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Agility

Shejpa’s running dogwalk

I started to work on Missy and Shejpa’s running dogwalks again this week, focusing on turning. I did that once before, but felt that the whole behavior was breaking down. Most dogs with running dogwalks does not seem to be that good at turning and I felt that maybe I should just run them and then turn them tighter and tighter as they got more experienced. But I didn’t really like that solution, I like to really teach my dogs things. So I tried again this week and it seems like I’ve had more success. I have focused on criteria and with Missy, I have used a target briefly (that didn’t alter her striding, but made her more aware of my criteria) and with Shejpa I used a stick in the ground for her to run around (also very briefly, for just a session). It only took Shejpa two sessions before I almost couldn’t make her fail. I could send her from behind the dogwalk and stand still, I could run laterally away and serp, I could turn her 180 degrees to a tunnel or a jump. She does slow down when I hang back, but I guess she’ll pick up speed when she gets more confident.

Here is a video from todays practice

Agility trials in Hamar

We’ve been in Hamar this weekend for Norway’s biggest dog show. Friday was agility classes I-2 and Shejpa was entered in both jumpers and standard. She is in heat and not in her best mood. I’m going to spay her when I get the chance, because I think she is in heat way too often (last time was July-August) and maybe spaying her will have a positive effect on her behavior as well. She was pretty mellow and I actually had to drag her with me on leash in the arena. She was better on the agility course, but not as fast as she can be. We started with jumpers, where she slipped in the weave entry and skidded past the second pole. We won the class with five faults and in Norway, that is a qualifying result in the lowest class. You need to run with no more than 5,99 faults to earn a leg and you need to get three legs in order to get to the next level. In the next class (2), you need to run clean to get a leg.

We only do jumpers and standard in Norway (plus team, but that’s not my thing, at least not now), no games. The standard course was pretty easy and Shejpa had more speed this time (she likes her running dogwalk). The dogwalk was really unstable and I think the sound and movement of it made her a bit hesitant. She hit her contact, but a bit high. Weaves and a-frame was perfect. The seesaw was at the end of the course and she few right of it. I thought it was a refusal, but the judge only signaled five faults and by the time I had that sorted out, Shejpa had taken another jump and started to sniff. I got her collected again and ran to the finish. Five faults once again and second place. The sniffing was entirely my fault, for disconnecting with her and looking at the judge, and for not taking her out to pee before the run. She sat right down on the carpet outside the ring and peed… Poor dog.

It wasn’t a very good trial for us, but she did what we came there to do (but not much more) we now have 2/3 legs in both jumpers and standard. I’m really looking forward to getting to the highest class and getting some challenges in the handling. We watched class 3 on Saturday and the Nordic Championships on Sunday. I really liked the German judge’s courses and I might set one of them up for my dogs at home. These were the individual results at the Nordic Championships:

Small:
1.  Elin Hylander, Woodmist Fine Sensible Promise (Zimba), Sweden
2.  Ørnulf Holm, TT, Norway
3.  Susanne Prier, Unique, Denmark

Medium:
1.  Annika Mojanis, Izor, Sweden
2. Morten Bratlie, Iver, Norway
3. Jesper Carstensen, Indy, Denmark

Large:
1.  Jouni Orenius, Yoko, Finland
2. Jaako Suokuuti, Zen, Finland
3. Sarah Lorentzen, Simic, Denmark

Squid was with me in the big arena all three days. She was just perfect. She slept through almost all of the agility and had small potty and training breaks. She doesn’t mind the environment at all, with many thousands of dogs and people in one building. She is happy to see both dogs and people, but can still concentrate on tugging and training with me anywhere It was good that she slept through most of the agility though, because she really wants to join in when she is awake and she is loud when she tries to tell you that… Something to work on right away!

Update

I should write in this blog more often. There are so many things that I have worked on since last time I wrote here.

Obedience
I havn’t done a lot of obedience training with Pi since our trial in May, but now I have decided to get ready for the next obedience level with her and I hope that we’ll be ready for a trial in four weeks, but that is really optimistic… I need to teach her send to square (10 meters straight ahead and then stop in the square), recall with stand, sit/down/sit/down at a distance, jump away from me and some other things. But she is a fast learner and maybe we’ll be ready to do a trial in November.

Shadow Handling
Both Missy and Shejpa has been working on a lot of shadow handling in the past week. For Shejpa, I have cut out all treats and I only use tug as a reward. That creates new challenges in our shadow handling, but that’s where I need to start if I want her to turn tight and respond quickly on equipment. Rewardning her with only tugging is a challenge, but I’ve been at this point using treats too and I know we’ll get better. She is already making good progress. With Missy, I realised the importance of shadow handling when I incorporated it into our training on turning tight over one jump. We’ve been working on it a lot, but progress has been really slow with both dogs. But when I put the circle work into that with Missy, she finally found a reason to dig in and turn tight over the jump. It was so cool. For her, using more high value treats (chicken necks!) and not just tugging, also has a good effect.

Running dogwalks
Shejpas dogwalk was really bad on Thursday (under new and challenging circumstances) and I realised that much of the value that she found in the dogwalk has gone away. She used to get really happy getting on the dowalk, but now it was just like any other obstacle. I think running it a lot in sequences, training turns but not going straight and mostly, just not training a lot, made that happend. I don’t think I should obsess so much about the turning. Both dogs turn pretty good if i decel smoothly. It annoys me that they don’t really get the concept of turning, but maybe it’s a thing they will grow into. It only took a few repetitions of running straight and throwing the toy to get Shejpa to love her dogwalk and hit the contact reliably.

Puppies
Puppies are four weeks old this weekend. Here are some pictures from last weekend

Home, Sweet Home

I’m finally back to som kind of normal life at home. I spent 39 days away from home (and most of the time, also away from my dogs) during August and September. It’s a lot of fun to travel and do exciting things, but it feels so good to be at home again. World Championships were great. It was definatly more exciting this year than Hamar last year. There are lots of videos from worlds in my YouTube channel. It’s also very inspiring to see agility at the highest level and I have to control myself and not train my dogs too much now. When I got home from worlds on Sunday, I decided to not give Shejpa any more treats in training. No treats until she is tugging like crazy and can work for just toys. I thought it would be a frustrating and slow process, but it worked right away! She was of course very keen on training when I got back, she hadn’t done any agility for three weeks. What’s even better is that she seems to get more and more intense and crazy about tugging for every session we do. And what’s even more surprising, is that she is much better at bringing the toy back to me now. I would have thought that that would be one of the hardest things to accomplish without food rewards. This is really cool and I just hope that she will keep this crazy, fast and focused attitude.

Missy is just crazy. We havn’t done a lot of training lately and you can really tell. She won’t drop the toy when I tell her and she tries to bite my pants when we do circle work… I really need to work her a lot more. Both dogs did a distance grid this week and Missy has made enormous progress with her jumping. I could get her really high and then run my fastest right beside her, and she was still perfect! Here nose touches are coming along and I hope to get her on the seesaw pretty soon. We also need to to a lot of work on getting that check stride for turning tight (with both dogs…) and more double box.

I havn’t been working Pi that much lately, but she was with me when we did a seminar in Sweden two weeks ago and she got to show a lot of things and learned a lt of new stuff. I started teaching her the movements for distant control in obedience. I want her to down and stand without moving any feet. We’ve hade some sessions at home, and this is what our training looked like yesterday:

Video from world cup practice

I’ve spent the whole day watching all the teams practice one last time before world championships start tomorrow. I have three favourites, one in each height. The best small dog I’ve seen today is the Russian sheltie called Adrenalina. I always get so happy watching that dog, it’s so amazingly fast. It might be turning a bit wide, but I really hope they do well this weekend. My favourite medium dog is a blue merle border collie from England. A really nice, fast, tight turning dog that has a good chance of winning if all goes well. In the big dog division, Susan Garrett and Encore were just outstanding. A great combination of speed, tight turns and amazing skills. A lot of big dogs look fast and great, but Encore was just in a class of her own, I think.

The Norwegian team looked really good in practice. They have speed and pretty good consistency. I think some of them could do well. I’ve made a video with short clips from todays training, mostly Sweden, England, USA, Switzerland and Canada. I ran out of batteries after the Canadian team, so unfortunatly no Norway or Russia.

Missy’s dogwalk

Before I went to Helsinki yesterday, I made a video of Missy’s running dogwalk. We havn’t been training dogwalks for a month, but when I get back home, I’ll start the “real” training. I also timed it and it’s pretty consistent at 1.25s when she’s going straight.

It’s been a hectic month and I have hardly been at home at all. We went away for two weeks after the trial, hunting and teaching, and a friend of mine stayed at our place and took care of my dogs. They were fine, but I think Shejpa really missed me. Missy just ran out the door to say hi to Thomas when I opened it to say hi to her when we got home. I look forward to having more time at home in october (even though I have three weekends of teaching away from home) and I look forward to visiting the puppies again.

A great day at the trial!

Our debut weekend is over and I have to say that I’m pleased. Yesterday was really not a good day for me and Shejpa. I think I was a bit overly excited and I wanted to qualify too much. She was eliminated in all three runs due to refusals. Good contacts though. Missy did a great run in jumpers, but jumped the side of the wheel and was eliminated since I kept running. She didn’t knock any bars! Pavlov was yesterdays superstar. It was his debut and Thomas first agility run ever. They had no faults coming to the last jump, but Pavlov ran beside it and Thomas had to take him back and around. You need three qualifying runs in each class to move to the next level. A qualifying run in the easisest class is any run with less than 5,99 faults. Pavlov had 5 faults and got his first qualifying run!

Today was my day. Missy made a qualifying run in jumpers, with five faults in the weave poles. Shejpa did the same thing in both jumpers and standard and she won her standard run. They were both faster than all the other dogs in their class even with refusals at the weave poles. That Missy pops out at the second pole is something that I’m not surprised by. That has really been a problem for us and she is just now starting to do it well in training. For Shejpa to do it was a much bigger surprise, but I think it was my fault. I tried to help her and handle her into the weave poles and she is not used to it. I don’t think it will be a problem in the future when we both get mor experience in trials. She is usually very good in training on all kinds of weave poles.

This means that all of our three dogs have managed to qualify once in jumpers and that Shejpa (who was the only one entered in standard) also has done a qualifying run in standard. We’re now off to the mountains for two weeks of hunting with Pax and Pi. Shejpa and Missy are staying at home with a friend of ours and Pavlov will be with Nina in Umeå.

One day left…

This weekend will be Shejpa’s debut in agility. She’s entered in three classes (jumpers, standard and open jumpers (unofficial)) on Saturday and jumpers + standard on Sunday. Both Missy and Pavlov (Thomas’ border collie) are entered in jumpers both days. Shejpa did her last training session today, I think she needs to rest in order to be at her best on Saturday. Missy, on the other hand, needs a lot of training to keep cool and I will do some more double box with her tomorrow.

We focused on discriminating between dogwalk and seesaw in todays session with Shejpa. She is very inexperienced and did her first full seesaw just yesterday. I will definatly need to help her by using my decel to get her to weight shift on the seesaw, but we will try it and then go back and perfect her performance for the rest of this fall. No more trials until January, since I work a lot. Shejpas dogwalks look great, she is turning nicely, but she might turn into me instead of going straight if I get to far behind. She is also sometimes not as good on a new dogwalk the first time, so we need some element of luck on Saturday. I really look forward to the trial, I havn’t ran any of my dogs in a trial for almost 1,5 years.

Here is a video from today

And here is a video from yesterday showing some of her first seesaws. She was a lot better in the session before, then I went to get the camera and she was a bit tired for this session. Looks ok for the first time, I guess:

Nice turning off the dogwalk

I’m teaching handling in Trondheim this weekend and I brought Shejpa with me. A good thing about that is that I get to try her on new kinds of equipment and today we worked on an old dog walk made of aluminum with carpet and really thick wooden slats. We have worked for two days on turning off the dogwalk using a stick in the ground for her to run around at the end of the dogwalk (just at the corner closest to me). It seems to have helped a lot already. I was planning to fade it gradually, but today she just seemed to do it perfectly with no stick anyway. I could do any turn that I tried. Recalling over the dogwalk with me in lead out position at A, B or C (running her from right to left to A and from left to right to B/C), running in to front cross position at A, B or C and running into serpentine position at jump A – 10 meters from the dogwalk. I hardly ran her straight at all and she was still almost perfect and turned tightly (she seems to acctually run on the side of the contact to be able to turn better. I hope the judges put on their glasses, it was even hard for me to judge with a dark carpet on the contacts, dark ground and black paws.

Here are some of the sequences that the group ran today:

Some agility videos

My friend Karine came over today for some agility training. I wanted to make a video of our seesaw training, but Shejpa did not have a good day. I made a video, but it’s nothing exciting about it really. We should be doing more advanced things really, and we did yesterday. Anyway. Here’s the video:

We also set up a course because I wanted to run weave poles, dogwalk and a-frame in a course with Shejpa. It was the first time I turned her after the dogwalk when running it i a sequence and she was good even though I turned her twice the same way. Her a-frame looks consistant. It’s not as deep anymore and I’m happy with that as long as she consistantly hits the yellow. It’s not a very good video, but perhaps the music will make up for that 😀

Missy got mostly rest today because she has burned a pad om her front paw (maybe from to many dogwalks, maybe from going on a bike ride with Thomas last week). I did some agility with her, mostly proofing weaves (Yes, we need to do that more often, she has problems with me running hard when she enters the poles). I also tried the a-frame with her for the first time. She was really good when I started her from the top and ran her down (full a-frame). Then she did a really good full dogwalk. I tried once more and she just leapt from the top of the dogwalk and landed on the ground. I tried it again, thinking that she wouldn’t make that misstake twice. She did. It looked really bad. Fortunatly, our physioterapeut/vet and friend Laxmi came by later and checked Missy thoroughly and found nothing wrong. I was very happy that I had warmed Missy up well before we did agility today…