Aren't they beautiful! Merger was less than thrilled yesterday when we went for a walk and I made him disengage from his dog herding duties to pose for a picture!! He was a good sport though and let me capture him against the beautiful back drop of the foothills of the Rockies where I live :-) Danger seems to live for posing for photographs!!It was a gorgeous day and after a very long drive home from the equally beautiful Vancouver Island, BC it felt so good to stretch my legs and just hang out with the dogs.
It has been a crazy couple of months and it is simply going to get crazier, just the way I like it!!
After returning from Phoenix the middle of Jan. I had a bit of a break and then it was off to the East coast where I had the pleasure of teaching for 3 different groups. Danger got to come with me as an only dog on that trip so he was a very happy camper! He handled all of the travels incredibly well and has made an incredible number of new friends!
I was home from the East for 2 days and it was time to hit the road to the Pacific Northwest! I drove this time as I really wanted to have dogs with me. It is quite a drive but the weather was perfect both coming and going and it was wonderful to have my puppies with me. I can't say we got a whole lot of training in as my breaks, lunch hours etc... were pretty much filled with exercising dogs, pottying dogs, playing with dogs, you get the picture. I tried to squeeze in a few minutes of quality training for each dog everyday if I could but all in all it was just awesome having them with me.
The groups in Seattle were so fabulous! They took in every bit of information and were always willing to try new things. I have had the pleasure of working with many of the people that I worked with several times over the years and it is always like old home week when I get to see the fabulous friends that I have made over the years.
We spent a lot of time working on collection and decelleration cues, front cross timing and execution and even got to play a bit with rear crosses on the flat. Timing is and continues to be the issue Du Jour, this is primarily because timing cannot be learned, the timing of cues changes with every run.
In order to be able to properly time cues there are a few things that must happen, you must be able to monitor your dogs position throughout the run as they are truly what defines proper timing. You must also be able to trust the dog to take responsibility for obstacle performance and each behavior that you cue.
The only way to do this is to train the dog properly from the beginning, our inability to trust the dog is actually a reflection of how well we trust what we have trained, do you trust what you have trained and have you trained the right things?
Does your dog have independent obstacle negotiation skills? Is your dog capable of paying attention to you through any number of distractions, any level of distractions, any type of distraction?
Have you taught your dog what the various hand signals mean? Do they understand that it is their job to seek out and maintain a path parallel to you unless instructed to do otherwise?
Have you taught your dog how to use itself properly from a physical standpoint? Think of what it takes for your dog to accommodate any angle and any spacing between jumps and still be able to clear the bar, turn, etc... There is so much to teach it is a really great idea to take inventory and define what skill sets your dog possesses and where there may be holes or gaps.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to train your dog to 200% to get acceptable performance in competition environments!
OK, back to my trip :-) After a great lunch at a Mongolian BBQ on Thursday, 5.5 days of teaching later it was my time to just relax! How does a dog trainer relax? She goes to another dog training facility to audit another trainers classes! Thank you Daisy for letting me be a fly on the wall during your classes and for the pizza and beer afterward!
I headed out after dinner to get at least a part way to the Canadian border so the trip was not so very long. I was booked on the 9:00 a.m. ferry over to Vancouver Island so I got up really early finished my trip to the border had a super fast border crossing and got to the ferry about 1.5 hours early!
I have never taken this ferry or been to VI, it was gorgeous!!! The weather was wonderful, I swear on Sunday afternoon it was in the 60's!!!
I had the extreme pleasure of working with a "new" group that had a ton of familiar faces as well as some new ones. What a pleasure it was to work with each and every one of them! Again, we had a lot of philosophical discussion and some major course challenges. The group was all about being pushed, in actuality that was the common thread between the Seattle and the BC groups, what a blast to work with so many people who are so eager and so talented! They made my job tough trying to come up with new scenarios to test their abilities.
In Canada we spent a fair bit of time on back side sends over jumps and pull throughs a good time was had by all I believe! I know that I personally cannot wait to go back to both places!
Today I finally had enough energy to get out and train my own dogs, after teaching a couple of lessons of course!
Danger is learning to run his plank and drive to a target, he is also becoming quite the master of the sit and down! I have made some serious progress in his parallel path work, (stationary heel/side), and, his outside turns.
I think what I am most happy about is that he is a toy/play freak, and, a food freak, but... he will tug and play immediately after a food reward and even continue to play if I am holding food in my hand!
Danger got to play on the wobble board today and as with all other things had absolutely no idea what the big deal was and acted as if he walks every day of his life on a wobbly surface! He was immediately willing and able to offer both sits and downs on the board without stress!
He is a very smart boy indeed!
Quickly switching gears, Able is doing fantastic and gets his stitches out tomorrow!!! He is still not using the leg much but according to the tech I talked with on the phone today he is on par with where he should be 2 weeks into recovery.
Back to todays training, Daisy gave me a very valuable piece of advice for Mergers running dog walk that I was finally able to try out today for the first time, she suggested a stride regulator on the third plank to get him to extend a bit more, it was brilliant! He stretched over the regulator, jumped right into the contact and, strode right through! I only tried it 3 times as he was already bit tired from some other things we were doing but I am very optimistic indeed. Merger is also rocking the weave poles!!! He is getting to be very fast and incredibly accurate, we have a bit of entry work to do but overall I am very happy with where he is at. Jumping is looking great, he is handling odd spacing and angles as if he knows where his caboose is! He gets to show off his abilities weekend after this in an AKC trial in Kansas, I will keep you posted...
How are SoBe's running dogs walks coming along you ask?? Well, at the risk of sounding like the boy who cried wolf I am back to proofing her 2on/2off behavior. This is new as off my trip to Seattle. I did a bit of soul searching and decided that I was driving myself crazy trying to retrain her dog walk behavior when she already has an amazing dog walk behavior, so... no more Mrs. nice guy and she will be held accountable, her performance is fantastic in training and I would love to be able to report on how it goes in the trial but alas, she has decided to come into season, gotta love those intact girls! I suppose it is time to decide if I want to spay her, I know that I always want to spay her when her seasons interfere with trials!
Wally seems to be recovering very well from his Iliopsoas strain and will get to play at the trial next week. Maze is doing fabulous and we are just starting to think about wrapping our minds around AKC Nationals that are coming up very soon!
So, on Friday I head out to Kansas to teach for a week, this is another of my "yearly" teaching engagements and we have grown very close, one could say we are even drinking buddies :-)
So, that's what's happening now in my life hope all is well in yours!
