Gustavo is one of those dogs that has a hard time with tables. Laying down in one place for 5 seconds during an agility trial has always been hard for him, and somehow, no matter how much I worked on it being stress free and fun, in his short trialing career, turned into a major bummer.

I pulled him from running in Standard last spring. I just couldn’t watch the train wreck any more that resulted from tables. The best case scenario was actually sometimes he would actually lay down on the table and wag his tail the whole time and look very cute. This was rare. He has exactly 2 Masters Standard Q’s to his name. His most common scenario was he just wouldn’t lay down and would stand there with a cuckoo insane look on his face and tap his feet around like the table was blazing hot. The worse case scenario was when the table would send him into a weirdo vortex and he’d start a frantic behavior like jumping off and climbing underneath then getting back on and back underneath and on and so on like that until I captured him.

That’s just plain weird. Clearly a problem. My table training methods, so reliable with my other dogs, made him insane.

As part of the reprogramming of ammonia free brain program, I started practicing constant rewarding on tables to make tables seem fabulous. Not that we hadn’t done this before. I thought I’d done a good job of training his table, but obviously, I was mistaken. So more tables and more rewarding. More, more, more.

I made him think he was king of the world every time he hit that table and just plain old layed down and stayed there while I counted. Gustavo should know how to count to 5 by now. He’s heard that count thousands of times by now. And Go.

So what I taught him, was that either during or after counting to 5, he would almost always get a treat. I tried to mix this up, so that he didn’t know when, or if, he was getting rewarded. But usually, the act of laying there without moving earned a prize.

I think I weighted this too heavily on the always rewarding. So I started to go 50/50, 40/60, 30/70, using my detailed record keeping system also known as my memory that can’t even find my sunglasses, to remember how many tables had been rewarded that week and how many had gone commando.

Lately I’ve been trying to practice with no treats out there on the course. Nada. The reward is at the end. Sometimes this is fine, and sometimes, it causes a meltdown. He gets a lot of verbal praise, but if there’s a stressy obstacle right after a table like the chute or a teeter, meltdown. I can see him on that table, licking his little lips, hoping for his treat. Hoping, waiting, listening for his And Go. And then if we have to go somewhere next like the chute and there was no treat, my god. Can there still, to this day, be a meltdown.

There was today. I wanted to cry. I don’t think I’m ever going to get this agility thing right.

He reboots in his crate. We worked it out. There’s always an answer I can find.

But.