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Contact Or Tunnel?

Do you remember the cool video of leading OneMind Dogs Coaches Jaakko Suoknuuti and Mikko Aaltonen practicing contact - tunnel discrimination as a pairwork with their dogs? How is it possible to get your dog to choose the obstacle you want him to choose?


Competition courses often include tunnel - contact discrimination sequences - a tunnel under an A-frame or a dogwalk - that require the handler to be able to guide the dog to choose the correct obstacle out of the two options.

After you've taught your dog both the tunnel and the contact obstacles separately, you can start working on different types of discrimination exercises.

In OneMind Dogs Method we don’t usually use obstacle names as a command. When we use verbal cues, they tend to tell the dog what needs to happen between the obstacles, like “slow down” or “take a connection to the handler”. Contact - tunnel discrimination is one exception for this: since it's not always possible to unambiguously cue the dog to the correct obstacle, we teach our dogs to be able to discriminate the tunnel and contact obstacles based on verbal cues.

Words are important for us people, but not for dogs. Since our words don't naturally mean anything to the dogs, verbal cues tend to need a lot of teaching.

Our mission is to give a happy life to dogs by helping people become amazing dog owners. We are passionate about increasing the mutual understanding between the dog and the owner, making a life together more enjoyable for both.