Nov 20th - at the barn

Another freezing night at the barn...not sure what we are going to do when Jan & Feb come :( Ripley and I started tonight by ourselves, first we did weaves. I made sure that he was calm going into them and when he entered correctly, he was flying!! I can't believe how fast that little black dog is. Next we did set point jump with the double. I did 16-22, 22-22, 22-26, 26-26, 22-26, using his holy roller as the toy, he did those jumps great. He even had a pretty good sit/stay without the vulture sit. We then moved onto a jump grid of 10" jumps set at 6' apart. He again had good sit/stays with me going back to reward at different times. I set him up about 6' back having him take one stride before entering the grid, he did this well. The last thing we did with him once Andrea got there was the dogwalk. Andrea was at the end to ensure he got his contact but she said he drove right to the target plate and was giving me some pretty good touches. We did some by himself and he did a really nice job of running the dogwalk, shifting his weight to the rear and give me good nose touches. Another really good thing is that I used the "touch" command with my hand a few times and he did them nice without biting me!

Baxter and Peso went next and we ran some of the sequences from this month's Clean Run. B had some good sit/stay's. He had some issues with coming into me with the threadle arm. We worked on this until he got it correct and his final run was beautiful!

Abbey was the last dog I worked on. First we started with the dogwalk and I couldn't believe how much faster she was along the top of the walk, so much better. She was also driving down the ramp, giving me the 2o2o contact with a seriously fast release. I realized that there was a target plate there and that it was helping her. I took the target away and she got in the yellow but it was a pretty big jump off with no 2o2o at all. I worked on this for a few more times and she really started to understand. I wonder how long it takes to do the muscle memory...Next we worked on the teeter and he is also doing this much faster. The final obstacle I worked with her was the weave poles. We only had 6 out there but I asked her to do some serioulsy hard entries. The offside was much better than the onside but she tried really hard and got some hard ones. We finished up with some jumping sequences. I have to be careful to not pull off the jumps before she is fully commited to jumping it. She did jump the single bar 16" jumps well so I feel she is ready to move up from Specials to Regualrs.