I’ve had an intense weekend with two days of teaching at home and then two days in Bergen (on the west coast of Norway). I flew home yesterday and have been pretty tired since I got home. The dogs are not tired at all (even though Nina has done a great job keeping them busy while I was away) and we have done some training today already. Pi is finally her self again after being in heat for the first time, wich really made her tired and easily distracted. I gave her most of last week off and now she’s back to normal (and our male dogs have started to calm down around her).
We also started to teach Nina’s kelpie Agera to weave today. The plan is to do 3 x 3 minutes of weaving every day for the two next weeks. Agera did 1 + 3 minutes this morning and caught on very fast. We couldn’t get her to fail once, but we didn’t do very hard things since it was her first time. When we planned the next session we made sure that we gave her more challenging entries and sure enough, she failed. And as I had thought, when she failed once, she had a hard time changing and being right again. She failed many times but did not stop trying and finally got it right. We finished with some easy ones and because of all the thinking and failing involved, the session was 13 minutes long. I hope that we can see her get that same, challenging entry tonight. We’re videotaping everything and I might show a clip tonight.
It was very obvious that it’s a great advantage to have a dog that is familiar with the one jump exercises when you start with the weaving (2x2s). Agera was sure of what to do right from the start!
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