01x02: Eli Beate Sæther | Agility, physical training and mental strength

JEANETTE: Today’s guest is one of the world’s best athletes in agility. With her Shetland sheepdog Zelda, she placed third in this year’s European Open, and they have been on the podium at the World Championship two times. Eli Beate Sæther, welcome.

ELI BEATE: Thank you.

JEANETTE: Agility might look very easy when you look at some good athletes doing it, but it’s a lot of hard work behind it.

ELI BEATE: I thought that as well. When I first saw someone do agility, it looks like a dance, kind of, when you are handling your dog through the course. It’s nice when you’re seeing someone that has this good connection with her or his dog. You have to have a good basic to get this good rhythm, to get it to look like this dance. Absolutely much hard work to come there.

I think for someone it’s hard to get this rhythm through their whole career, but if you are always trying to find the small key points, I think you will come there.

JEANETTE:: On the course you are communicating with your dog in different ways, and everything goes so fast, but you use body language. You use your voice. What do you do to tell your dog what to do on the course?

ELI BEATE: I started with agility in 2008, and then I was just 12 years old. So I was very young myself. I had a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and his name was Todd, and he didn’t want to work. He was just walking through the course. Then I didn’t have this much speed either, so the rhythm was not so good then. But after two years, I got my first Shetland sheepdog, Siraja. She is now 10 years old. With her it was much more speed.

The good thing with Todd was that I had to learn how to take – you have different ways to handle a dog through the course. You have front cross, you have rear cross, you have blind cross, and then you have different techniques you can use on the jump obstacles or the tunnels. With Todd, I really had to learn his crosses in a good way because it was so slow. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. It was never fast with Todd, but with Siraja I had this good rhythm in my own body, so when she ran faster than Todd, it was easy to me to do the same process with her. The rhythm was much better.

For other people that start their agility career with a fast dog, it can be very hard to learn these crosses in a good way because it’s not so often that you are repeating it on your own without the dog. You will always do it with the dog, and then it’s always too fast, and then you never learn it good enough. But if you have a slow dog, then you’ll learn it very well, and then it’s easier to do it with a fast dog afterwards.

I’m very grateful that I had Todd and I learned it in this good way at the beginning. It was much easier for me to then have Siraja. I was just 14 when I got her, so I was not that good a dog trainer then either, but when I then got Zelda that I have been in the World Championship and European Open with, I learned a lot more myself. We found this good connection and rhythm quite fast.

JEANETTE: How do you build this connection from the dog as a puppy? How do you start with an agility dog, and when do you start training?

ELI BEATE: Zelda is the first dog I really started to work with from a young age. The reason is that Siraja, when she was I think two years old, she got a big injury, a slipped tendon. Her tendon where her ankle is, like her Achilles tendon, was slipping. So then she started to limp. Because of that, she had an operation. First she had one operation on her first leg, and after rehabilitation, in 6 months she had the same injury on the other leg.

The vet I had talked to said to me that that could happen, that when you get it on the first leg, it can come on the second leg also. And that did happen with Siraja. Then I had to go through a new rehabilitation. Like I said, I was quite young, so maybe 15 years old. I was tired of waiting at this time, so I started to search on the internet for different things to do with her because I couldn’t do agility at this time.

Then I found Silvia Trkman. She is a well-known person in the agility society, so I think it was because of that I got her link or her YouTube channel, and I was so inspired. She had a lot of good movies. She was doing a lot of tricks with her dog. I was going to her YouTube channel, and I had seen some of her videos with the dogs that did a lot of stuff. I remember I think some of the first videos I saw was this washing video. She taught the dogs to wash on the table with this towel and taking things out of the washing machine with clothes and so on, and on the kitchen floor and on the kitchen bench and so on.

I love to have it clean in the house myself, so I was like, “oh, this is nice to teach the dog this stuff.” [laughs] So I went to her YouTube channel and started from the beginning. I just scrolled down and saw her first video. Then I worked my way through her whole channel, I remember, while Siraja was still in this rehabilitation period. This was also during the summer holiday.

After that I started to try these things. I started to do a lot of tricks with her because that was a good thing to do when I couldn’t do agility.

After that day, most of her meals we did training. I took her breakfast and I tried to teach her new tricks. I started, of course, with the simplest ones that she also knew, like sit, laying down, standing, and then rolling on the floor, and then also going in circles. I asked her to take this towel in her mouth and roll around with the towel so that she could hide in a towel.

I started with walls, I remember. I wanted her to lift one paw and then both front paws and hind legs up to the wall and so on. So she had to begin on the walls so I could strengthen her front. I also asked her to “sit pretty,” I think it’s called. Sitting pretty on her hind feet when her feet were better, and also to stand on two feet so I could strengthen her back, and a lot of this stuff.

In the beginning she didn’t like it at all. She thought I was a little bit – when I told her to sit, because I often asked her “Can you sit, please?” and then she was like, “Yes, I can, but I don’t want to.” I was like, “Please sit down,” and she was like, “No.” Then she just went away because she didn’t like that we had to train for food. She was like, “Why are you telling me to do stuff? Why are you doing that?”

So we had a little trouble in the beginning, but after a while I was working with it, and then she really understood and she started to like it. So after a while, when I took her breakfast, she was running after me and wanted to train with me in the morning because it was a routine.

It differed if I could do it every morning, but I tried to, and also in the evening. In that way you get a really good connection with the dog because when they are getting food, they are getting it through you, and that’s a very positive association. Of course you’re getting a strong bond with them then.

That was also what Silvia thought. Her mindset is much that agility and everything else – also obedience and most dog sports are not just tricks. That is a mindset that I use a lot as well. You have to take a big sport or maybe a hard thing to teach a dog, and you have to break it down into small pieces and then start from scratch, and build it piece by piece, and in the end you can do the whole thing together. Small tricks are just a little piece that is good to have in the bottom because it strengthens your connection.

Then I got Zelda. Zelda was born when Siraja had her third operation for slipped tendon. I think this was a nice time to get Zelda because I was so extremely crying, I remember, when she had this last operation, and I was so sad. So it was a huge motivation for me to get a puppy then. And already from Day 1, when she was eight weeks old, I started to take her breakfast.

I took her breakfast and collected it in a little bowl and took it with me, either on the kitchen floor or the living room or something, or maybe in the garden, and I started to train. I remember when she was so young, she was struggling to find the food in my hand, actually, because she was sniffing a lot. She couldn’t really find it because they are not so good at looking at that age. But she found it.

So I started to teach her with a clicker. That was the first thing. I was giving her food and then clicking so she got this association with food and click. That was the beginning. All the way, the food came through me. That was something that she took fast. After she had learned click, I started to teach her different tricks, but very, very easy when she was so young.

I actually saw what she was doing, and if she did something that I think was a good thing – maybe she turned around, maybe she was laying down, maybe she was barking – I was just clicking for it.

JEANETTE: So you were letting dogs come with the ideas. You don’t necessarily tell the dog what to do or guide the dog. You let the dog have ideas itself.

ELI BEATE: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s an important thing also to get their motivation up, that they can decide themselves as well. It’s like if you had a kid. You are not always telling them what to do or how to play, but you can play with them. I think you are a team when you are a dog and a handler, so it’s important to respect the other team member, and that’s the dog. You have to look at what the dog wants and how the dog wants it, and then you have to work your way around it.

And some dogs don’t want any food at all because they are full, and then it’s a little bit hard to train them, maybe. I have had some of those puppies that are so round when I get them, they have eaten so much at their breeder, and then they aren’t interested in food at all. But after some days they are, of course, hungry, so then you can train with them more easily.

You have to make the rules together. Of course you are the leader, kind of, but you have to respect the dog. These small things give you an extremely good connection, I think, because you get your own language with the dog and you have this feeling for them.

Zelda is the closest one, absolutely. I have a little puppy, 10 months, but I haven’t trained her so much yet, so I don’t have the same strong connection. But we are getting closer and closer, and I can feel it because of this type of training.

Quite early on, I’m starting to think of agility because that’s my sport. Then I’m thinking, okay, what’s agility about? It’s about you have this jump and you have these tunnels and you have the dog walk, A frame, seesaw, and slalom. That’s pretty much it. I’m starting to think, okay, that’s the obstacles. That’s what they have to know.

Then I have to break it down to small pieces. Since jump and tunnel are the most common obstacles, I start with that one. The tunnels are something that they can run through at a really early age, I think, because puppies are running anyway. If they’re running through a tunnel or if they’re running in the woods, it doesn’t matter. Of course you don’t have to press them to run full speed all the time or in sharp turns and so on, but I don’t think it will hurt them to run through the tunnels a little bit.

Then you have jumping. With Zelda, I started to teach her to go around a little stick. This type of stick was quite small. The reason for that is because I want her tight. I thought that to teach her to turn around this stick, to just go around it to the left or to the right, both ways, it was good for two things. One, I could use these tricks further in the jumping and agility, and two, it is good stretching for her back. She’s really getting flexible in her back.

I started with the clicker and shaping, so I just rewarded her for looking at the stick, and then I always rewarded her near the stick. After a time, I was rewarding her a little bit so that she went a little bit around, went a little bit to the left. It didn’t take such a long time before she understood “oh, I have to go around a whole circle.” Then she started to do that. Then I had to teach her the other way, because they often have this favorite side.

In the beginning it really goes slow, but like I said, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. So nowadays when I tell her to do the stick, she really goes fast through either to the right or left. When she did a whole circle and afterwards she did two circles to the same side, then I started to say a verbal cue on it. Then I started to say either “left” or “right,” or if you have anything else you want to say to them, you can use that word. That’s the same word that I use in the agility course today.

When I then introduced her for a jump for the first time, when she was maybe four to six months old, the bar was quite low, of course. It wasn’t high at all. But I was trying these left and right commands for the first time on the jump. She thought it was maybe a little bit big wing because she was used to this small stick, so she was looking at me and saying, “Seriously? Are we going around this big thing now? Why?” So she tried to go through it.

But in the end she understood it was the wing she had to go around. It took me just one training and then she understood it. That was a very nice thing to see, that she was developing her skills in that way, so I was quite satisfied. Because this was the first time I’d tried this on a new dog. I saw that she really understood.

She’s a thinker. Not every dog is a thinker, but Zelda is. I can use my knowledge that I’ve gotten through tricks, and I can use it for agility. I know that not every dog can do that so fast, so you have to be patient with them as well. My youngest dog now uses much more time to understand that what we are doing in the kitchen or in the living room is the same as what is going on on the agility course. I don’t know why. It’s just genetics or just the head and the mindset to the dog. So we always have to do a different thing with different dogs.

These tricks I think are very important to get this strong connection. I think if you are able to break everything you will teach them down into small tricks, then it gets very easy.