Dual training day

Today, Morgan and I tried to make up for lost time by doing obedience and agility on the same day. It seems I last blogged about 10 days before Christmas. We've had some really rainy weather so we missed some agility lessons but we have done some work that I missed blogging about.

This morning the obedience plan was to work mostly with Merlin because he is entered in the obedience trials that I am the trial chair for in January. He failed miserbly at everything but I hope to whip him into shape before we have to show :-) The plan with Morgan was to see if I could get her to tug, to put the clicker back into our heeling practice, and to make her wait longer on her recall exercise.

Morgan is not an enthusiastic tugger. It takes a lot of work to get her excited about tugging and I need to spend more time training her on it. In one article I read, they said to get a rawhide chew or something to encourage tugging. Well, we got plenty of those for Christmas so we'll see how the tugging training goes. Today, I tried it with Merlin's 2nd favorite tug toy--the stuffed orange gecko. She got in a couple of good tugs but wasn't really "into" the game. We'll try it next with the rawhide.

I had better luck with the clicker. Nobody said she wasn't food motivated. She did beautiful heeling in a circle for me and only once got out of position. I still have her on the pinch collar but when she lagged and it pinched her, it seemed to de-motivate her. I think it is because it usually pinches when she pulls and she wasn't pulling and she didn't quite know what to do to make it stop. She didn't figure out that lagging was the same thing as pulling to the pinch collar. I think she may get it when she figures out that when she is in correct heel position, it will no longer pinch her. A few more tries with it and the clicker and the light bulb should go off.

I started shaping the waits on recalls a bit more. I left her on a sit stay and walked about 20 feet away, waited to the count of 20 and went back to her, praised her, and gave her a treat. Then I went about 30 feet and she was up within 5 seconds. I dropped back to 20 feet and decided that I would hold there for the next week or so and build up time. After I have a minute at 20 feet, I'll move to 30 and so on.

So obedience went okay. I just have to keep reminding myself that I have to have a plan and execute my plan.

In agility, we started with helping Tom and Jake with control exercises. Morgan amazed me. She was there to distract Jake. However, she was awesome. She never lunged at him, she stayed by my side and as long as she did she got praise and cookies. Good girl. We worked the jump chute first. She dropped bars toward the end the first couple of times so we stretched out the last two jumps and that worked better. She would stop and turn to look at me every time I said something to her. Even if I told her to go on. We will need to work on that. For the time being, I'm not saying anything. When I don't speak, she does the entire chute w/o a problem. Once we worked through that, we went to the weave poles. She starts off gung ho and actually got a couple of the straight up weaves--we both cheered and gave her cookies and it was if she said --well that's enough of that, and she didn't do as many when I sent her again. My motto for Morgan is quit with success and quit while she still wants more. However, I get caught up in her successes and forget that. We practice again tomorrow and maybe, I will remember :-) We had the same problem with the teeter. She does it great the first couple of times and, of course, gets bored with it and her performance falls off. I've got to think of a way to keep her engaged so that we can progress to the next level.

I'll try to keep up with my training for the next couple of weeks. It always helps to write it down.