As far as I know Suzanne Clothier's book The Clothier Natural Jumping Method (Copyright 1989) was the first book written for dog trainers that presented a systematic approach for developing a dog's jumping skills. Suzanne is a trainer who just amazes me. She has analyzed and studied animal behavior and training methods and through careful application has developed what she terms "relationship based training". You can read my brief review of her trainers' seminar to get a feel for her overall philosophy and training approach.

Executive Summary

If you are at all interested in dog jumping buy this book and read it. This is the book that brought jumping training to dog trainers and agility competitors.

Some Details

Just like Suzanne's other writings this book is thorough in its coverage of the topic, concise and to the point. Suzanne recommends that you read it through at least twice before beginning the program. I've read it at least four times so far and am reminded of things on each reading. There is a lot of information packed into this slim book.

The key point of Suzanne's approach is to have the dog learn to jump without direct intervention by the handler or other props. The dog is allowed to experiment and hone their jumping skills through a progression of varied Jump Chutes. Her intent is to give the dog the skills to solve the jumping challenge presented in each lesson and find the best way for them to jump the sequence.

The book opens with a discussion of strides, jumping style, take off points and jump curvature. She then presents jump chutes, definitions of jump types, jump construction, and how to measure jump locations within the jump chute.

Once the prerequisites are out of the way Suzanne presents "The Natural Jumping Method". Through measurement of the dog's height at the withers, body length and height of the elbow (not as important as the first two) Suzanne has developed tables for calculating a dog's stride length. (Other jumping systems directly measure a dog's stride length on the ground; requiring interpretation by the trainer to correctly judge the degree of extension/compression of the dog's stride.)

Suzanne then presents a sixteen week program of three lessons per week, each lesson contains two sets of three jumping passes through the jump chute. The location of the jumps and the types of jump are varied in a step by step progression. This progression allows the dog to learn how to adapt to the challenges presented by each sequence. Prior to each group of lessons Suzanne explains the goals and the jump chute configurations. The key to her method is to always allow the dog to figure out how to "solve the problem" of the each sequence. The handler is to give the dog as much time as he needs to solve a sequence before advancing to the next lesson.

At the end of the sixteen week program Suzanne describes some next steps to take including curved jump chutes.

My Two Cents

I really like that Suzanne presents a detailed step by step training progression along with the rationale for each set of drills. While I have attended a Jen Pinder jumping seminar and talked about jumping with more knowledgeable trainers, I don't pretend to be able to develop my own jump training program so the less opportunity I have for misinterpreting my dog's actions the better. I have been following this program with Meeker (we are currently at week 12) and I've only seen positive change in Meeker's confidence and ability to handle jumping challenges so far.

I'd like to correct a common misconception about Suzanne's training system. I've mentioned this book to other agility trainers and some will say something like "well it is good as far as it goes but she only uses fixed distance grids". While it is true the progression starts with fixed distance grids, once the problem solving phase begins both the distance between jumps and the types of jumps are varied.

I only have a couple nits to pick with this book. The typesetting and photos are showing their age, and additional photos and/or diagrams identifying desirable jumping form or what to look for would be helpful. The text is quite concise, sometimes additional restatement or reinforcement of key concepts would be helpful or, as some books do, highlight the "remember this" key concepts in a sidebar or some such.

I would really like to see her expand on the brief section on jump training for agility. This program takes the dog very far but it would be helpful to identify jump chutes to take dogs all the way to the sometimes "extreme" jump sequences of excellent/masters courses. I've emailed Suzanne about expanding the next edition in this area and am hoping to spur her interest in that direction.

In the New Notes section at the beginning of the book Suzanne writes that she plans to issue a revised and updated version of the book, along with a video, at an unspecified future time. I look forward to the day she completes that task. It will be very interesting to see how she has progressed in this area and how she views the books, articles, and other training approaches that have developed based on her seminal work.

I regularly read the Clean Run agility email list and there are always requests from magazine readers to locate the issue(s) containing various articles. The Clean Run staff usually search their indices and reply promptly. Clean Run's website also provide Microsoft Word documents containing indexes to individual articles for free download. They also provide a brief description of each magazine in their online store where customers can order back issues. I figured from the combination of that information I could put together a database of descriptions and indexes and provide an online search page for other Clean Run readers.

I first contacted Monica Percival at Clean Run to see if they were planning on providing search in the near term and if they would let me use their data for that purpose. Monica said they weren't currently and kindly gave me permission to copy and reuse the data. So I downloaded the data and got to work.

Right now the search page supports searching each issue's summary description and the article index from Jan 1997 to the latest data on the Clean Run website. I have written some scripts to "crunch" the data but there is still a fair amount of manual work on the article index MS Word files to make it fit the format I need. So there will be a slight lag for me to keep the database up to date as new issues are published. There is a checkbox on the search page to let you choose whether to search index or description information.

Here's the link to the search page.

Technology

Not a lot of technology is involved. I found a simple Perl CGI script for searching flat file databases called "free-search.cgi" created by CNC Technology. It had the basic functionality and didn't require configuring and populating a database, after all there isn't that much data to search.

I had to modify the script to sort the output (newest issues first), provide flexibility in styling and placing the previous and next result buttons, rerouting the no results page back to the search template page, and populating the search box with the previous search keywords. Including desiging the page layouts, I probably spent about 8 hours getting this to work as I needed.

I'll send my changes back to CNC Technology in case they want to incorporate them into their script. Their copyright doesn't allow me to redistribute my changes.

There are two flat file "databases": one containing a line for the text summaries of each issue and another containing a line for each article in each issue. It is the extracting and formatting of that data that is time consuming part.

For the article database I've also added a keyword column. It isn't populated yet but I was thinking it could be used to add keywords to each article to help in locating articles whose titles don't contain all the words that could identify it. I figured I could enter them as I read each article in future issues. Maybe I can get other enthusiasts to volunteer to provide keywords for the back issues.

So I hope you find this search tool helpful, let me know if you have any suggestions or comments.

The last couple weeks I've been reading Susan Garrett's latest book Shaping Success. The Education of an Unlikely Champion. If you are at all interested in using Clicker Training to train dogs for agility this is an invaluable book. As the title suggests Susan describes the journey she embarks on to use Shaping (as opposed to Luring) to train her pup Buzz to compete at the highest agility levels.

Susan makes a compelling argument for shaping developing a thinking dog that offers behaviors in an effort to obtain a reward (toy, treat, tug, access, etc.). As a trainer I'm only a novice clicker trainer so making the jump to shaping will require more planning and thought on my part but I'm up for the challenge.

The book follows Susan's training of Buzz as he grows physically and mentally and ultimately becomes a championship level agility dog. She presents and clearly explains drills along with the reasoning behind the behaviors she has chosen at each stage of Buzz's development. It is the change in a trainer's thinking required by shaping that Susan presents clearly. I found the many applied examples very helpful.

Just as important as the successes, Susan describes problems she encountered, their causes, and how she worked through them. These included barking, pulling on the way to the ring, among others. She shares her doubts, concerns, and frustrations and the challenges she faced both in training and among those who didn't believe her "Buzzy" would ever successfully compete. It is easy to imagine the trainers/handlers at the top of the sport are all knowing, never doubt their methods, and are always successful. Susan gives us an unvarnished view of her journey.

While I don't think she addressed this directly, this book isn't only for trainers starting a new dog. Her approach can work for any dog that is still willing to work for their trainers. I would think the dog that is always expecting to be lured through their next behavior will take longer to understand offering behaviors is a good thing; but if appropriately and enthusiastically rewarded I'm sure it can be successful.

The only thing I would have liked to have seen added would have been a recommended skills progression diagram or table. While she does discuss and clearly describe specific drills throughout the book, there are a couple times where she describes how she would have changed her initial training approach. So it would be nice to see an ideal outline of which skills she would teach and in what order (with the understanding that all dogs are different and may not need exactly that progression).

I highly recommend this book. I know one clicker-savvy trainer who has been shaping her puppy's behaviors (starting before this book was published). I'm amazed at the speed with which the dog has learned new behaviors and the enthusiasm the dog has for learning and playing. I think learning to shape is a skill that will challenge agility trainers in a new positive direction (pun intended). It will also improve relationships between dogs and their trainers and help develop dogs for which training is a new, fun way to play.

Clean Run Magazine is the preeminent Agility magazine for North America. It is required reading for anyone learning or seriously practicing Agility. Each month's issue contains training tips, methodologies, equipment plans, practice courses, and course analyses. The results and handling of USDAA, AKC and World Championship courses are also covered in detail.

Over the past few years the number of quality articles in every issue has steadily increased. Now in every issue there are several articles by the top handlers and instructors in the world.

I remember as a Novice handler some of the terminology and explanations in the magazine were over my head. But with time it started making sense. One of my goals for this website was to remember the areas of the sport that confused me then and try to explain them in my articles.

So if you don't already have a subscription it is a worthwhile investment.