# Why Tie-Downs Vs (Other)?



## hotel4dogs (Sep 29, 2008)

I think it depends on the dog. I have a dog who does best figuring something out for himself, and who doesn't like to be wrong. The tie down method makes it so that the dog can't ever be wrong. I know it doesn't work for every dog.


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## Megora (Jun 7, 2010)

Adele described something a while back about doing tie-downs with her dogs who had been trained previously in field. I think they are more likely to be thinking RETRIEVE vs stopping to snuffle the pile for the correct article. She's had that even backfire on her with dogs who just yanked up the mat by the article and brought it back. 

I can see that at least.... and I know this golden from class last night is going for her MH. 

But the dog yesterday looked so confused....


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## Loisiana (Jul 29, 2009)

Really depends on the person and the dog. Just like there are so many ways to teach every other exercise, different things work for different dogs.

When I spoke with Adele a few years ago, she said she usually taught articles starting with around the clock and then transitioning to tying them down.


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## AmberSunrise (Apr 1, 2009)

Yep. I tried tie downs with Faelan and they were such a disaster!! He is a strong retriever and what he decided would get him the article the fastest (since I had a 4 foot by 4 foot article board) was he stepped in the middle of the board, bracing both front feet around the article he wanted and YANKED!! Oh my goodness!! Dog, article and pieces of that peg board all came flying backwards. We are so lucky his teeth stayed in his mouth. But he got his article!

Note to self ---- never ever again!

My King did something similar but since the tie down board was smaller, happily came back with the entire board.


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## PalouseDogs (Aug 14, 2013)

I tried the round-the-clock method for a few months with Alder and Maple. Alder caught on, sort of, but Maple had a heck of a time. I went to tie-downs, which worked much better. 

The person you saw working with the golden should have started with only 2 articles. I don't use a pegboard because I've had a dog that would pick it up. I use one of those heavy woven rubber door mats. A Great Dane couldn't pick up one of those. 

The biggest advantage to the tie-down method is that you never have to say "No" or "wrong" or anything else to the dog. Once the dog figures out that there is an untied article (starting with only two so it's real easy at first), they know they just keep trying to find the untied one. At first, they will test every article to see if it moves. After a while, usually a short while, it dawns on them that the untied article always smalls more like Mom than the tied articles. 

Once they have the idea and you've been using the tie-down board until you've built up to the whole article set, you get rid of the heavy board (or mat in my case) and tie the unscented articles together in pairs with fishing line. The dog could easily bring a pair of tied articles back, but after the tie-down board, as soon as they feel any tension, they drop the article. 


In my training group, there are 3 others training articles. They all did RTC and they are ALL having confidence issues. One of the dogs, an intense, eager to please Aussie with about 5 UDX legs, is having a major crisis of confidence. He spins frantically looking for the right article. If he makes a mistake, the owner holds his head to the right article like deMillo does in her video. It is not helping. He gets very upset when Mom is unhappy and he's getting worse. I think he'd be much better off if the "correction" came from not being able to pick up the wrong article instead of the owner. 

If a dog is easily discouraged from a retrieve by a tied-down article, then RTC might work better. Goldens tend not to easily give up on a retrieve. 

The other thing I hated about the RTC method was the mind-numbing repetition in each session. Not only did it make the dog wonder if he was wrong, every time you do another rep, you're adding to the pool of scent wafting around the pile. Probably not an issue with a dog with a poor sniffer or out in the wind, but I think it was the source of my golden girl's confusion. After the nth million rep, everything in the vicinity was probably a cloud of scent. 

Lots of people swear by RTC and it obviously works for many dogs, but I'd keep the thought of the tie-down board in the back of my mind as an alternative if you run into problems.


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## AmberSunrise (Apr 1, 2009)

BTW; I usually just clicker train articles.


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## Megora (Jun 7, 2010)

> If he makes a mistake, the owner holds his head to the right article like deMillo does in her video. It is not helping. He gets very upset when Mom is unhappy and he's getting worse. I think he'd be much better off if the "correction" came from not being able to pick up the wrong article instead of the owner.


 I never used corrections like that when training either my dogs. The way Adele taught me was slightly different than the way Janice De Millo does in her video.... I think? (Adele mentioned something about corrections - this was a couple years ago, but I was under the impression the Janice used a more forced fetch type method which I will not do with my dogs). 

With my Jacks I could never correct him - and the one time I did correct for picking up the wrong article, I had him refusing to go near the pile again and I had to start from the beginning again to fix. That was only a "NO" and then followed by withholding of praise and rewards while repeating. 

I hated the repetitions as well. That's why I did this a little differently with Bertie. And I saw he learned his articles in less than a week while it took Jacks a few weeks while following the actual program.

The thing that baffled me while watching the lady do articles with her dog was it was CLEAR that the dog was not using her nose or even tasting the articles (Jacks does that in addition to sniffing). The dog was either checking each article or she was test tugging each of them.


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