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

Summary

How to Communicate with Your Dog, from a Westminster Champion

TED Talks Daily | Guest: Jennifer Crank | November 19, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this engaging TED Talk, world champion dog agility competitor Jennifer Crank shares transformative lessons from the world of dog agility—lessons on teamwork, trust, and, most of all, communication. Drawing parallels between interspecies communication and human relationships, she demonstrates how deeply understanding and adapting our signals and language can spark exceptional connection and collaboration, whether with dogs or with people. The episode is both an inspiring showcase of canine athleticism (with the adorable border collie High Five) and a practical exploration of what it takes to truly communicate across boundaries.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Spectacle of Dog Agility

• [04:22] Host Elise Hu describes the atmosphere as Jennifer Crank enters the stage with High Five, her border collie, and initiates a dazzling agility routine live.
• Jennifer shares her background:
  • Competing in dog agility since the age of six.
  • Now a world champion with multiple canine athletes in her team.

What Makes Dog Agility Unique

• The Complexity Behind the Scenes
  • Dog agility has evolved from a backyard hobby into a global, fiercely competitive sport.
  • “At a proper competition, you have 18 to 22 obstacles on approximately 10 to 12,000 square feet arena…The goal is to run those obstacles in order, making no mistakes, and faster than any of your competitors...But there’s a catch. Every course is different. In fact, the judge almost never reuses the same course twice.” — Jennifer Crank [05:14]
  • The sheer number of possible course configurations: “6.4 quadrillion different courses available.” [05:36]
  • Only 8 minutes are allowed for handlers to study and memorize each new course.

The True Challenge: Communication, Not Physical Skill

• Skill Mastery vs. Split-Second Signaling
  • “At the highest levels of competition, dogs rarely make mistakes. So that means the difference between winning and losing comes down to speed.” [06:30]
  • Modern competitions are so precise that finishes are measured to the one-thousandth of a second.

Interspecies Communication—Decoding ‘Dog Language’

• Beyond Human Defaults
  • Jennifer emphasizes that agility isn’t about issuing commands but building a nuanced system of signals, timing, and trust.
  • Humans gravitate to voice and hand signals, but “those are unnatural cues for the dog.”
    • “The most natural cues for them are motion, location, shoulders, and eye contact…This is emotion-based communication. It’s very innate, very instinctual.” [08:07]
  • Example: An untrained puppy will chase a running human, not respond to verbal commands.

Live Demonstration: The Power of Clear, Natural Cues

• Jennifer demonstrates on stage how her movements, not her words, guide High Five through complex agility maneuvers.
• “This time what I’m going to do is…not 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.” [10:15]
• Timing and clarity are critical: conflicting signals between body and voice will confuse a dog, especially at speed.

The Teamwork Metaphor

• Driving Comparison
  • “So she's the driver, she's in the driver's seat…I'm just the one navigating and letting her know where to go.” [12:13]
  • “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… it costs us a bunch of time…” [12:32]

Building Connection, Trust, and Joy

• Adapting to Your Teammate’s Needs
  • Each dog is different; training must fit the individual’s strengths, weaknesses, and temperament.
  • “Train the dog you were given. All of my dogs are a little bit different.” [13:46]
  • Adjusting communication and expectations is key to fostering a mutually rewarding relationship: “I want them to be having a good time out there.”

Universal Learning: Lessons for Human Relationships

• Jennifer closes by drawing out the human parallels:
  • “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 trying to understand them, or am I just trying to control them?” [14:35]
  • The best communicators build trust and create connection, not just compliance.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Communication in Agility:

  • “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.” — Jennifer Crank [06:56]

• On Effective Teaching:

  • “I often tell my students that I could have laryngitis and 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.” — Jennifer Crank [08:52]

• On Connection and Joy in Teamwork:

  • “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.” — Jennifer Crank [13:06]

• On Universality of Communication:

  • “The 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 ask them to, but because they want to. That’s agility and that’s communication at its best.” — Jennifer Crank [15:18]

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Important Timestamps

• [04:22] – Introduction of High Five and live agility demonstration
• [05:14] – Technical demands and structure of dog agility competitions
• [06:56] – The real challenge: building interspecies systems of trust
• [08:07] – The six cues of communication; what’s natural for dogs
• [10:15] – Live maneuver demonstration: importance of motion over verbal cues
• [12:13] – Driving analogy for handler-dog teamwork
• [13:46] – Tailoring training to the dog you have; “train the dog you were given”
• [14:35] – Applying agility communication lessons to human relationships
• [15:18] – Closing reflection on trust and partnership

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Tone and Atmosphere

The talk is lively, practical, and deeply insightful, blending expert sport demonstration with humor and compelling storytelling. Jennifer’s warm, encouraging style—backed by real-time stage performance with her dog—makes the episode both entertaining and resonant with anyone interested in deeper levels of connection, leadership, or teamwork.

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End note: For an even more vivid experience, TED encourages listeners to check out the video to see High Five in action and to witness the agility cues demonstrated live.

Transcript

[Elise Hu]

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[Jennifer Crank]

I've been competing in dog agility since I was 6 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.

[Elise Hu]

You probably figured it out based on the very sweet aww. 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 High5 doing drills on stage and I definitely encourage those who can to check out the video after listening.

[Jennifer Crank]

Are you ready? Are you ready? Okay, wrap, wrap. Tire. Weave, weave. Yes. Good girl. Weave, weave, tunnel, tunnel, loop, loop, tunnel, tunnel, Weave, weave, weave, weave. Get it, get it, get it, get it. Dog 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. Bea 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, each 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. Sounds 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. That 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 1100th 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. This 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. In 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 8 week old puppy down and I set them down and I take off running, that puppy chases me and 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. I 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 to that to her, I also kept my motion running in that direction and I wanted my speed to stay forward as well. Now, as I mentioned previously, the judge often changes the course and, 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, 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. After 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 cueing 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. So imagine a scenario where my body says one thing, but my verbals say 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. So 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 going, 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. It'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. Surprise 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? Agility 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. The 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 ask them to, but because they want to. That's agility and that's communication at its best. Thank you. Hi. High five here. Sit.

[Elise Hu]

High five. Good girl. That 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.comCurationGuidelines 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 in and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tonzika Sangmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balarazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. TED Talks Daily is sponsored by Capital One. In my house we subscribe to everything music, tv, even dog food. And it rocks. Until you have to manage it all. Which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in, you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn more at CapitalOne.comscriptions Terms and Conditions apply.

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