Self-Taught

I have decided that my dogs must be watching agility videos and hopping the fence to train themselves while I am at work every day. That's fantastic, don't you think?

It is absolutely ungodly hot and horrible here at the moment (and yes, we've been very spoiled this summer) so we aren't doing much, but last night I decided to play with the dog walk after the sun went down. I stuck a tunnel under the right side, figuring we could work on discriminations as well as a flip from the dog walk into the tunnel (since we are likely to run into that at AKC eventually).

I don't recall that I've ever actually trained this skill. I know I've worked on calling from the tunnel up the dog walk, but for some reason I just don't feel like I've put much work into the opposite.

Well who am I to worry? Apparently I don't need to train anymore because my dogs just know everything.  ;o)

Not really sure how it happened, but both Secret and Kaiser pretty much did it automatically AND with nice drive/speed! Like "whee, this is fun" type stuff. Huh. Nice to know they can still surprise me -- in good ways, even.

We didn't drill a ton on discrimination at a distance, but both were probably around 75% or so. We'll definitely continue to brush up on that going into Champs -- and I'll also be flipping that tunnel to the other side to proof that direction for in/out and the flip from the dog walk to the tunnel (which, by the way, I'm really failing on attaching a cue to -- but "tunnel" or "switch tunnel" seemed to work equally well, supported by a hand motion of course).

Kizzy is also managing to pick up training via osmosis, seeing as I went so long without doing anything with her. I was happy with her dog walk work last night, but I was even more impressed with the sequencing work she was doing on the the jumps/hoops between dog walks! Of note, I was working with food instead of toys and as much as I hate to admit it, I think she focuses a bit more with the food. She just gets a little too over the top with the toys and we also tend to get less work done because it takes her so long (still...) to release the toy regularly and she wears herself out faster with the psycho tugging. We'll have to work on going between food and toys depending on what we're doing, I guess.

Tonight I drug the teeter out of the garage and set it to "wee baby height" (what Secret is modeling in the above photo). I let Kizzy watch Kaiser go back and forth a few times and of course she was not at all fazed by seeing or hearing it move. Kaiser was being ever the food/attention hog, so I ended up putting him in the little yard to give Kizzy a turn.

No surprise, she is scared of nothing. She did jump off the first few times it moved from under her, but she never hesitated to jump back on for another go. It didn't take long at all  before she was making it tip and riding it down while I fed her. We'll continue to play at low heights and make everything super fun before I worry about moving it up too fast.

I suppose one of these days I'll have to start thinking about introducing weaves....