Rumi lesson 2--Obedience

I am continually amazed by Rumi and how much energy and stamina he has for training. And he is very forgiving of mistakes I may make. After our 3 lessons with Laura Romanik (whom if she had a website I would gladly link to it ), I have some good solid concrete goals for the next 5 or so weeks. First of all, here is a link to him working in December at an ASCA show in wildcard novice.
This was at a busy dog show with lunch begin cooked and all the usual dog show hubub. So here are our goals:

Work in at least one new place for each of the next 5 weeks.
Work on the forging in straight line heeling.
Work our left turns (and I need to not slow down)
Work on about turns (and I need to not slow down)
Work on the coming back to me on the retrieve faster
Work on Rumi being able to do things with the dumbbell in the mouth (when his mouth is engaged he forgets he can use his hind end to jump/climb)

Of course we'll have other things we're working on like go outs, broad jumps with targets, gloves, signals, drops,.... But the above is our focus. I'll try and post every time we work someplace new.

Lessons--Part one

I've had a busy weekend. I spent Sat. and Sun. at a herding clinic. And then have done obedience lessons Sunday and Monday afternoon. Part one is going to be about the obedience lessons. :)

Thai had the larger part of Monday's lesson and Rumi had the larger part of todays lesson. Thai has a hard time dealing with the stress of any environmental change. Especially people and dogs. So the first thing we worked on was her heeling with as many distractions as we could throw at her :) She did much better than she did in the past. I think it helped that she had been the forgotten one at the herding clinic and was excited to be the center of all attention :) Her tugging has gotten much stronger, even when she is stressed, which in turn is helping to despurse the stress. Her scent articles ROCKED! She even got the one when Laura was standing in the middle of the pile on her second try :) Her Utility stand for exam is also getting better. And Today she held it for two different people, did her gloves (although we need to work on blind retrieves) and was up the whole time.

Rumi. We came up with a goal. Work in 5 different places in the next 5 weeks. His heeling. Work on no forging in straight line heeling, and my cadence in left and about turns. Nice run to the dumbbell and clean pick up. Work on the return and holding the dumbbell longer (while running, walking, climbing stairs). Continue working go-outs, broad jump with target and fronts :)

Overall, good lessons, nice time to focus me on what to work on for the spring :)

Next time...herding

Fronts

I thought that maybe, the more geeky things I add to the blog, the more likely I am to keep blogging :) So I've decided to pick a skill and post a short movie of it once a week for a few weeks to see how I improve with focusing on a skill and having video feedback of how I'm doing (and of course your helpful comments :) )

This week I found that setting up the video camera, without a tripod, to video tape yourself is HARD :) I captured some good fronts, which is the skill I'm really focusing on. But I also managed to capture some drops and the video was really telling in that I haven't set the criteria clearly what I'm reinforcing. So I kept the drops on the video also.



Thai is the red aussie, Rumi the black one (for those of you who don't know my dogs). I think if I just keep videoing once a week it will make the blog more than worth while and keep the tech geek in me happy since writing doesn't seem to be inherently reinforcing for me!