Tuesday, January 13, 2009

3…2…1…contact?

In the standard class in AKC, we need one more leg to get into excellent. I'm not really in a hurry, 2008 was our first year trialing and in jumpers with weaves we're only 1 leg away from finishing our excellent A title.

We would have finished it long ago actually if I didn't occasionally kind of psych myself out about Not Being Ready to move up. But in standard, we've found ourselves bedeviled by one very very big problem. The A-frame. DJ had been ostensibly trained to do 2 on 2 off on the A-frame. Never really happened in trial, and rarely in practice but he was hitting the contact so I didn't really correct it. Naturally he started leaping over the contact. To the point where he seems to be convinced that the yellow is electrified or otherwise booby-trapped.

You know how, like…everyone in the world says to have criteria and stick to it or else…that's probably why. I'm no dog training expert but yep, that makes sense...

In November we started re-training using Rachel Sanders' method for running contacts. It's been going pretty well. At a fun run on Sunday, he did the A-frame perfectly, beautifully, 3 out of 4 times. At class on Monday, he did the A-frame perfectly 0 out of 6 times. This morning we traipsed over to the club at 6:45 for A-frame practice. And can look forward to many mornings (and evenings) of the same.

For the past few weeks its been about 4 times a week of practicing but I think, maybe, to avoid the leaping over the contact in trial we'll practice a little more often.

No comments:

Post a Comment