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Apparently I never posted this video today! It’s been that kind of day…
Here we are doing front crosses, TnB, and RSs as part of the rocking horse drill with wings. We even added a tunnel too! Ronan liked this game!
We did 2 sessions today- here is the first one, week 11’s concept transfer to wing. Ronan didn’t seem to have any trouble transferring wraps from our round “barrels” to a wing. We later took 2 wings and played around with FC, RS and post turns. I’ll post that one next.
We are a bit behind this week so glad there aren’t that many week 11 assignments! We gave the Adding motion to serps and threadles a go today and it mostly went well. Ronan had some issues moving past the jump directly to the MM. In some reps it seemed to be our position or timing. Other times perhaps the handler’s feet weren’t pointing enough towards the direction of travel. Maybe Karena’s arm was too high? There were a few reps with too much handler speed too. Help! 🙂
Hi Tracy,
The regional was great! It was pretty cold on Saturday and in the mornings! Great conditions for the dogs! Our pap Kiwi made her first GP Finals-very happy about that since she is in novice AKC! Jax, our BC, made steeplechase finals and had a pretty nice run! I had a couple of bars in GP semis, but she was flying! We did more training with Ronan at the practice jump and he was really focused! No video unfortunately, but we worked on a lot of the drills that required only one jump.I gave the wing wraps and left rights another go.
Mike
Advanced retrieve games session 3, on the road. Pony turned the correct way in all reps! I did a few more before I found Mike to video and they were good too. Hopefully this will continue once we get home.
Ronan has gotten some really good training experience the past 2 days while we are at the Wild West Regional in Tucson. He’s doing a super job at focusing while dogs are running! His threadle/strike a poses were perfect! Before we left we did a Minny Pinny session.
We are waiting for some (fake) jump bumps and will use those next time. It seemed like Ronan didn’t necessarily “see” the bars as much as the wings themselves. I think in combination with too little motion in some reps caused him to go in between the wings vs going all the way out around them (and over the bars).
Questions/comments: 1) He steps in between the bars and doesn’t “bounce” for some of the reps with Karena. 2) Should we be going for as much speed as in the last reps with Mike? Maybe doing this earlier in the day might have helped :).Yesterday we had fun with Pony doing the Wing Wrap Foundations (Rocking Horses Part 2). I think we are moving in too close to the barrel on some of the FC-RS-TnB sequences and that is causing us to be late.
This is interesting because we noticed the same thing when he was driving to the target (boot) back in the earlier lessons. Back then he was even turning the “wrong way” when he was supposed to turn right too. We should go back and look to see if it was worse with him turning to the left than turning to the right. Before I video the session I did some left spins (and a few right spins). I also tested the idea that maybe occasionally he would turn correctly but he never did when he was supposed to turn left. It didn’t matter which of the two drills I was doing. He would just turn right if I was on the left or on the right. So I tried to vary things like distance, speed and the angle between himself, the toy, and me. I ended up doing mainly a 45-60° angle (Ronan-toy-me, see 0:13, 0:40) for success. At 0:29 the angle was too high.
Hi Tracy,
We gave it another go today with the tunnel threadle. Old habits are hard to stop with the off arm flick for threadles. I understand better after your comment to keep the off arm as it is and not to flick him off to the tunnel. Mike
Here is perch work session 2 with a lower treat reward position. We used some treat tosses every now and then to get him to pivot automatically. He seemed to be offering a bit more stepping without handler motion :).
Hi Tracy,
A little bit of perch work to upload this morning. We had started perch work before starting Max Puppy but had not worked on it since before class started. Ronan did quite a bit of staring at us while we waited for him to offer hind leg movement, even offering other behaviors instead. He turned his hind legs well with a bit of human position pressure and enticing him with the opposite head turn to initiate the hind leg turn. Let us know what you think!
Mike
Hi Tracy,
We were able to work on the lateral motion with the toy drop closer to the barrel yesterday (actually a wing in the practice jump at the USDAA trial :)) and he seemed to understand it a bit better. We are going to try in the yard today with the barrel and see how his understanding looks. Glad you liked the serp dance! Ha Ha.Mike
