Breau: So, what's the best piece of training advice you've ever heard? Sara Brueske: That everything's a trick. From my history -- when I couldn't do agility anymore, I just did tricks with my dog. So when I actually started looking into IPO and Mondioring, and looking at these very complicated obedience maneuvers, and precision things it was really kind of eye opening to remember that everything is a trick. And that kind of came from Sylvia Turkman's DVD, Heeling is just another Trick. And that was kind of a light bulb moment for me -- this is just like teaching all those other things I teach. Melissa Breau: I think that's really interesting, because you mentioned it specifically in relation to Mondioring, which is not a sport people look at usually and go, “oh it's just tricks!” Sara Brueske: No they definitely don't. Melissa Breau: And then finally, who is someone else in the dog world that you look up to? Sara Brueske: So Sylvia Turkman. And the reason for that is that when i first started my dog training career she was the one i went to for online classes, i watched all the DVDs, and it was her upbeat attitude and her relationship with her dogs that really inspired me to be that kind of trainer. I wanted [my students] to be happy - i wanted to think that they're still going to come out the other side and they're still going to enjoy their dog and they're sitll going to be having fun. Melissa Breau: Thanks so much for coming on the podcast Sara -- and thanks to our listeners for tuning in! This week have a special treat -- FDSA's own Hannah Branigan Also runs a podcast, called Drinking from the Toilet - and today we're sharing an excerpt from her most popular episode, “What to do when you get stuck.” Enjoy! Hannah Branigan: Hey there - you're listening to Drinking from the Toilet and I'm Hannah Branigan. Today we're going to talk about what you can do when you get stuck. Why are we even talking about this? Well mostly because I was sitting here trying to think what topic i should make my next podcast be about, and I got stuck. I couldn't think of anything to talk about. So I kind of sat here, I looked at a few things on the internet, facebook, took a few pictures of my dog with my phone, and pondered on how many other places in my life I feel stuck, maybe feel like a failure. And at least one of those places in my life where i feel stuck is when I'm training a dog. So I thought, well, let's do a podcast about getting stuck when you're training because I think that's a fairly ubiquitous experience. There's probably people out there that sometimes get stuck when they're trying to train a behavior. And so in my previous life, when I would run into a problem, it really was almost a pattern, really… so I'm working on training a behavior or maybe untraining a behavior problem and I would get so far; I would make a certain amount of progress and then I would get stuck and i would revert to punishment. Maybe intentionally, as a training choice, or unintentionally as an emotional expression of frustration. But either way I would often fall back on these old habits -- after feeling like I was running out of choices. And so as my journey continues, i continue to improve my understanding of behavior, i have a better picture of the behaviors I'm trying to train. My knowledge in that area increases and I think clarity in your goal of your behavior is always helpful. And I learned more and my skill set improved. I had better tools for manipulating behavior and for manipulating contingencies, particularly those using reinforcement. Better understanding of how reinforcement works --  both in general, in concept and in theory, and then also in practical application. And so overtime, i can get a lot further before i would resort to that old habit. So eventually, maybe about 10 years ago at this point, I made a conscious decision to just take punishment totally off the table. So aversives are no longer an option for my training. So I still have frustration attacks occasionally - I am human - but i do try to recognize them for what they are. They're just emotional expressions, they have nothing to do with training the dog and i don't have any expectation that they're going to change either of our behaviors for the better in the long run. But I still have a lot of situations where I still get stuck. And now there's a vacuum. I'll still get training to the same point -- a little further each time because I'm learning more -- but when I get stuck, there's a place where I would punish or I would use an aversive in some way, which may or may not solve the problem because we know that simply bringing in punishment is no guarantee of getting the results that we want. And so now I'll get about 80% of the way there -- I'll get about 80% of the behavior trained that I want -- and then I'm stuck. And simply not punishing doesn't give me any information about what i should do instead to continue making forward progress. I end up with a kind of vacuum. So sometimes I quit. I don't have all the answers. And I know that's disappointing to hear, because frankly it disappoints no one more than i disappoint myself when i don't know the answer to a problem, when i don't know the solution…. Well, maybe my father. He has pretty high standards so he might be more disappointed but I learned it from somewhere. And I'm willing to bet that you get frustrated sometimes too. And your stuckness may not manifest in quite the same way that mine does, maybe instead of frustration, anger, and potentially aggression you turn to other defensive strategies. Maybe like rationalization. Sometimes I find myself thinking thoughts like, “Maybe my dog just doesn't like to do obedience. Maybe my dog actually can't do this -- it's not possible. You know, maybe he has a health problem! Maybe it's his thyroid -- he could have a thyroid, he could have low thyroid! So if my training plan didn't pay out the way that I expected it to, clearly the problem is caused by his thyroid and no protocol would have worked. He needs medication! This dog needs pills to fix this problem, and it has to be just the right medication, and it might take weeks or even months, or years, to find what that medication could be and so none of this is actually a training problem, it's not in my control. It's not me, it's the dog, right?” Okay. Now, to be clear, I'm not trivializing endocrine disorders in any way. They're very real and certainly having a health problem does throw a wrench into the works and can add contingencies beyond those that we can realistically control within the context of a training session. So if you're worried or suspicious that your dog has a physical or medical problem, it's always a good idea to consult with your vet. Get that physical problem ruled out. Make sure your dog is healthy and sound. I know I certainly have no problem paying my vet $100 -- sometimes maybe more -- to be told I'm crazy and there's absolutely nothing wrong with my dog. But just to be clear again, every now and then I'm actually right. And so I have that long interval of random reinforcement effect that maintains my behavior on dog after dog, year after year. Anyways, okay. Let's assume that we've ruled out any physical issue. What can we do when we get stuck trying to train something? So it is a training problem, we're stuck with the training, we need to change something about the training to get past this obstacle. Ok. So here's a pretty common scenario. You're trying to train some behavior. Maybe you're following a training plan or a recipe that you found on the internet -- or you saw on youtube, or maybe you've just been to a seminar and this is now Monday morning and you're trying to apply the technique you learned at that seminar to your training in real life and now the powerpoint slides aren't there and the presenter isn't there, and so you're on your own. And so maybe you get through the first couple of steps --  you're shaping and things seem to be going ok. You think you're doing it right; you think you're doing it the same way as you learned in that seminar. And then all of a sudden you hit a plateau. And the dog keeps doing the same version of the behavior over and over again without progressing to the next step. So maybe you've made it through steps 1 and 2, and step 3 - instead of performing step 3 a couple of times and then moving on to step 4 your dog keeps doing step 3 over and over and over again. You can't see why you're not able to make the leap to that next step. This is a common problem that I run into with different behaviors with different dogs and certainly see it in my own students periodically. Maybe you're trying to teach your dog to retrieve an object and your shaping plan is I'm going to start by clicking when the dog looks at the object and then click him for sniffing it and then I'll click him for touching it with his nose or targeting it. And then the next thing I'll click is for him to open his mouth and bite the object… but instead of biting the object he just keeps touching it with his nose over and over again and he never opens his mouth. What do I do then? Another common place where we'll run into this situation would be adding duration or distance to an existing behavior. So you can get the dog to hold the sit for 8 seconds -- as soon as you reach for 9 seconds the behavior falls apart. Or you can get your dog to respond to a cue -- maybe he'll lay down if you give him the cue at 6 feet but one more step back and the behavior disappears or starts to degrade. And it's really frustrating - and then it's easy to think this isn't working, something's wrong with this technique, this method is ineffective, or we can continue to spiral down and think about what might be wrong with the dog, and then the world in general. And so obviously continuing to repeat the thing that's not working isn't the right choice; that brings to mind that quote that I know i've seen lots of different places… I often see it attributed to Einstein but I don't know if that's true or if it's just internet-true. So, to paraphrase, the idea that repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. So, I may still be crazy, but this totally applies here. Even if we just look at the A-B-C operant contingency, repeating that same A-B-C … the same Antecedent or A, the same Behavior or B, and the same Consequence - “C” - then yes, we're probably going to continue to get the same result. So, we need to change something. I like thinking about it this way because it gives me three solid categories of things to look at -- and three is my favorite number, also it's a prime number so a lot of things to recommend it. Three categories is a very achievable way to start putting stuff in buckets and structure our thinking. So let's start with A -- antecedent. So the Antecedent, this is the cue. It's what's inducing or causing the behavior, what's associated with the behavior. And when we're thinking about this in terms of cues from us -- so I say sit and the dog sits --  well that's easy to recognize and understand. In active training, when we're learning, the antecedent really is much bigger than that. It's a bigger idea; it's more than just the cue you're deliberately giving, but it's that whole picture, all of the stimulus and all the pieces of the picture. So it's the whole set up that the dog is associating with a particular behavior. It's your body, your body position, where you're situated in space, your dog's position, any props that you might be using, if you're using a platform or a target or if you're using an object in the case of that retrieve. And it's the environment in general -- where the dog is, where you're training, all of the sounds, smells, feels, tastes maybe, all of those things are in that big stimulus picture and that whole picture functions as the cue when the dog is learning the behavior.   Melissa Breau: Thanks to Hannah for letting us share that with you -- I hope you'll consider subscribing to both our podcast and hers if you haven't already, in itunes or the podcast app of your choice. We'll be back next week, this time with Laura Waudby to talk Fenzi TEAM training and training service dogs. CREDITS: Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called “Buddy.” Audio editing provided by Chris Lang and transcription written by CLK Transcription Services. Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!

Aaron Watson is a champion of Ultimate Frisbee and he competes in disc golf, Disc Dog (also known as Frisbee Dog), and other flying disc competitions. He is also a coach of Ultimate Frisbee, coaching his team to the championship game of the American Ultimate Disc League, also known as AUDL.  At only 24 years old, Aaron is also creator and host of the popular podcast, Going Deep with Aaron Watson, where he talks with a wide array of people about their  passions, fears and problems.Contact InfoTwitter: @AaronWatson59Podcast: Going Deep With Aaron WatsonMost Influential PersonMy coach, Nick Kacznarek from the University of PittsburghEffect on EmotionsEmotional regulation and trying to be that cold-blooded warrior, the player who has ice in their veins and isn't fazed by a big crowd of bright lights.Thoughts on BreathingTaking slow, deep breaths, whether I'm stressed out, something goes wrong, something falls apart. Taking the deep breaths to get some perspective on the challenges I'm facing, but also just to help regulate my own emotions and get back to a more rational, focused state.Suggested ResourcesBook: The War of Art by Steven PressfieldApp: The Pomodoro AppAdvice for Newbie I would challenge them to take six great breaths every single day. What that means to me is, five seconds in through your nose, five seconds out. If you take six great breaths of ten seconds each, that's one minute out of your day.

Hoy en nuestro programa hemos hablado sobre desconectar del trabajo en vacaciones, hemos visitado el Palacio Real de Olite, nos hemos trasladado a Ozaeta donde se celebra este fin de semana una nueva edición de Disc Dog y hemos charlado con Gotzon Monasterio sobre su libro "Bilbao Blues".

Hoy en nuestro programa hemos hablado sobre desconectar del trabajo en vacaciones, hemos visitado el Palacio Real de Olite, nos hemos trasladado a Ozaeta donde se celebra este fin de semana una nueva edición de Disc Dog y hemos charlado con Gotzon Monasterio sobre su libro "Bilbao Blues".

Ron Watson reads a piece from the Pawsitive Vybe Disc and Dogs Blog from 2011.

Ron Watson reads a passage from the Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog on Collection and Lead Changes.

Ron Watson reads a passage from the Pawsitive Vybe's Disc and Dogs Blog on Collection and Lead Changes.

Ron Watson reads a piece from the Pawsitive Vybe Disc and Dogs Blog from 2010 - Economics of Distraction.

The short lived k9athlete.com ...

Taking calls under the influence of Tequila.

Hanging out on location in Branson, MO.

Click to Play Here's Juicy getting her flip altered and a refresher on a forgotten Disc Dog sequence. This Frisbee Dog Training Session took place in February, 2008.

Talking the state of videoblogging with Josh Grenell. AKA JG or Wazee, and founder of the MN Disc Dog Club.

Revenge of the Noobs... duh!

Ron & Apryl hang out with Nadja and Kara - Team Clem and Team Bandit.

Back from a bit of a hiatus...

Chatting with the elusive Jeff Hoot about the QUAD.

Ron & Apryl chat with disc dog legends Ron Ellis & Bryan Lamky.

Ron & Apryl take calls on Disc Dog Radio - July

Discdog X overs TeamClem, Bandit & MIlt Wilcox

Ron & Apryl Take Calls & Talk Discdogs

Chatting with Lou Mack and Donna Schoech from Branson MO.