Articles Tagged: cues

Having a dog with well-trained turn cues can make your life easier and is also much easier on your dog’s body and brain. In this series, you’ll learn how to teach your dog the seven turn cues. Here are more drills for the third cue, the front cross.

Having a dog with well-trained turn cues makes your life easier and is also much easier on your dog’s body and brain. In this series, you’ll learn how to teach your dog the seven turn cues. But first you’ll work on an important jumping skills for turn work.

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll examine the directional cues—Straight, Here, and a side-switch cue—and how the dog can be trained with these cues to help the physically limited handler achieve success on course.

This month we’ll compare the use of the opposite arm in both handling systems. The use of arms seems to create the most confusion between the two systems so here we’ll discuss using arms with regard to particular maneuvers.

By training your dog to run at distance with strict directional cues, you can free the dog to run the course while you walk, trot, or even ride in a wheelchair.

Whether you’re training a young dog or a dog with a start-line problem, you can teach him to stay in a balanced position without moving or even shifting his weight.

This month Jenny Damm presents an overview of her handling system, including its history and philosophy, her three basic rules, the crosses she uses for changes of side, and the cues she uses to tell the dog to turn or to go straight.

During the coming months, we’re going to compare the two most popular and proven handling systems in the U.S.—Greg Derrett’s system and Linda Mecklenburg’s Awesome Paws Handling System—to try to help you understand both the differences and similarities.

This month, Greg offers exercises to proof your dog’s response to a front cross, deceleration cue, and positional cue, as well as suggestions for practicing your front-cross timing.

Cueing your front crosses earlier than advocated in the Derrett handling system to get your dog to turn tighter may have short-term benefits, but it can also have long-term fallout.