nathhad t1_ithcj81 wrote on October 23, 2022 at 5:36 PM

Reply to comment by fuzzy9691 in TIL that the dogs in competitive agility don’t rehearse the course ahead of time. The courses are randomized at each competition, and the trainers (without their dogs) only see the layout beforehand on the same day. When the dog runs the course they are literally seeing it for the first time. by Pyraunus

> It doesn’t understand ‘ooh I need to memorise this course’. It doesn’t have that function. They stare at their keeper and follow orders.

You are drastically underestimating the intelligence of dogs. they absolutely DO learn a course they've been on before, and the smarter ones will pick it up very, very quickly. This is true of other things too, not just agility.

My wife trains sheepdogs (she raises sheepdogs and sheep for a living). The entire point of buying and breeding such smart dogs is that if they're trained right, most of them do come to understand what you're trying to get done, not just their commands. Sure, some people do train their dogs to be "mechanical," just left, right, stop, go, but most aren't training for that, it's an exception. When you have a working dog that has done the same jobs with you every day, day after day, they normally understand what you're trying to get done, which job is next, and with the better ones and simpler to medium difficulty tasks you can just tell them it's time to go get it done and they'll go do what you need them to do (adjusting on the fly as needed, because when you're herding live animals there's no "fixed course" like with agility that they can learn by rote). You're often only giving them instructions when something is going wrong and they need help.