Squid and I had a great day yesterday, training with our friends Louise and Louise and their dogs Snipe and Kite. Snipe and Kite have the same mother as Epic and Squid, and are born here. This month is obedience and conditioning month for Squid. This day was the perfect kick off for our obedience. I have been logging all training time with my dogs since the beginning of May (really since the beginning of the year, but I changed systems in May). Squid gets an average of 5 minutes of obedience training per day (an average that was 4,43 before yesterday’s massive 70 minutes of training). I think 5 minutes is a decent number considering all other things that we’ve done during this time – agility trials, traveling and resting. It’s far from what the best obedience dogs clock though, so I hope to improve that average by quite a lot by the end of this month!
Obedience is a lot of fun right now. Squid knows all the exercises and I really like how she performs most of the behaviors. She has speed, precision and a happy tail. It feels like pay back for years of training sessions. We’re far from ready to be competitive. When you’ve taught the exercises, you still have a long way to go in terms of stability in competition. I’m excited to do our first obedience trials in the highest class this fall, but I’m happy that we still have many years to find stability and flow in competition.
Here’s a video that Louise posted from our training:
Mia William ,
Effective ways to reduce the pain involved in saying goodbye to a pet and helping children deal with loss.
http://completepuppytraining.com