We’re dedicating the whole month of October to help you teach and perfect heelwork. Heeling is a complex exercise that can be used for obedience, rally, canine freestyle and heelwork to music. We cover all aspects of heeling in text and video in our October online workshop. If you want more than instructions, you can sign up for a working spot and send us as many videos as you like for an entire month. We will comment on your training and help you progress. Sign up here!
Jessica Martin, FCI world champion 2010, held two seminars here the week after European Open. We had a great time and got very inspired, so I decided to ask Jess to do an online agility class for us here at fannygott.com
I’m happy that she wanted to do it, and I’m very excited to work in this class with my dogs. We will focus on handling with a dog training/jumping perspective. Join the fun here!
Squid and I do train some obedience. We’re working on small details and I try to do some obedience before we go to agility. We’re also playing around with obedience while waiting for our turn at agility trials. Sit, down and stand from heel, heeling and distant control are things that you can see us play with while we’re waiting to go in the ring. She is really good at it, even when she is very aroused at an agility trial.
Most of the time, I’m very happy with the precision in her work, and I hope that we’ll be ready to start class III some time. Since we’re putting a lot of energy into agility, there is no rush. I think it’s nice to just enjoy working on the details without having the pressure of getting done quickly. It’s nice, and I really like what we do, but it takes time when you don’t train that much.
I tried to teach Squid the directions for the directed retrieve for the first time earlier this week. She’s never done anything like that before, but she knows how to run around posts. She got the idea very quickly and in the next session, I will probably be able to add a third post in the middle (as a distraction, the dog never goes to the middle dumbbell in FCI obedience). If that works well, I’ll move the posts out to full distance. It’s a lot of fun to teach new exercises when good foundation makes it so easy!
It feels weird to say, but I’m glad that fall is here. We’ve had a very intense summer, and it’s nice to go back to a bit more normal life. It might not seem like it happens much in the blog (but I’ll try to change that, now that we have some more time at home), but we’re having a lot of fun with the online obedience class that we’re running. Awesome people and great dogs working on some advanced obedience skills.
I went to a local agility trial this weekend and was very happy with both the arrangement and some of my runs. Shejpa won the agility class on Sunday by almost a second, Squid got a certificate in jumpers on Saturday, and Epic won class 1 jumpers on Saturday and class 2 jumpers on Sunday. He turned two a month ago and it feels like we’re getting more and more consistent. I used to call him my intern at agility trials, but now that he is two years old and is running in class two, it’s time to take his intern badge off 🙂 He still has a lot to learn though, and I’m working to improve his jumping skills, his turns off the dogwalk and his weaving. I hope that he will make it to class 3 during the fall, but I’m not in a hurry. Here is Epics winning class 2-run from Sunday:
