How to communicate with your dog, from a Westminster champion | Jennifer Crank

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. What do dogs have to teach us about leadership and teamwork? Well, the dogs have arrived on the TED stage to show us. For this talk, the stage has been transformed into an agility course. Green turf, hoops to jump through, poles to weave through, and jump over. So that Jennifer Crank, a world champion in dog agility competitions, can demonstrate the extraordinary art of interspecies teamwork. She reveals how the principles of coaching across species can reshape how we think about communication and connection, reminding us that our greatest teachers can walk on two legs or four.

0:55I've been competing in dog agility since I was six years old, so I've had a lot of time to accept this hard truth. I'm not the part of the team that most people are concerned about. They just want to meet my teammate. So let's start with her. High five. Good girl, sit. You probably figured it out based on the very sweet awe you just heard from the audience, but high five is an adorable black and white border collie who just bounded onto the stage. Jennifer starts to give high five commands and we watch her jumpstart to flawlessly run through the course. There are a few more moments in this talk with high five doing drills on stage and I definitely encourage those who can to check out the video after listening.

1:34Are you ready? Are you ready? Okay. Wrap, wrap, tie her, weave, weave, yes, good girl, weave, weave, tunnel, tunnel, loop, loop, tunnel, tunnel, weave, weave, weave, weave, weave, get it, get it, get it, get it.

1:58Dog agility started as a backyard hobby, but it has evolved into a serious global competition. For many, including myself, it's become a full-time career. High Five is just one of many dogs that I compete with. I also have Surprise, her niece, who is also a Border Collie, Bee and Rio, both Shetland Sheepdogs, and my youngest is Skittles, a mixed breed. Like most pro athletes, we train year-round, four to five days a week on average, in a giant air-conditioned arena with AstroTurf. At a proper competition, you have 18 to 22 obstacles on approximately 10 to 12 ,000 square feet arena, and the goal is to run those obstacles in order, making no mistakes, and faster than any of your competitors.

2:49Sounds simple enough, right? But there's a catch. Every course is different. In fact, the judge almost never reuses the same course twice. That means that there is a possible 6.4 quadrillion different courses available. That's right, quadrillion. And we don't know until the day of the event what the course is. You, as the human, get just eight minutes to study, memorize, and get ready to run that course at full speed. One mistake, just one, and the wind slips right through your hands. Often people think that the hardest part about dog agility is teaching them how to jump through a hoop or climb over a teeter-totter, but that's not entirely true.

3:36That part's actually easy. The equipment specifications are standardized, so once we teach the dogs the equipment, they know how to do the equipment. Frankly, at the highest levels of competition, dogs rarely make mistakes. So that means the difference between winning and losing comes down to speed. Just like F1, NASCAR, or Olympic skiing, the judges have to use laser sensors and video playback to determine the winner. At last year's Agility World Championship in Belgium, they measured time to the 1 100th of a second, and yet there was still a tie for the gold medal. This means that the real challenge is in this interspecies communication, building a system of signals, timing, and trust so refined that the dogs can run full speed, making decisions in milliseconds based on nothing more than the information the handler is providing.

4:35This sport is about communication. This sport is about connection. And that's what I'm here to share with you. what dog agility can teach you about communication. In fact, learning how to communicate with my dog and not just to my dog has been the most important lesson of my career. In the beginning, it seemed simple. I would holler a command or I would point at an obstacle. I would use my voice and I would use my hands. After all, we're human. That's how we communicate. But that's not what's natural to the dog. So if I want my dog to run with passion, power, and precision, I have to learn her language.

5:16In agility, we have six primary cues that we can use to communicate with the dog. We have the hand signal and the verbal, which I've mentioned, but also shoulder position, eye contact, motion, and location. As humans, we tend to default to the hand signal and the voice, But those are unnatural cues for the dog, meaning those are not ones that they're familiar with at birth. The most natural cues for them are motion, location, shoulders, and eye contact. These are the ones that they're going to understand, even as puppies. So if I take an eight-week-old puppy down and I set him down and I take off running, that puppy chases me.

5:55And if I stop, the puppy stops. This is emotion-based communication. It's very innate. It's very instinctual. But if I take that same eight-week-old puppy and I look at it and I say sit or stay, that puppy doesn't understand what I'm talking about unless those cues are already trained. So imagine a scenario where you're trying to run a dog at full speed through a complex course using the signals and communication that is the least natural to them. That's very risky. We don't want them to stop and be checking in with us and say, where are we going? what does that cue mean? This is about speed after all.

6:35I often tell my students that I could have laryngitis in both arms in a sling, and yet still I could run an agility course because I'm not relying on their least natural cues of verbal and hand signal. I want to focus on what my dog understands, the natural uses of motion. So let me go ahead and show you what I mean. What I was looking for her to do was run a straight line at a very fast speed. I wanted her to go down this line, taking as few strides as possible. I didn't want her checking in with me. I didn't want her questioning where we were going and what we were doing. So in order to communicate that to her, I also kept my motion running in that direction.

7:20And I wanted my speed to stay forward as well. Now, as I mentioned previously, the judge often changes the course. And as the levels get more difficult, the traps and challenges get trickier. So often a judge will place an obstacle very obviously on the dog's line in order to try to trick them into what seems like the natural path. So this time what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down and start at the tire, but we're not going to ask for the tunnel. and I'm not going to holler her name or scream anything frantic. We're going to see if she can watch my motion. So what I wanted her to do was turn after this jump and make the turn back to the weave poles, not go straight ahead into the tunnel.

8:05After all, the tunnel is the dog's favorite obstacle and it is what we just asked her to do. So in order to cue that turn, it was on me to change my handling and my communication with her in a way that she would understand. As she was approaching this jump, because I wanted her to decelerate and turn, I decelerated and turned. If I wanted her to do the same thing as before, I would have kept doing the same thing as before. So our goal is in queuing very clearly what it is that we want her to do. She wants unambiguous communication, very, very clear signals. What we don't want to do is present conflicting information.

8:47So imagine a scenario where my body says one thing, but my verbal says something else. At the speeds the dogs are traveling, they don't have time to stop and ask for information about where to go. They just have to make a choice. And they're often going to go with what is natural to them. This is how we train. I record almost every training session that we do. And if there's any mistakes, I go back and I watch that video. Most of the time it was me. A poor signal, a late command, confusion on her part because of something that I did. So often when I'm teaching, I will use driving metaphors for my students.

9:29So she's the driver. She's in the driver's seat. She's running the course. I'm just the one navigating and letting her know where to go. So imagine we're going down the freeway, 70 miles an hour in the left-hand lane, and I'm just go, oh, this is our exit. You can't just be swerving across and getting off. It's my job to communicate to her where we're going and to do so in a timely manner. But I also don't want to be so early that she gets over in the right-hand lane behind a line of semis and it costs us a bunch of time getting off at the exit. Agility is a team sport. It's not a solo act. It's all about communication.

10:07It's all about connection. The best runs are when there's a real connection between the dog and the handler. It's not just about watching her on course. It's about actually making eye contact with her. It's why I will never be caught running an agility course in sunglasses. But the best teens are also those who understand each other. Knowing my teammate, knowing their tendencies, their strengths, their weaknesses, their fears, allow me to meet her halfway. They allow me to adjust and tailor every training session to my dog. As I tell my students, train the dog you were given. All of my dogs are a little bit different.

10:47Surprise has no problem doing the drills 100 times over and over again at full speed. High five, on the other hand, is a bit of a perfectionist. If there's too many mistakes or if I have to repeat things too many times, she starts to worry that she's done it wrong. She has to go slower. So adjusting for what my dog needs and how they communicate allows me to build a relationship where my dog does agility because they want to, not because they have to. After all, I'm going to put them in some pretty high pressure situations and I want them to be having a good time out there. So you might be thinking, this is fascinating, but what does this have to do with me?

11:26Agility has taught me that communicating with dogs isn't all that different than communicating with humans. You have to ask yourself the same question, whether it's raising a child, leading a team at work, or arguing with a spouse, am I speaking their language? Am I communicating in a clear way? Am I being consistent? Am I trying to understand them or am I just trying to control them? Agility has also taught me that the best communicators aren't necessarily those that speak the loudest or are the most commanding. They're those who reach out to have the best connection and to be understood. It doesn't matter if your teammate is two-legged or four.

12:08The best relationships are going to be when they trust you enough to run full speed into the unknown, knowing that you will get them through safely. And not because you asked them to, but because they want to. That's agility and that's communication at its best. Thank you. Hi. Hi. Here. Sit. High five. Good girl.

12:36That was Jennifer Crank speaking at TED Sports Indianapolis in 2025. To watch Jennifer and High Five in action on stage, head over to TED.com. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Sports research team and produced and edited by our team. Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tanzika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faze Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.

13:16I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.