Girl's Day Out

This is Ivy's new 'gal pal' Sassy, a 10 month old BC owned by a fellow agility competitor. For anyone who reads my 'Agility Kelpies' blog, Sassy is the star of the Greg Derrett DVD watching post made last year.

She has turned into a rather stunning girl, don't you think ? Plus she has brains as well as beauty, her only 'fault' is that she appears to think that she might be a mountain goat rather than a BC and has a whole list of 'objects successfully scaled from a great height' to prove it.

Last weekend we met up, along with another trialler who has an 8 month old pup and had our own puppy workshop. We did circle running, crate work, the puppy set point exercise from Susan Salo's 'Puppy Jumping' DVD, some stay and release work and of course play, play, play and more play. Very exciting for Ivy who hasn't done much training around other dogs - apart from ours. This was the first time she has done off lead work in a strange environment with some high level distractions and I was very pleased with the results.

No, she wasn't perfect and we had a couple of run offs to visit the other puppies, but all up I was happy with her focus, especially when she was working with me. She stayed with me 100% when working and gave me really good focus, plus she never broke a single stay, whether waiting to be released from her crate while I ran off or working stays around the others. Mostly the 'run offs' occurred once when I threw a toy for her to retrieve and on the way back to me she spied her mates, and a couple of times when we had finished and were returning offlead to her crate.

It was a very valuable session in that it showed up several holes in my training that I still need to fix - and without 'trying her out' offlead I wouldn't have gotten that information. Although I don't want her rehearsing 'unwanted' behaviours, I believe there comes a time when you have to put what you have to the test rather than always controlling and manipulating the environment that you train in. In the words of Susan Garrett, ' You should always set the dog up for success, yet at the same time he should experience enough environmental challenge and freedom that he does occasionally fail. This approach allows the dog to learn the boundaries of correct and incorrect responses.'

I believe this is something I did wrong with the kelpies as I didn't let them fail enough.

All the puppies did very well and there were 3 happy owners at the end of the session - still with 'lists' to work on I'm sure. Mine reads :

*Circle running - watch for forging ahead in different environment, she doesn't tend to do this at home.

*Continue to build value for motivators.

*Recall - still needs work. (Don't bother when she is running around with other puppies having a ball, although after they had run for about 30 seconds to a minute they did recall no problems, so maybe still working on recalling first time, every time, which would also relate directly to the value of the motivator.)

*More sessions like this one to continue to work on high level distractions.

It's hot today so we've been working on crate games under the trees. I need to find some higher level distractions for this as she has a rock solid stay in the crate and won't come out no matter what I do without being released. At our puppy session I even led out so she had to run directly past other puppies to get to me and she didn't even look at them.

In between the 'photo session' we worked on sending to the crate from every single extreme angle I could find and recalling for a game of tug incorporating lead out pivots on the flat, acceleration and deceleration. We can recall out of the crate from around the 20 metre mark and send in from around the same distance, so I'm pretty happy with that plus I'm also happy with the speed she is driving in and out of the crate.

Now I need to start a list of potential distractions, might be a good time to review the Crate Games DVD I guess. Any further ideas also gratefully received.