Oct 23rd - at the barn

Another night at the barn, man was it cold and dirty...I think it is going to be a long winter.

I started with Ripley and it went downhill fast :( I just don't know what I am going to do with him anymore. Oh well, it has been a shitty week, so this just fits right in. The only good thing about his session was his dogwalk. He did a nice drive across the lowered dogwalk to the target plate and had some nice nose touches.

Baxter's session went much better, so that was good. We started with the double box work that Andrea organized. We started with front crosses first and B did it really nicely both directions. He kept all the bars up, read the crosses well, and kept his start line stay. We then moved on to rear crosses which B didn't do as well. He kept taking down jump 5 so with Andrea's help we worked the sequence of 3-6 and then 6-7 to keep his head down instead of watching me. We finished off with some dogwalks which he did well. One of the key things that I need to work on with him this week is to reinforce his stay without moving his front feet. If I move away from him laterally, he moves his feet and body to look at me. In order for him to find his line, he needs to stop doing this.

Here is the double box stuff we did for future reference:
After we were done with the class Andrea did a mini class for a couple of us and I ran Abbey. We worked on jumping skills which went really well. We have moved Abbey to 16" jumps now which is going well but is a bit of work for her. We started with a pin-wheel where she had me send Abbey from a distance, throwing a treat tub after jump 2 ensuring she was staying out in the pin-wheel. She did it well both ways but did need to have 2 bars on each jump.

Next we did a 180 and threadles. We started with distance on the 180 which she did well again. The threadles went well also but I have to remember to stand up straight when I turned my upper body.

Next we did 270's. Andrea threw the treat tub out to ensure that she stayed outside of the circle. It worked well and she finished off with some nice 270's without too much help from me.

The last thing we did was the dogwalk. With a target plate at the end, Abbey drove straight through to the target and maintained the contact :) I am hoping with a winter of that, that her contacts will be much more solid.