Teaching a Dog how to Jump

I’ve been pretty lucky during my agility career, in that my dogs have been pretty natural jumpers and have learned quickly on their own. I now have a dog which is very agile, and is a very good jumper, but is lacking the confidence to be able to jump on a regular basis all on his own. And so now I find myself learning all about how to teach a dog how to jump.
This is a picture of Maze jumping, isn’t he just the cutest guy? 🙂 I love Mr. Maze, and I want to help him be a confident jumper who has a lot of fun doing agility. He will currently do a couple of jumps, but then he will go around most of the jumps on a course. And so now I get to learn all about improving a dog’s confidence about jumping.

I am currently reading the book by Suzanne Clothier about Jumping called The Clothier Natural (Dog) Jumping Method. She advises about how to determine a proper stride length for a dog in order for him to learn a comfortable and confident jumping. So far I’m quite enjoying the book. I also am reading Jumping A to Z by Chris Zink and Julie Daniels. Jumping from A to Z: Teach Your Dog to Soar I’ve had this book for a long time, but I have never read the whole thing. So, off I go for some reading!

I set up some jumps for Maze based on the Clothier method, and I think he’s doing really well. I’m going to adjust the spacing, though, because I think my calculations were off and he needs jumps just a little further apart.

So now the jumping training fun starts. Maze is teaching me all about things I have skimmed over in the past with other dogs. So here we go, let’s learn to jump!