Well, where to begin. The blog has yet again been neglected. As you will notice it now has a new look, thank you ever so much vicki ( Ruffs Dog Blog ) for this, its lovely! :-)
The blog layout now has added pages one for each dog, results etc and with time will possibly have one or two more added.
Kennel Club Good Citizen
Back in May Roxxi passed her Bronze Kennel Club Good Citizen Test, the amount of test dates at both the clubs i attend for obedience have been far and few and they have not had a Silver test at all! But, our waiting (and training) has paid off and a date was finally set for 17th Nov. I knew Roxxi was ready although, anything can happen on the day. So along we went to the test being held at The East Lincs Ringcraft Society, Sutton-On-Sea, just up the road from us. Roxxi was amazing :-) My clever little girlie didn't put a foot wrong and i'm pleased to say she PASSED!!! So i am a very proud mum :-)
Snow (grr!!)
Don't get me wrong, i love the snow, the lovely white flakes falling gets me in the christmas spirit. It's been really fun watching the dogs trying to catch it as it falls and seeing chloe's face light up at the sight of it and being able to make snow men with her. But, the amount we've had has been rediculous to say the least, the whole country has been in termoil as funny as that sounds. Alot of people have been snowed in and shops have been more or less out of essential bits and bobs ie. Milk, bread and salt funny enough. This lasted around a week and a half - two weeks. Training at most venues has been canceled/ re-arranged for safety reasons with driving. As the snow thawed it became very dangerous as it then froze so we then had several layers of ice. The majority hs dissapeared now and the dogs have churned up the garden with the slush thats been left so i'm in the process of fencing it off in areas :-( And as the good old english weather doesn't like to stay the same too long, just as we thought we were getting over it the weather forcasts are predicting more snow!!
Contact Training with Lucy Osborne
In between the horrid weather and getting ready for christmas i booked both dogs in to do a contact session with Lucy. They've not done any agility training since begining of Oct now i think, although the rest has done them good. So after a glitch with the weather and the sessions having to be re-arrnged we went to Skellingthorpe looking forward to the training ahead of us :-)
Roxxi - Roxxi's class was first and, yes, she was WILD!!! The first dog walk, a-frame and see saw she did she either jumped off (dog walk), flew off (see saw) or (a-frame) flew over the top and only just hit the bottom!! So after the group had all had their first go Lucy took us all back to basics. So with Roxxi we got her targets back out and made her re-value the bottom of the contacts. This consisted of placing Roxxi at the bottom of the contact and rewarding for touching the target then moving her further up the ''down plank'' releasing her then letting her run to the target and rewarding her and finally releasing from the target and rewarding for only releasing on the release command. After all the group had done this we did the full dog walk again, Roxxi flew across! And stopped in position perfectly :-) We then did tunnel - dog walk and then jump - tunnel - dog walk. Lucy then wanted to show us that with a good solid understanding of what behaviour is expected on contacts we shouldn't need to be with the dogs (running right next to the equipment) So. . . . If u imagine a u-shape, we started at the top one end at the jump (with an a-frame behind us) the tunnel is the bend in the u-shape and the dog walk is the other top of the u shape. Lucy placed a pole a metre/two away from the side of the dog walk and explained for us to run along the pole keeping on the outer side away from the dog walk. So over the jump, into the tunnel and keeping our arm outstretched towards the dog walk (arm nearest dog walk) we ran to the end to reward for stopping on the contact. Even though i wasn't running right next to the dog walk she powered on to the contact point at the bottom.
Next we did the same course; jump - tunnel - dog walk. But this time we were on the dogs right hand side sent over the jump, into the tunnel and onto dog walk but instead of running along the dog walk we ran behind the a-frame! Meaning there was the a-frame in between us and the dogs running over the contact. I had my doubts weather Roxxi would do it but to my surprise she did! :-)
We did lots of other small exercises but sending over jumps on to the a-frame, jump, tunnel but us staying behind the dog walk :-) Roxxi worked really well, i was really impressed with what we achieved.
I will update demon's session over the next few days as his session was just as interesting! :-)
For anyone who hasn't done a training session with Lucy before it is something i'd highly recommend. I train with Lucy on a regular basis and also do most of her contact/weave/handling sessions. I always find when training with her that i come away feeling i've achieved something and also knowing my aims/ targets to work on. Her training methods are *always* rewarding to my dogs and i always feel they work up a gear training with her, which is due to her positive and rewarding training methods.
