Meg is doing great in agility! I on the other hand need some serious practice. I'm keep using the wrong arm to show her which way to go or I take my eyes off her and she ends up behind me. (Agility Rule #1: Never take your eye off the dog.) I'm also bad about having the treat/toy in the wrong hand. (Agility Rule #2: The hand closest to the dog is the 'active' hand.) Meg will have me trained sooner or later, but in the mean time she gets lost or frustrated with me until I get it right.
Meg and Bear didn't get much practice in last week because we (the humans) were out of town, but they still did pretty good. Today in class we expanded on some of what we did last week and worked on a few new things. When we arrived, the dogs did what I hope is their new pre-class routine. Bear peed before entering the building (working on that so he doesn't do any marking inside) and Meg did her stretches (with no cues from me). I'll have to remember to reward her next time and add a few cues as that will be beneficial later.
First we worked on switches/back cross. The goal here was to start with Meg on the right, get her to move forward and switch (move away from me) toward the right in front of an 'obstacle' while I moved across behind the obstacle and picked her up on the left on the opposite side of the obstacle than where we started on. Then we also do the same for the other side (start with Meg on the left and end with her on the right). Its much simpler than it sounds. (A diagram would be helpful here...prehaps I can add one later.)
We started building up to this last week using the target. This week we are just eliminating the target. I messed us up here though because when we practised with the target last week, I started and ended with Meg on the same side, so it wasn't really a back cross. Good thing we weren't able to practice much and Meg wasn't thrown off too much. On the third try today we got it down and did it a fourth time for good measure.
We also worked on wraps...I practised this one wrong too. Meg did her part great, but I was doing a blind cross...not what we want.
We reviewed targeting...Meg's Target-Soccer has paid off and she did great. We just need to get her to not take those couple of steps towards me after she touches the target.
We worked on 'Leave It' ('look at me, not that') and 'Watch/Look' (we'll be using the cue 'look' for Meg as I use 'look at me' when she freaks out at other dogs on our walk). Meg knew these already, but we need to practice some more.
And the new items of the day were directional cues 'Here' and 'Out' ('come towards me' and 'move away from me'). The dogs already know 'here', but were working on teaching them 'out' and also working on the humans' body language and communicating the right thing. We practice this by weaving through widely spaced obstacles...at home we'll use buckets, in class we used jump wings.
Meg and I had some trouble with this one, but so did the other Border Collie in our class. Bear on the other hand did very well and looked like he was having fun weaving through obstacles. ("Hey, I can do this!"...I think the old Lab mix just liked showing that he coul do something better than the young Border Collies.)
Most of our troubles were from me not being clear with my hand/arms at telling Meg where to go. Also, Meg wanted to work on the right side as that is the side she usually walks on. When we switched to the left, she got behind me and tried to go back to the right side. We'll work on it.
We still need to make a wobble board in preparation for teeter work. And I think I need to find a tripod for my camera so I can video our practice sessions and see what we (ok...what I) need to change to improve.
No comments:
Post a Comment