Back to Basics

I was so excited about Duffy that I forgot to even mention Clancy's training progress in the last post! He's doing so well, maybe I just figured it would be superfluous to mention it. Hehehe...superfluous. That doesn't come up in training too often.

Clancy's obedience work is proceeding apace. We're entered in a pre-novice class next month to see how a trial run under trial conditions goes. He shouldn't have any trouble with the pre-novice exercises (knock wood!). His focus improved dramatically post-op. Somehow those little girl dogs (and the occasional boy dog) just don't seem as enticing as they did before he was neutered. Much to my relief. There's lots of fine tuning needed. He tends to forge on the heeling patterns - I'll take that over lagging any day! Figure eights suffer mostly from my inability to actually make it through the pattern without getting dizzy and stumbling. What's with that? His group exercises were solid - recently I've seen some going down on the long sit. In his defense, our training class is very late at night (well, after 9:30 pm) so I think that's his way of telling me we should be home in bed! So we'll see...we'll see...I'm hopeful to be trialling by the spring. Ever the optimist, I even bought him his own dumbell last week.

Agility. Did I mention that we started agility training last spring? Did I mention that he loves it? Did I mention that he's fast. Much faster than his handler. I'm not sure how he manages to arrive at what he's supposed to do without any effective coaching from me. Our biggest hurdles (ha, pun intended!) are the weaves - the evil weaves...or weevils, as we call them - and the teeter-totter. Big surprise.

Channel weaves & weavamatics, he did pretty good at the introductory sessions. But once they were upright, he lost all concept of what to do. And apparently my attempt to train him only ended up confusing him even more. Sorry 'bout that, little buddy. So this past week we went back to basics and retrained with the 2X2 method. After just a few days, it's 'clicking' with him. And because we're training on grass he's loving the big chunks of cheese that I have to throw so that he can actually find it in the wilderness. Our new 'tug-it' toy from Clean Run is in the mail LOL.

The teeter is a little trickier as we don't have one to practice on at home. I'm not as worried about that as his issue is that he loves it. He gleefully goes barrelling across, clearly loving the BANG as it hits the ground. So the next few lessons will be working on teaching him some self-control on the teeter.

I`m constantly amazed and impressed with Clancy`s attitude. He`s a wonderful bundle of confidence and sheer joy. It`s going to be an interesting run.