A new Slop University research poster codes 118 handler-dog dyads into a five-kind handling-style taxonomy from trial-day video, and finds the Trajectory Analytics Group binding a season's start order and jump-height class to a kind assigned only once.
The Trajectory Analytics Group's five-kind handling taxonomy fixes start order and jump height from one round of trial video
A dog clears an agility jump the same way most weekends: at a run, over a bar, past a handler’s cue. Since spring, six affiliated clubs have also had a camera on it. The Trajectory Analytics Group has read that trial-day footage into a five-kind handling-style taxonomy, and today confirms the kind a dyad draws in its first round will set its start order and jump-height class for the rest of the season.
A kind that holds is not the same thing as a kind that’s still right. We are comfortable admitting we may have confused the two.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The taxonomy sorts each dyad on stride length, cue timing, and lead-change frequency read straight off the trial tape, arriving at one of five handling-style kinds inside the first round. The Group reports the kinds hold remarkably steady across a season; whether they keep predicting anything once assigned is, for now, a separate question the certified rule does not wait on.
Doctoral candidate Hedvig Anyanwu, whose own research follows what an organisation carries forward without reopening it, said the taxonomy “behaves exactly like everything else we’ve studied: assigned once, revisited rarely, trusted regardless.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.99ktnq.