Awesome Obedience: A Positive Training Plan for Competition Success

by Hannah Branigan

When Hannah Branigan began training her first dog for obedience competition, she wanted to play the game but train using positive reinforcement. She quickly discovered that traditional methods weren’t for her and that she had to throw out the old playbook. “Clicker trainers like me look at the problem completely differently,” she says. “We break down skills into easily mastered bits and pieces that we then link into behavior chains to produce flashy heeling and snappy drops on recall.” Hannah built a new training program from the ground up. The results were awesome. Her dogs have competed successfully at the national level, earning High-in-Trial awards and advanced titles through several organizations. These strategies have transformed training for hundreds of teams, who also believe in the power of positive reinforcement and good training practices. In Awesome Obedience, Hannah lays out all the components to build the behaviors needed to go as far in obedience training as you want. You’ll How to create a happy, reliable partner using motivational games Where to put your efforts ( not in Fronts and Finishes) How the mechanics of exercises affect training How to fine-tune your dog’s arousal level for maximum performance How to train your dog to ignore ring distractions (like that judge following you around) How to train the critical, unscored transition portion of your performance between exercises Most of all, how to have a blast with your dog while you train

Genres: Dogs

547 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 23, 2020

Reviews

[Joy Stephenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I've read briefly through the whole book I will be returning to certain sections to study in detail. This book is intended for those already committed to force-free training and who wish to take part in Competition Obedience or Rally. It is based on American competition standards but still offers very good instruction for those of us competing in the UK.
I like the way that the book gets very quickly to the meat of training - there is no discussion of the ethics of force-free training and there is also an assumption that the reader already knows how to use a clicker. This is for people who want to refine their training skills.
The book breaks down each element of Competition Obedience into small skills and presents the information each time as 'Objective', 'why to teach this', and then detailed steps as to 'how to teach this'.

The content of this book is excellent.
BUT the Kindle version hasn't been properly formatted which makes it difficult to find the section you want to refer to, as you can't just click on a link in the index. The Kindle version was much cheaper than the physical book but I wish I had a paperback copy. It's a shame the problem of lacking links in the table of contents and poor page breaks spoil this very good book.