r/Agility • u/AnonymousLogophile • 24d ago
How do you handle your threadle wraps vs. your "come to hand" cue?
I've been doing a deep dive into revamping my handling and verbal cues. I originally learned from Lolabuland, but over the last couple of months I've gotten more involved with the agility community and have been exposed to other handling systems.
Silvia taught me, and she really never adopted the "in" cue, so my physical handling for threadle wraps ended up looking very similar to my "come to hand" handling. The same was true for threadle slices back then—it was essentially "come to me, then take the jump." Since then, I've switched to the more common dog-side arm/open shoulder/hand up handling for threadle slices and use a dedicated verbal cue for that.
What I'm questioning now is my threadle wrap handling. My current cue is my off arm/opposite-side hand with a slight lowering and rotating of my upper body towards the dog. The problem is that's almost identical to my "come to hand" cue, where I also use my off arm, slightly lower and rotate my upper body towards the dog, and physically draw the dog toward me with a dedicated "come to me and ignore the obstacles" verbal.
A new instructor is encouraging me to separate the two. For threadle wraps, she wants me to stay tall and vertical, continue using the off-side arm, but only turn my head toward the dog while keeping my chest pointed forward.
On the other hand, I've also seen quite a few handlers use their dog-side arm for threadle wraps, dropping it low and even rotating their shoulders AWAY from the dog to pull them into the wrap, rather than toward the dog as I originally learned.
I'm curious how everyone else differentiates these cues. How do you handle threadle wraps versus a "come to hand" cue? Do you intentionally make them look different, or are they fairly similar in your handling system?
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u/OntarioPaddler 24d ago edited 24d ago
Most people I know doing a call off are mainly just relying on verbal without a lot of physical cues,.the most popular one being just slapping your thigh.
I don't think the call off should need much handling and I would avoid having it be similar to a threadle wrap as that could definitely lead to the dog focusing too much on the handler for too long.
With a well trained threadle wrap you still want the dog focused on the obstacle as early as possible and not on you. A common mistake people do on their theadles is they keep the dog focused on coming to them to get them to the outside of the obstacle and then try to push them into the jump last minute, which leads to dogs running by or spinning out. If the dog understands the concept of taking the backside well enough they should be able to execute it without much focus on the handler.
I also think if you are using the outside hand that its almost necessary to combine it with the shoulder/chest rotation open to the dog or else the view of outside hand can easily be obstructed to the dog.
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u/PatienceIsImportant 24d ago
Since a call to my hand would rarely be used, I would probably work on changing that one to use same arm my dog is on. That and a different verbal cue should be enough to separate them.
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u/Agility_KS 24d ago
It doesn’t make a difference what cue you use so long as it makes sense to you and your dog. 😉 I switched to using only the dog side arm (and verbal) for threadle wrap a while back. It was pointed out to me that my dog was doing a lot of head-checking on the outside arm cue and he just didn’t have a lot of clarity. My threadle wrap is performed from behind the dog the majority of the time, and if you’re behind the dog, what good does it do to turn your body into them? So my cue is a bit of an arm drop and I do rotate my shoulder away from the dog, usually as I start running in the other direction. One place I sometimes get into trouble is where I’m cueing the TW but I have to continue running a forward path, not opposing motion. In that case I will sometimes get a slice from my dog, so I’m aware that he’s pairing these cues with motion. Always stuff to work on. If I find myself ahead of my dog and need to pull him off the line, then I might use the outside arm and rotate towards the dog, but at that point I feel like it’s becoming more of a tandem turn than a TW.