Backyard Training Challenge – Contact vs Tunnel

Niki
March 19, 2020

Now that many of you are spending more time at home with your dogs, we wanted to give you some ideas for fun home training tips and challenges to try! In this first challenge OneMind Dogs Coach Niki Drage is showing you a little Contacts vs Tunnel challenge.

The benefits of teaching contact-tunnel discrimination

When a tunnel is placed under a contact obstacle on an agility course, you will benefit from having taught your dog contact-tunnel discrimination. The dog is taught to choose the right obstacle by a verbal command as the obstacles are generally placed very closely together.

The challenge

Place yourself and your dog on many different starting angles and see if your dog can differentiate between your verbals for the tunnel vs the contact.

What you need

  • Tunnel (any size)
  • Plank (any size your dog fits on)
  • Something to rest the plank on so it is raised. e.g. small table, chair or large cushion
  • Something the dog can wrap around (wing, cone, flowerpot, tree)
  • Optional: Dogwalk or a frame instead of the plank

In this video you can see Niki Drage running the exercise with her dogs. Be sure to also watch the blooper at the end of it! 😜

Niki and Flow are doing this challenge on a full dogwalk, but you can easily do the same on just a raised plank in the backyard. If your dog has not done any work on just one raised plank before, make sure you reward your dog a few times for going up the plank first with your contact verbal before starting the challenge.

We’d love to see you try it too, so if you’re happy to share your challenge videos on social media, please tag us and use #oneminddogs and #oneminddogscontactvstunnelchallenge as your hashtags!

Can’t make it work?

OneMind Dogs Premium members can see how exactly we teach this skill from the ground up by watching this tunnel-contact discrimination video.

Get Agility Premium today and learn this and many other valuable skills for you and your dog!

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