Karen VanHoy: Hello! I am Karen VanHoy, Captain of the Santa Barbara Flyers, and we were talking about dog agility today.

We're going to start talking about how to teach your dog some basic jumping skills. You will see in the back here that I have some jumps but they do not have jump bars on them, and the jump bars are down on the ground. This is to teach the dog usually their kind of forward drive motion, they don't really know where their rear feet are.

You can do this at home. If you want to put broomsticks down on the ground or anything else, and you can also teach them how to back up. They need to know where their back feet are. If I had four feet I wouldn't know where mine were either.

So where I'm going to go is the dog on my left. She and I are going to go through the middle and she and I are going to step and roll of the bars. Zing come. So, on a new dog you'd want to have a short leash, little bit slow. Good girl, lot of praise through the middle. She has done this before so that's okay. Good girl. Yes, good girl. Maybe the next time you do that you want to do it with a little bit more speed. Good girl.

So I'm through the middle. Yes, so now I have got to little jog. She and I both are not stepping on it, good girl. Now you'd want to repeat the same thing with the dog on your right side. So I'm going to walk her through. I'm on the outside of the jumps. Yeah. Good girl. And again, we want to go repeat that same thing with the dog on the opposite side.

Now we're going to take and put those bars up at various different heights. You're going to as fast as you can go being comfortable keeping them within the bars. You can say jump or over, whatever simple comment. Ready, over, over, over, over, over, good girl, good girl. And again, make sure that you do it on both sides.

So now the jumps are in a pinwheel formation and you're going to have your dog on the right and the dog on the left. Leave that one at 16 and we will put this one really, really low. Now you'll be surprised, she will make the 20, she will drop the 8. She has to think about what she's doing in the jump. Ready, over, over, over, over. Yeah! Good girl, good girl.

Then you can start to vary the distance about how big this circle is. You can move them out; you can do all kinds of different angles. Do it definitely the both ways and that's the beginning of the jumping skills.

Okay, so the next segment of dog agility is how to get your dog starting to work away from you with a toy or with a food bag.