It’s really hot here right now and it’s hard to do training. It’s not cold enough until it’s dark. I guess a lot of you live with that all year, but we certainly don’t, so I guess we should be happy. We have long days in the summer and the weather is great (except if you want to do something active…). Fortunatly, Shejpa seems to really enjoy her training on contacts, but she’s not as fast as she could be in the heat. She is a very fast dog, but I really have to work to get her to want to run fast. Her favoutite thing is sniffing while running (but I don’t think many dogs run and sniff that fast) and she’s also likes running very fast away from me 😀
We continued our work with the running contacts yesterday. When Shejpa ran the dogwalk at 1.4s yesterday, she missed the up contact and I know she did it quite a few times. I never thought that I would have that problem with a cocker spaniel, but she is a remarkable little dog with a huge stride. It helped a lot to just take the dogwalk the other way, so that she started with the contact where she’s gotten a lot of clicks on her way down. I got to click correct behavoir on the way up and reward her on the dogwalk. She didn’t jump any more up contacts yesterday, but she might do it again if she picks up speed.
I also worked some more on the down plank contacts. I tried to fade the crate and throw a toy instead. I still had the crate there, but I threw the toy after the click most of the times. She was pretty good, but if she isn’t speeding, she is more likely to jump. I don’t know if I should just keep sending her to something (person or crate) or if I should just work on throwing toys.
We let her run her first a-frames yesterday too. She didn’t miss the yellow many times, but she was not low enough and I will have to lower the a-frame and work through it. She did the whole obstacle in one stride once and got a perfect hit, but I don’t think she’ll do it again and I don’t think she should either. It seems to hard on the body. Is it common with one stride a-frames with the bigger dogs running their a-frame?
I’ll do some more training tonight, when it’s cooler. I think weaves and seesaw will be my focus for the night.
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