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Videos

Agility Trial in Torsby

Squid did her first trial of 2012, and her first since September, yesterday. It was a long day in a cold riding facility, and a long drive, but it was worth it. I realize that I have a lot to work on, her performance is far from how it is at home where she doesn’t get aroused by other dogs running agility. Last season, I felt that all the training i put in made a big difference and that it got better, but we’re back where we started at the beginning of this season. She’s acting like a different dog and the biggest thing is that she is ignoring decel and looking for tunnels and weave entries. It’s really boring training, but I realize it has to be done. I want to trial with the dog I have in training. Crazy Squid still managed to win both her runs and is now qualified for class 3 in jumpers. Exciting!

Obedience Jump

One of my online students asked me for ideas on how to teach the dog to always take the jump back, even if you for example throw the dumbbell badly so that the dog no longer has a straight line to you over the jump. This is one of the basic exercises that we do with our dogs. We let them run between the handler and a helper and we click for jumping. We gradually move to the side so that the dog has to think about what he is doing. If the dog runs past the jump, there is no click and the dog gets to try again.

You’re welcome to post any questions on this below.

23 – More shaping with Sarek

My family has arrived and we’re ready for Christmas. I had to excuse myself for a while to make this video where Sarek learns to put his head on the floor during the long down. This is a common style in Nordic obedience, where it can be a good thing with clear criteria for the dogs head. I trained it just to show you some more shaping (and because I have some students working on this), but maybe Thomas will choose to use it in obedience later on. We had four sessions, two around the sofa and two on the floor. I have cut out about half of the training, because the video would be too long and boring otherwise.

21 – Shaping Sit Up with Sarek

Sarek and I had our first session with sit up from down today. I thought it might be interesting for you to see a shaping session where a new behavior is shaped from scratch. It’s of course just a start. I’d do one more session to get more fluency, then try to teach him to sit pretty to get more strength and power. Sit pretty is a really good behavior to have on the repertoire if you want nice sit up from down.

8 – Second Day with Advanced Handling

Epic has been such a good sport these three days. He came here and had done very little sequencing. We started with double box on tuesday, moved on to more challenging sequences yesterday and today we ran courses the whole day. We were only five handlers running dogs in the advanced handling seminar, so we got to run a lot. Epic has never done a full course and he was of course not really ready for these advanced courses, so we had some mistakes and also stopped to reward often. I’m very happy with how well he has been working all three days, and he sure loved a lot running agility. I have so much to work on when we get home, but I think we have a pretty good foundation. Here is a video with some of the work we did today:

We’re staying one more night in the south of Sweden, doing some herding tomorrow morning. Then we’re heading back home. They say that there is a lot of snow and wind coming, I hope it will be alright to drive.

7 – Advanced Handling with Greg Derrett

We’re exhausted after two days of handling with Greg Derrett. Epic did advanced handling today and sometimes it was a bit too advanced for him, considering he just started to run sequences and jumping high jumps. But he did a lot of nice things too and I’m glad that he is behaving nicely and relaxing between runs. He did drop more bars than I’m happy with. He seems to take off to late and takes the bars down with front feet. It’s probably just his inexperience, but I will work more on his jumping. We have a lot of things to work on this winter and I’m looking forward to it.

5 – Seesaw Basics

I teach my dogs nose touches as the end behavior on the seesaw. This is a pretty long process for me (and I don’t hurry, I don’t think my puppies are ready for a full seesaw before they are grown) and I do most of it on stairs, away from agility equipment. Parallel to teaching the end behavior, I work on weight shift and confidence. I start by just tugging with the dog in 2 on 2 off, teaching him to keep back feet on the contact. I then let him drive the last step into 2o2o and grab the toy and then gradually increase the distance he has to run before the weight shift. Eventually, I will add a bang to this game and with time increase it. Epic always had a bit of problem with this since he likes to put all of his weight into the toy instead of shifting his weight back in the grip. It’s better, but not perfect. You can see what I mean here:

Advent Calendar 2011

Count down the days until Christmas with Fanny and Thomas at fannygott.com. We will share training tips, videos, recommend products we like and share stories about what’s happening here at the farm.

Today is the first day of December and I have embarked on my count down project – trying one new form of work out or training every day. This is probably my biggest weakness as an agility handler – I hate working out… I can train dogs for hours, but not my self. Trying one new thing every day will hopefully be a fun (and painful) experience and I won’t risk getting tired of anything. Maybe I’ll find a way to work out that I actually like. Today, I did the only thing I kind of know how to do – jogging. Shejpa and I went for an hour run and it wasn’t that bad… What kind of work outs do you like? Recommend them to me and I’ll try to get the chance to try them before Christmas.

I will keep you updated on my project, but this blog will mainly focus on dog training for the next 25 days. Today, I will share a video that shows two exercises that I use on my dogs to increase their strength as well as their understanding of criteria for stand, sit and down. Many things that we want our dogs to do, like a balanced sit with back feet under the body, standing absolutely still for a longer time or lying down without shifting weight to one side requires strength from the dog. This strength can be trained gradually by some easy exercises like the ones I show in the video. Working on an exercise ball is also great for increased strength. I do stand, sit and down on the exercise ball and work on the dog holding his feet still for gradually longer repetitions.

Epic’s Progress

Epic recently turned 15 months and is starting to do some big dog stuff!

Full height dogwalk:

He is doing well with his running contacts and I have started to work on turning after. The biggest problem is that he often tries to go for three strides and then is high in the contact (and sometimes misses). He is also doing full height a-frame in a nice way.

12 straight weave poles:

Weaving has been a lot of fun to teach him. He learned extremely fast and I could progress fast. Good thing since I’ve been away a lot the past month and also have put a lot of energy into his contacts.

He is also herding a lot: