Episode Details

Summary:

Shade has been training and competing in dog sports since she was a kid. She has successfully competed in Schutzhund, AKC obedience and French Ring and her focus is really on clear communication with your dog.

She also recently launched a blog on her website, which all of you should check out at www.shadesdogtraining.com.

Next Episode:

To be released 10/05/2018, an interview with Stacy Barnett to take a deeper dive into scentwork than we have previously here on the podcast, talking about everything from start line routines to scent cones and converging odor.

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 have Shade Whitesel back on the podcast to talk about concepts of competition. For those of you who haven't heard the previous episodes with Shade, Shade has been training and competing in dog sports since she was a kid. She has successfully competed in Schutzhund, AKC obedience and French Ring, and her focus is really on clear communication with your dog.

She also recently launched a blog on her website, which all of you should check out at www.shadesdogtraining.net.

Welcome back to the podcast, Shade!

Shade Whitesel: Thank you Melissa. Thanks for having me on again.

Melissa Breau: Of course! To start us out, do you want to just remind listeners a little bit about who you are and share a little about the dogs you share your life with … including of course that newest addition?

Shade Whitesel: Well, we've got six dogs right now. We've got three old ones — 10 and a half, 11 and a half, and 12 — so it's going to be a hard couple of years, but they're all doing really well. And we have two we call the twins, which is Bailey and Ones, who are almost 6. And the new arrival is a 4-month-old German Shepherd puppy. All of them are German Shepherds, with the exception of one of our old ones, who is a German Shepherd/Australian Shepherd mix. So yeah, we've got a full house here, including two kitties, so a lot of individuals in our small house.

Melissa Breau: So let's start with the puppy. It's Talic, right? Am I pronouncing it right?

Shade Whitesell: Yeah, you're pronouncing it great.

Melissa Breau: All right. So I'm pretty sure it's puppy season, because it feels like everybody has puppies right now. I talked to Sarah Stremming and Leslie about Watson, and I talked to Hannah recently about Figment, and I've asked everybody a different version of this question, but … with a new puppy in the house, what have you been focusing on?

Shade Whitesel: Well, I haven't listened to what they said, so I'm interested in what they said. But I'm really about building his reinforcements, like, how I'm going to reinforce him, which means training his toy skills, how to use "chase" and "strike" as reinforcement, will you eat food here, will you eat food there, and then also, as far as skill-wise, how to move his body.

Onesie's got some challenges in his body as far as doing Schutzhund, and Schutzhund is physically challenging on the dogs, so I'm wanting Talic to understand how to move his body in different directions, how to be two on, two off, hind feet. I just want him to be really aware and really flexible and really supple, so I've been concentrating a lot on shaping skills like that.

And he still does not know how to sit, and that's not a bad thing. He knows a lot of other words that mean reinforcement, but it's mainly about building the joy in what I can give him, because that's what I'm going to be using to teach all the behaviors, like sit, and if I don't have the reinforcement, then I can't get t