E64: Sara Brueske - "From Tricks to Disc"

Summary:

Sara Brueske has been training dogs for over 15 years. She became a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner in 2011 and jumped into the world of professional dog training.

Sara and her dogs work at Purina Farms in Missouri, where they demonstrate the sports of disc, agility, and dock diving for the public in over 400 shows each year.

She and her dogs also compete nationwide. Currently, she is active in the sports of disc dog, agility, mondioring and dock diving -- plus, she's a trick dog enthusiast.

Sara has also recently re-entered the world of competitive Disc Dog and was the 2016 overall UpDog International Champion as well as the 2017 UpDog Freestyle Champion.

Sara believes in positive reinforcement not only for dogs, but for their handlers as well. Her biggest joy in training is watching a handler and dog become partners and grow as a team.

Next Episode:

To be released 6/1/2018, featuring Heather Lawson, talking about all the ways you can use a chin rest, platforms and the "fly" cue!

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'll be talking to Sara Brueske.

Sara Brueske has been training dogs for over 15 years. She became a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner in 2011 and jumped into the world of professional dog training.

Sara and her dogs work at Purina Farms in Missouri, where they demonstrate the sports of disc, agility, and dock diving for the public in over 400 shows each year.

She and her dogs also compete nationwide. Currently, she is active in the sports of disc dog, agility, mondioring and dock diving -- plus, she's a trick dog enthusiast.

Sara has also recently re-entered the world of competitive Disc Dog and was the 2016 overall UpDog International Champion as well as the 2017 UpDog Freestyle Champion.

Sara believes in positive reinforcement not only for dogs, but for their handlers as well. Her biggest joy in training is watching a handler and dog become partners and grow as a team.

Hi Sara! Welcome back to the podcast.

Sara Brueske: Thank you so much for having me.

Melissa Breau: I'm excited to chat. To start us out, I know it's a big crew, but can you just refresh listeners' memories a little by telling us a bit about your dogs and what you're working on with them?

Sara Brueske: Sure. I have a lot of dogs. I actually have thirteen dogs, and yes, they are all house dogs. They sleep in my bedroom with me, they hang out on the couch, they watch TV, they do everything normal dogs do.

Quick rundown of what I have: I have a couple of Malinois, a little Papillon, a shelter Boston Terrier mix, a couple of Border Collies, a Border Staffie, and a bunch of Koolies, Australian Koolies, and I actually breed Koolies as well.

We're working on a whole bunch of different things. The Malinois are doing mondioring as well as dock diving right now. Famous my Malinois, also does Frisbee. The rest of the dogs do diving, they do agility, they do disc dog, they do pretty much whatever I get intrigued by. Sometimes it's scent work, sometimes it's tricks, sometimes it's the flavor of the month, the cool thing people are teaching. They do everything, really.

Melissa Breau: That's awesome. I know you're a pretty big proponent of teaching lots of tricks, and I wanted to ask you what you thought of as the benefits of doing lots of trick training.

Sara Brueske: There are so many benefits to trick training. My biggest one that I try to preach a lot is I treat tricks kind of like throwaway behaviors. I don't mean that in the term that tricks aren't important to teach, and they're not really cool to teach, and they don't have their own purpose, but the behavior we can teach to get all the kinks out of our training.

They can teach concepts. If I want to teach a head target for heeling, for instance, and I want to shape that, I might start with some simple trick like a head target on a piece of glass so I can smush my dog's face up against it. I might do something really cool like a chin rest, or the head down, or "look sad" trick where the dog looks super, super sad.

If I want to train something like, for instance, a really nice foot finish for heel work, I might teach my dogs to back around backwards around me first, because that gives them really good hind-end awareness as well.

So there's a whole bunch of really cool tricks out there that can teach our dogs concepts for competition behaviors, and that way we're not really experimenting on the final behaviors that we want to have. I'm not going to work out the kinks on head targeting while I'm teaching the actual head targeting from a heel position, and for that reason that's why I call those throwaway behaviors. They're also really cool because they teach us about our dogs, and they teach our dogs about us, and they teach body awareness and balance and control. I mean, they're pretty cute, too. There's a whole bunch of cool tricks out there as well. So tons of reasons why we should do trick training with our dogs.

Melissa Breau: You mentioned a little bit as you were talking about how you use one skill to teach the concept for another skill. Are there "foundations" for tricks the same way there are for other sports? And I'm pretty sure you're going to say yes, but I won't go there all the way. If so, can you share some examples of what that looks like?

Sara Brueske: I feel like I should just say no now just to throw you off your track! "No, there's no foundations. You treat the behavior just as it is."

There's always foundations for every behavior we teach our dogs. The way I teach tricks, and the way the upcoming tricks class is going to be situated, is they're going to be broken up into concepts, so front-paw targeting, rear-paw targeting, hind-end awareness, head targeting, and then there'll be some miscellaneous tricks as well.

What I do is I teach the concept of that, and then I can branch those into different tricks, and then those tricks can turn into different tricks and so on and so forth. I might start with something really cool like rear-paw targeting, and then teach back up from that. My favorite trick is the fake pee on something, where you tell your dog to go pee on something and they don't actually pee, obviously, but they look like they are.

That all comes from the same place as rear-paw targeting, and that's used for wall handstands and actual independent handstands later on. It's all the same idea just branched off one off of another.

Melissa Breau: My next question was going to be, How do you build on those foundation skills to create those more complex tricks later on? Do you want to talk about that little bit more, how that progresses, I guess?

Sara Brueske: Sure. I'll use a different example here: pivoting. We all know pivoting from heel work, but pivoting is a huge component of a whole bunch of tricks that I use as well. Pivoting is where your dog's front paws are stationary on an upturned bowl, or something along those lines, and their back end rotates around it, kind of like a circus elephant. They rotate around a pedestal using their hind end. I use that for teaching my back-around, and my reverse leg weaves, and my scoot for disc, and even to teach agility weave poles. I can teach that backwards using that same concept.

So where I do that is I would start with the dog pivoting around a bowl, fade that bowl, use it on a body cue on me, and then put it on verbal cue from there, and then I'd be able to use it for the agility poles later on as well. So it's a whole process, but it's all that same behavior just used in different ways.

Melissa Breau: That's interesting, because those are pretty different end behaviors, backing around you and reverse leg weaves. I could see how they have similar components, but they're definitely different end behaviors. They're very different concepts.

Sara Brueske: They're definitely different in the final product, but if you look at what the dog's actually doing, they're just swinging their back end around in different ways, and so therefore to the dog it's the same trick. It's just where they're doing that trick in relation to you, where they stop that trick, where they start that trick, and then obviously with the agility poles, using that as a prop outside of just the handler.

Melissa Breau: Is there maybe a particular trick that you usually teach first? Is that something that differs depending on the dog? What are some examples of that?

Sara Brueske: The tricks I teach, first I teach my core concept behaviors all at one time, obviously in different sessions, and that goes into my little puppy foundation program that I've developed. So the big ones I want to knock out right away so that I can start using them in different ways to teach behaviors off of them is head target — that one's really really important for me, chin rest, nose targeting, extended moving nose touches, because all that stuff turns into holds and stuff later on, and then to pivot, like I talked about earlier. I want those puppies really working their hind end as soon as possible so they get used to it.

And then teaching them to shape with different objects is a huge thing. It's one of the first things I teach them to do, and so behaviors like all four paws in a box is super-important. It's something that … most dogs learn touch within a session, and then we can work with it from there. I think those are the important ones.

The other thing I really try to knock out with my young dogs, my new dogs, right away is three different concepts as far as shaping. These aren't really tricks, but I want them to learn to shape in relation to me, the handler. So using a chin rest or a hand touch, for example, for that I want them to learn to shape with an object, so all four in a box, or the pivot work. And then I want them to learn to shape by themselves, so something like shaping a down or a spin that way. Those are really the three concepts I need my dogs to learn right away, regardless of what tricks or behaviors I'm teaching them later on.

Melissa Breau: It's really interesting because it teaches them both to operate independently, to operate with an object, and to operate with you, and having a dog that's learned one really strongly before learning any of the others, it's very hard to get those mindsets if they don't learn the three simultaneously.

Sara Brueske: Yeah, so going back to that point of what I teach first, I really look at the concepts I need first, and those are the three ones, and I basically pick my behavior based on that. It might be a different behavior for the dog previous to this one, but it teaches that same concept, so I look at that rather than which behaviors I'm actually teaching.

Melissa Breau: You mentioned this earlier, but it's also in the description for your upcoming class — that tricks not only teach our dogs how to learn, but they teach us how our dogs learn, as well. Can you explain that a little bit more? What do you mean by that, maybe with an example?

Sara Brueske: Sure. I'll start with the first part of that. Tricks teach our dogs how to learn, and so that comes to that whole conceptual learning that I was talking about, things like luring, teaching our dogs to lure, dogs have to learn to lure. Not all of them just follow that cookie in your hand, and not all of them know how to fade that lure. That's a training tool that we have to teach our dogs. Same with shaping. I've already touched on that.

Things like reverse-luring or zen hand, all those things need to be taught to our dogs, and tricks are a great way to teach those tools to our dogs. That way, we can take those tools and teach a different behavior later on.

As far as us learning about our dogs, every time we teach our dog a new behavior, we're learning something about them. We're learning about their frustrations, or we learn what they enjoy as far as rewards go, how they want that reward delivered. We learn the signs that teach us that our dogs are getting pushed too far. Are they getting to the end point of that session? How far can I actually push that dog? Do they do better with short sessions, like 15-second sessions with a couple of reps here and then switching to something else, or do they do better working on it for six or seven minutes straight, which I don't typically recommend, but some dogs are OK with that.

And so tricks, again because they are that throwaway behavior — typically they're not things that we win ribbons or anything like that for, other than obviously the AKC trick dog titles and the Do More With Your Dog trick dog titles. But typically they're not behaviors that need to be done with such precisions that we're worried about screwing them up, and that's why I like using tricks to be able to learn from my dog and figure out how they like to learn.

Melissa Breau: Do you have any examples of something, maybe a trick that you taught one of your guys that really taught you something about how one of them tends to learn?

Sara Brueske: I want to use Brilliant, my Koolie, as an example because I've learned so much from working with her. She was the keeper from my litter, my first litter I bred. She has a wonderful work ethic, but she doesn't work like her mom does. Her mom is very, very fidgety, very, very fast, very, very crazy, and has a very low frustration tolerance as far as being right and getting that reward. Brilliant is methodical She is very thoughtful with her process. She's slow, but not in a bad way, just slow as in she thinks things out before she does it. Duration is her favorite thing to work on.

So instead of really talking about a trick that taught me that about her, I want to talk about the type of tricks that I learned that she enjoys the most. I tried teaching her fun, fast things with food, like wrap around the cone, spins, and leg weaves, things that other dogs enjoy, and they're moving, and stuff like that. It was always slow, and it was getting me frustrated with her, like, "Why aren't you more like your mom?"

And so I started playing around with other tricks, tricks that her mom isn't really good at, things that make her think, so stacking bowls, putting this inside that, nosework. All of those things that require a little bit more of a thoughtful process, Brilliant is really excelling at.

While she was becoming older and her repertoire is getting larger and larger, it still has all of these other tricks that I didn't teach her mom, and that's because her mom didn't enjoy learning them. So it was a cool insight to her. She knows all of the stuff that her mom does, but she doesn't really enjoy doing those in the same way, but she enjoys the more methodical tricks, and so that's a cool thing that I've learned about her.

Melissa Breau: That's really actually neat because it shows how different personalities come with different dogs, and it doesn't even matter that they're blood relations.

Sara Brueske: Yeah, exactly.

Melissa Breau: I know you do a lot with your dogs — you do a lot of different skills and train a bunch of different sports. How does the trick training that you do benefit or carry over into teaching them some of those other skills?

Sara Brueske: There's a lot of ways. I've already talked about the conceptual theory, how I'm teaching head targeting with this behavior, teaching pivots and all that stuff. But I think that the more broad answer to this question is about our relationship. Because I haven't experimented in the behaviors I need for other sports or anything like that, those behaviors, my dogs' emotional response to those other behaviors, and their enjoyment of those behaviors, is always higher.

So because my dog comes with the tools ready to learn things like heeling, or ready to learn things like sequencing for agility, because we've done the behavior chains with tricks first before fading out rewards and everything else like that in agility, I feel like that is the biggest benefit with tricks. Being able to use those to prep my dogs for the skills they need in other sports and helping our relationship that way.

That way, when I go out there and I start doing our 20-minute mondioring routine without any rewards, my dog's ready to go, our relationship is stronger, they love and enjoy those behaviors without any failures or errors that come with teaching our dogs new things.

Melissa Breau: Twenty minutes is a really long time. That's a long time to be showing.

Sara Brueske: Mondioring's hard.

Melissa Breau: The Tricks and Purpose class — what led you to create the class? Can you share a little bit about it?

Sara Brueske: I love training tricks. It's definitely one of my favorite things. When I was 11 years old and I had my first Border Collie, he got washed out of agility because he ended up with a shoulder injury that ended his career before he was even 2 years old. I was 11, so I get home, I train my dog to do tricks, and it's still something that I've always enjoyed. It's something that's always part of my relationship with my dogs. Always in the back of my mind is, What else can I get this dog to do? What cool thing can we play around with? That's why I wanted to share the enjoyment I get from training tricks, and I wanted to show people the other side of trick training, the purpose behind it.

I just spent the weekend with a whole bunch of production-sport people. People don't train in production sports, they typically don't cross-train, they don't train tricks for sure. So showing them that there is a purpose, there is a thing to be gained from training tricks, it's something that I wanted to share with the community as much as I can.

Melissa Breau: Did you want to talk a little bit about what skills you're going to cover in the class?

Sara Brueske: Like I said, we're breaking it down into concepts, and then we're going to branch tricks off of there. My vision for this class is to spend each week, so each of the six weeks, on all concepts.

I think the first week is something like front-paw targeting, and then I'll show a couple of tricks you can do along with those things. That way, students aren't required to train a certain trick or anything like that. They can pick and choose those tricks, cover as many as they want. If they want to do all four, then go for it. If you only want to do one, that's cool too, as long as you get that concept of it done.

So we do front-paw targeting, we do rear-paw targeting, head targeting, there's some miscellaneous fun ones in there, like we do this really cool trick in our shows, it's math, so you ask your dog a question like, "What is 2 plus 2?" and then the dog barks out the answer. I thought that would be a really cool one to share because it's a crowd pleaser, and it works really well for a bark and hold and IPO or Mondio too, by the way.

Melissa Breau: That's actually neat. It's the crossover that most people probably have not thought about.

Sara Brueske: Yes. My Malinois are the ones that do that trick because they have bark and holds.

Melissa Breau: The other class that you have on the schedule is a disc dog class. Just to give people a little bit of background, how did you originally get into disc?

Sara Brueske: I got into disc in a funny little way. I was an agility girl. I did agility. I loved agility with all my heart. I trained my Great Danes in it. I finally got this little Border Collie mix, a little rescue dog, and for some reason I was looking on Craigslist — this is the weirdest story ever; I don't know if I've shared it a lot — but I was looking on Craigslist, and somebody was selling a box of dog Frisbees from the local club — the local disc dog club. I'm like, hey, that seems kind of cool. I should probably go check that out. I always wanted a disc dog.

I went and met up with this lady, and she sold me her box of dog Frisbees for, like, 30 bucks. I started throwing them for my dog and I'm, like, this is pretty cool. I watched a couple of videos on how to train different tricks, and I'm, like, yeah, my dog's really enjoying this. This was Zuma, eight years ago, this was Zuma, and I'm, like, this is really cool.

I posted on Facebook a photo of her all happy after a session, her tongue was hanging out, and there's the disc with the Minnesota Disc Dog logo on it. Apparently I was friends with some members, and they commented, like, "Hey, we have a competition this weekend, come on out. It's Raspberry Fest in Hopkins, Minnesota. It's a UFO local." I'm like, "All right, I'll go check it out." I went, and we won first place in Novice Freestyle and Novice Toss and Catch, and I met some of the coolest people I've ever met in my life that are still my really great friends today, and that's what started my addiction.

Melissa Breau: That's awesome. That's fantastic. It's kind of like random. There's nothing more reinforcing than going to your first competition and walking away with those kind of placements.

Sara Brueske: Yes, it was a lot of fun.

Melissa Breau: For anybody who's never been to a disc competition and isn't super-familiar with the sport, can you share a little bit about what some of the competition skills and games and stuff look like?

Sara Brueske: The traditional disc dog format, and there's a few different organizations that have it, is they have freestyle, so that's what most people think of when they think of disc dog competitions. The dogs are vaulting off the handlers, they're doing flips, they're doing crazy routines set to music. That's my favorite thing.

But there is so much more to disc dog than just that component. You can be super-successful in the sport without ever even doing freestyle. Then there's the other traditional games called Toss and Catch, or Toss and Fetch, or Distance and Accuracy, depending on the organization. This is a distance and speed and accuracy game, so you're throwing one Frisbee down the field to your dog and they're bringing it back. It's a timed event. You get extra points for distance and for accuracy. That's Toss and Catch. Typically there's a champion for both for Toss and Catch and then there's a champion for Frisbee or freestyle combined with Toss and Catch for an overall champion. So that's really cool. That's the main traditional format.

Then there's a whole bunch of distance competitions, so who can throw the Frisbee the furthest. It's not timed. It's just the longest throw wins, typically, generally, in a tournament-style format. After that, there's a whole group of strategy games. Skyhoundz Disc Dogathon started this whole idea of strategy games. You have to get "this catch in this zone," "that catch in this zone," or it's a timed trial how fast you get three catches.

And then this organization that really rocks, called UpDog Challenge, started … some friends of mine and some other people created this organization, and it's all strategy games. They also have Toss and Catch and they have freestyle. There's personal achievements you can win, it's really cool, there's different world championships and stuff like that. It's really beginner-friendly and it's a ton of fun.

Melissa Breau: It sounds that way. For people just getting interested, what skills does a dog need to compete in some of the different games, or what skills could they be working on, maybe beginner skills, for all of this?

Sara Brueske: The big one, obviously, is they need to have toy drive. Frisbee drive is obviously what they need to have. There are some organizations like UpDog that allow you to use any Frisbee as long as it doesn't have a hole in the center, so soft, floppy, fabric Frisbees work just fine, or whatever you normally use for any of the other competitions. So Frisbee drive is really important, obviously, since that's the sport. We want the dog to catch the Frisbee in the air, and that actually is a taught skill. UpDog allows you to actually throw rollers, which is a throw that's along the ground. It rolls on the ground, so it's little bit easier, depending on the games. Sometimes it's harder. We also want a handoff, so we want our dogs to bring the Frisbee back to our hand and we want the dog to drop the Frisbee at a distance as well.

Melissa Breau: Interesting, because those are definitely different skills, bringing it back and dropping it where it is.

Sara Brueske: Yes. It's kind of technical. And then there's a few other behaviors, like go-arounds, where you send your dog around behind you so that you can get a head start throwing the disc and timing it a little better, and little skills like that as well.

Melissa Breau: In the class that you're offering, is it for beginners, is it for people who are a little more advanced, what are you covering in the class or how is the class formatted? I know it's a little different than maybe a typical class.

Sara Brueske: It's a little bit of a hybrid class. I wanted to offer a handler's choice in this dog class just because I know I've run the foundation class a few times and there's some students sitting in limbo. We don't ever have quite enough people to do a Level 2 all the way, but I know there's that group of people that want a little bit more. I wanted to do a handler's choice. That way, they can work on whatever they need to work on with their dog.

But, at the same time, I always want to grow the sport, so I wanted to add a little bit of a foundation curriculum so it would be more of a bare-bones curriculum based on the foundations class. It won't include all of the things we work on in that class, but it will be definitely enough for new teams to come in, have a good idea of what to work on using that curriculum, and personalize their class based on that stuff.

It won't be a class where you have to do everything in the curriculum. In fact, I'm expecting you not to. I'm expecting you to pick things that you want to work on, based on what you need. That way, you can utilize the time in the best way you can and hopefully get more out of the class that way.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. It sounds like a lot of fun, and I know at least a couple of people who are looking forward to it. It should be a good one. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Sara! This has been great.

Sara Brueske: Thank you so much for having me.

Melissa Breau: And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in!

We'll be back next week with Heather Lawson, and we'll be chatting about breaking down foundation skills and using them as building blocks to teach multiple useful behaviors.

If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

CREDITS:

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.