In this episode of The Agility Challenge Podcast, Daisy interviews Kelly Daniel of Hybrid Dog Training. Kelly lives in New Zealand, where she teaches canine fitness, dog agility, and secondary school science (that’s high school for those in North America)!
This is an AMAZING conversation you won’t want to miss, where we discuss topics such as:
- How stress hormones released in the FIRST run of a weekend can shape EVERY run for the REST of the weekend
- Why you should care about including your dog’s emotional state as part of your criteria for the behaviors you’re training
- How to increase your DOG’S mental resiliency, or mental toughness
- …and much, much more. Dive in to this fantastic interview episode, and share your thoughts after you have a listen!
It always seemed to me to be a bad idea to breed a high drive agility dog to another high drive agility dog just because both are winners expecting that the puppies produced will also win. Isn’t too much of a good thing, not good?
I agree that it seems like a bad idea when not much ELSE is known about the pair in question, and that does seem to be the case quite often these days. The same could be said I think for Open Trial Sheepdogs – keep breeding top dogs to top dogs and you’re going to get something that *might* be a top Open Trial Sheepdog, but might not be much good for every day work or living. I wouldn’t ever rule out a pairing based solely on the results of one or both, I guess is more accurate.
I very much enjoyed this podcast with Kelly Daniel, as until recently, I had not really looked for my dog’s conditioned emotional response. In hindsight I feel I rewarded my dog, who can be skeptical in certain situation, for what he was doing physically, but not looking at the emotional state in the moment, and actually increased his fear. As I recognized this, I approached the problems differently and looked at his emotional response. Happy to report at this moment he has not even lifted his head to a noise that a year ago sent him shaking and panting!!
Susan, this is such an important point that you make, and it’s actually one that is on our list of topics to cover in the future!