Contacts

Vega and I practiced again yesterday and it’s very clear that she’s not in tune with what she is doing at all. She doesn’t understand that she has to do 2o2o on the dogwalk. She is completely focused on the food in my hand. I have a contact board at home and put one end up on the bottom step and she sort of got it this morning. We are just going to do 15-20 minutes a day of that until she gets it.

She had a fabulous time playing ball with Rip and Ice though. Even Merlin joined in. Vega LOVES Rip. She just wiggles around when she sees him. It’s cute.

Merlin progress

Merlin is still going to therapy and is doing a lot better. When we started I had to click and treat him for looking at anyone in the room and this last week he took food out of Lauren’s mouth. In the grand scheme of things he is not going to make enough progress to do anything more that be a pet though. That’s okay cause I still love him to death.

We did go to Lorrie’s house yesterday and he walked in like he owned the place! That really surprised me since he hasn’t been there in months and usually he hides under her table. He immediately ran up and started snuggling Lorrie and then grabbed a toy to get her to play! Sometimes he is so normal I have hope but then most of the time I know better…

Oh well, we’re going to keep working on him anyway.

Vega training…

We went out and practiced yesterday and worked on weaves, contacts and barking. She is doing well at the weaves though she sometimes pops out after about 8 or 9. I’m not concerned at this point since she’s just 9 months old in a couple of days.

We need serious help with contacts. I don’t think she’s getting it and is totally focused on the food. I don’t think I’m teaching it right either since I think she’s smarter than this. I’m going to make a contact board at home so we can work on them for a few minutes everyday. I’m also going to recruit some help from Lorrie next chance we get.

So, barking. This is going to be a major issue for me, I can see already. If we do something and I know what I’m doing she pretty much barks just once after the contact. I can handle that but if for any reason I don’t know exactly what I’m doing she barks the whole time. For a while when she barked I would tell her “no bark” and walk away. She just starts sniffing and shuts down so that doesn’t seem to help much. Disciplining seems to shut her down some too so I have to be careful about that. When she stays (which is about 75% of the time) she lets me lead out about 3-5 feet and I think that’s very cool for her age.

At the end of training we just played fetch a little and accidentally discovered that if I run obstables with her with a ball in my hand she doesn’t say a word! I’m going back out tomorrow to work some more and see if that holds up. If it does I’ll be playing in class with a tennis ball in my hand for a while.

All in all she’s a good little girl. She can easily do 4-5 obsticles in a row. Her major hold up is me learning. She has no patience for me being slow or confused. She’s going to be awesome though when we get it worked out.

Vega training

I’ve been without a computer for a couple of weeks now so it’s time to get caught up. Vega has the most annoying habit of barking at me constantly while she’s running obstacles. To be honest I don’t even think she see’s the obstacles and her focus is that I’m running. She just gets so excited. I can’t recreate this behavior at home since it’s snowy in the yard and there’s not enough room in the house so… I’m going to start going out to FAAD to train alone at least once a week so see if we can practice not barking and weaves and contacts.

For me this behavior (if continued) would be a show stopper. I can’t think with her yelling at me. I’ve talked to both Lorrie and Katrina, read a couple of books this week and rewatched Crate Games and we are going to start practicing more groundwork and foundation and NO barking.

I’m going to start with targeting past a first jump and then a second to see if she can get that there are jumps. I’ll probably target tunnels to since she just can’t see them. She’s just too focused on me. (I never thought that would be an issue!) I will also start with one jump and reward for not barking and the minute she barks she gets crated.

Our first try at this is tomorrow so we’ll see how it goes.