Another year for Yasser, my lovely old man and honorary kelpie ! (We think there is a little bit of kelpie in there somewhere, along with the BC and ACD. ) This is his 14th Birthday portrait.
To celebrate I made the boys ice cream cone cakes - a doggy muffin jammed into the cone then covered with low fat cream cheese frosting, tiny bacon pieces and a blueberry on top, covered with finely planed doggy chocolate - gotta get those antioxidants. No complaints from the canine customers so I guess it was a winner. Plus I'm addicted to the microplaner grater thingy since I saw it on 'Jamie' - although I don't know what he would say about using it for doggy chocs.
Atilla is having a break from training at the moment, much to his disgust.
The end of trial season visit from the muscle therapist is happening next week. Since the end of the trialling year he has already had a few weeks off , so hopefully we will be able to ease back into training after that. I still feel that something is not quite right with him, so we will see.
We have been working inside with the clicker to sharpen up some of his tricks - now that I am doing this with both Tilla and Cruz at the same time, I can see a difference in their progress with both freeshaping and working through the clicker. (eg: the click does not end the behaviour- wait for your release cue) Cruz is way better at both these things which really makes me feel as if I didn't really use it to its best effect with Tilla in the beginning.
So nothing like a refresher course - for him and for me. And I think the clicker was almost invented for kelpies - they love the independence it gives them in trying out behaviours for themselves ........ plus the rewards for getting it right! Yes, another lightbulb moment.
I have also started retraining Cruz's weaves with Susan Garrett's 2X2 method - not that I wasn't happy with Cruz's weaves, but one thing that I have neglected with him is really working those difficult entries, so since this method is meant to train these I thought I would give it a go.
Day 6 so far and I am blown away by the results. We are on 4 poles, still slightly open even though I know he can weave straight poles - but the entries he is making are amazing. I know that a week ago he would have needed so much assistance from me to get them, but now he is doing it all by himself. I'm sure he thinks I'm losing my mind (I know L does!) as I am so excited by this that I am yelling 'yes, yes, yes' as he goes through the poles - note to self : Be silent next time. I am also impressed with his new found perserverance when he gets it wrong. I never used to let him fail at anything more than twice, and once we had two 'failures' I made the exercise easier. But this is one thing that Garrett now cautions against when teaching this method - let the dog work it out for himself without making it easier for him.
We had 5 'failures' in a row the other day - and it killed me not to help him out, but I didn't..... and then he got it right! As Elicia would say, 'Yeeeeee Harrrrr!!!!!!! ' Plus this is now also paying off in both his work and also his attitude. No shutting down and refusing to work, no frustration barking - which is also carrying over into the work we are doing inside using the clicker.
We should probably move to a location outside the yard now for a bit of proofing, so that may be a weekend project.
I have decided that once I get to the 'challenge' exercises, if he can still make the entries (eg: I've actually trained it properly!) then I will also retrain Atilla - who I thought had really good entries until I tried some of these with him.
One thing that I really wanted to do with Atilla over Summer was work on the cloth tunnel. He has never had any difficulty performing this before, although it's not my favourite piece of equipment. Personally I think it's an accident waiting to happen, especially with the design of many being used in Australia including those awful heavy canvas ones. Atilla got tangled in one on a Masters Agility run at Warrnambool in November. He has been tangled in chutes before and this has never caused him any problems, but in the following Masters Jumping run I got 3 refusals at it before he decided he would go in. That's never happened before, even back in Novice. Got it out at training the next week and he wouldn't go in either. So I brought one home from club for the summer break as it's the one piece of equipment that I don't own. Put it out on my agility area and as soon as I brought him in, he took off away from me and made straight for it, running through no problems and then looking at me like 'that was fun, let's do it again'. Several repetitions later, all fast and confident....... where was the problem again?
So after all the effort I made to get it home, it's now sitting in the bungalow gathering dust!
It will come out again in a couple of weeks so that I can design some sequences to run incorporating it for both dogs, just to make sure.
And I would still like to see it disappear from trials in the near future.
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