Teaching a long lead out

On Friday, Shelby's class worked on lead outs. A lead out is when you leave your dog at the start line and walk out onto the course and release the dog from one or more obstacles away. The general rule is that if you do a lead out, it should be to a place where you intend to put a turn, otherwise you're not really providing any extra info to your dog, which is the whole purpose of positional cues.

So we had an opening of 3 jumps in a row, with a fourth jump set laterally from the third jump to create a 180. So the correct lead out position is to lead out to next to the fourth jump, which at first seems insurmountable. So we did backchaining.

First we worked on the lateral distance. I set Shelby up in front of the third jump, and moved the fourth jump closer-about 3 feet away. I released her, did a front cross, then threw the toy over the fourth jump. I progressively moved the fourth jump further away until it was about 8 feet away.


Once we had the lateral distance, we worked on getting the other 3 jumps in. So I moved Shelby back to the landing side of the second jump, then the take off side of the second jump, then the landing side of the first jump, and then finally all the way at the takeoff side of the first jump.

We broke this into 2 sessions, but in total it took about 15 minutes. I was amazed. I did have some broken start line stays once we were setting up at the first jump, but as I got further away and Shelby kept her stay, I jackpotted her, and that seemed to work.