I'm the first to admit that blogging doesn't come that naturally to me. As a result, I don't always keep Dare's blog updated as often as I should. I think that I'd be even worse on the Resqtails blog if it weren't for the fact that my friend convinced me to get that blog approved for paid posts. I was a little hesitant at first. I really didn't think it would add up to much, but I was wrong. I was looking back and so far this year I've made about $600.00 just from putting those silly links in the posts. That extra money has come in very handy for dog stuff that I didn't have otherwise!
So, the other day, that same friend asked me if I had tried to get Dare's blog approved. Well, I hadn't, but I thought I might as well try. I contacted the company that gives assignments to Resqtails but they replied to say that I'd need to consider making some changes before they could consider adding Dare's blog. Which leads me to the reason for this post...
You will now find Dare's blog at: www.dare2train.com
I hate to do that, because I know it's an inconvenience to everyone, However, if it allows me to make a little more for the dog sports fund, I'm going to try. It actually should make for more regular posting on my part if I have an incentive. I can't help but think about Sara's posts about her kids in the class that need to see immediate consequences for their actions...maybe I'm still a kid at heart.
I just have to share some of the pictures that I got of Dare this fall. I still find it hard to believe that this is her second fall with us. Time sure flies.
Ok, training is just fun! That's all there is to it. Especially with a partner like Dare. Today we were out doing some weaving, working on different angled entries and I also wanted to see if she would recall to me through the weaves.
So, I led out and called her through the weaves, which she did nicely, then tossed the ball over the jump and turned around and ran back to the start where the camera was, to turn it off. Before I got to the camera I turned around in time to see her enter the weaves at an angle like we'd be working on, nail the entry and then continue slowly back to me. The best part...she was holding her ball in her mouth the whole time. LOL
You'll see that her weaving is much slower coming back through, but I'm not as fast when I'm multi-tasking either. :-) The fun thing is that she got the entry (without me anywhere near her), and finished all 12 poles all while concentrating on holding that silly ball. Go Dare!
Hope you are all enjoying your training as much as we are. :-)
The jump training continues. Along with other training too of course. But I thought I'd post an update on some of the stuff we're working on now.
We are still working on the basic drills that I've already talked about, and we're adding distance and impulsion to those exercises. Unfortunately, Andrea was right (darn her for knowing what she's talking about)LOL As soon as Dare started picking up speed and not just striding through, but planting her feet to jump, the box turned into the same scenario as all other stride regulators before it. Something to land as close to the front of as possible.
This week, I've been working a bit on pinwheels. Here's the baby pinwheel work:
The next step is obviously raising the bars, and then changing the angle of the pinwheel. The next thing that I wanted to do was try adding the pinwheel to the standard jump chute that we've been working on. So, here is that video.
I was looking for her to still read the spacing and jump heights of the straight part of the chute, but then be able to adjust her striding and jump style to solve the puzzle of the pinwheel at the end, and have her jump closely to the inside uprights for an efficient jumping path. I think she did a pretty good job. :-) I'm still waiting to hear back from Andrea, to see if we've missed anything on this one, but hopefully not.
The jumping experiments continue. The ultimate goal is still to get Dare more comfortable with striding in closer to jumps for take off. You know that we tried with the stride regulator. I decided to try something new, to see if it made more sense to Dare. It started with the suggestion from Andrea that maybe a foot target would make more sense to Dare as a take-off spot. Being a little lazy, I wondered if something that we already use for obedience. We have a pvc box that I send her to when we work on signals for obedience. I remembered seeing that Diana and Miley had used a pvc box when they were working on their running A-frame and I wondered if we could use a combination of ideas for Dare.
So, I started with the box and just clicked Dare for getting in and then tossed a toy out of the box to keep her moving. She picked up on that pretty quick. Here's the video.
Then I decided to try putting it together with the jump standards.
Now, I'm working on introducing the bars again on the jump. I also need to do some other variations, but so far, she isn't treating the box like she did the stride regulator, just landing directly in front of it, so maybe this does make more sense to her. I sure hope so.
Well, I looked back and I haven't posted anything since July about Dare's jump training. Where does the time go? We have been consistently working on the jump training, I guess I just haven't been good about posting.
I guess I'll start with the very basics of what we're doing and what we're learning. First, I knew it was important to teach the dog to be comfortable and proficient at taking off with the rear legs. One of the pre-jump skills that we work on is the beg-stand-beg exercise. Here's Dare demonstrating that drill.
Then we've worked on the up and over collected jumping exercise that I showed you in the previous jumping post. Placing the dog right in front of the jump and targeting just a body length beyond the jump in an attempt to get the dog to simply lift the front legs off the ground and push off for the jump with the rear legs. We did this starting at 8" and worked up to 16"
We've also been working on baby front and rear crosses...These exercises also have been started at 8" and worked at all angles and then repeated at the higher jump heights on both sides.
We have also been working on some jump grids. This one is test help us see how well she is able to scope out the differences in spacing and in heights.
What we noticed in the grid work you just saw and when I started adding more distance and speed to our baby front and rear cross drills...is that Dare prefers to take off for jumps from further away, (rather than striding in closer), which is neither efficient or a safe way to jump.
This led to a series of drills where we are trying to use the stride regulator to get Dare to stride in closer to the jump before take-off. We had some success, and a lot of experimenting in the process, and we are still working on it.
It was also around the middle of August that it was suggested that I take Dare in to the veterinary opthamologist to see if she was having issues with her depth perception or eyesight in general. In examining her eyes, they did find that she has Distichiasis, which is just simply eyelashes growing where they shouldn't. It can cause irritation and eventually scarring of the cornea, but at this point, they said that it doesn't appear to be even causing any irritation, so I'm just to keep my eyes on it for any changes. Other than that, they said that her eyes looked great, and they found nothing that they felt would account for her early jumping.
So, having ruled out any major vision problems, we are back to training. With Andrea's help, we are focusing on helping Dare get more comfortable with striding in closer to the jumps and rewarding that behavior. We are actually doing this not only with jumps, but with the table as well, since she exhibits the same tendency to take off too early for the table as well.
It's a slow process, but a fascinating one. One of the other things that I'm looking into is how to help condition her better for jumping and agility in general. I got the DVD "Building the Canine Athlete" and I'm trying to come up with a practical routine for Dare and I to work on.
Anyway, as with the last jump training post, this is now more of a book, so I'll just end it here for now. Hopefully we'll have more updates and progress soon!
Two months ago we started our weave training. I'm thrilled to be able to share today's weaving video. Today Dare did 12 weave poles, with no channels, no grid guides, no wires. Just straight up 12 weave poles. Woot! Here's the video.
I will probably keep working with the wire on the entrance for a while longer, while I continue to work on more difficult entries, but I'll be taking them on and off, since I want to use them as a reminder, but I don't want it to become a crutch for her.
Now I'd like to start including the weaves in short sequences too, while the weather is still nice enough for me to have all the equipment outside.
I've always thought that's such a weird title abbreviation, since it is so commonly used for Nurses. LOL But regardless of the abbreviation, Dare has her first real AKC title now. :-)
Today the ring conflicts were really bad. In fact to be honest, if it weren't for the fact that my friend was keeping a very close eye on Twist's ring, I would have missed my turn. Thankfully, she knew I was going in the Rally ring with Dare right then, and so she had the gate steward move me to the bottom of the class in Open A with Twist. A huge "Thank you!" to Cyn!
Anyway, Dare finished her Novice B Rally title today with a score of 95. You might have guessed, that we tied with another dog. LOL The really fun thing was that it was our friend and traveling companion's dog, Tatum! How cool is that? There was another dog that scored 99 today, so today Tatum and Dare tied for second place. When I manage to get the video uploaded to Youtube, I'll post it. It's obviously not our best performance, but I'm still just thrilled to pieces with how well Dare is doing.
They had really pretty title ribbons, so we couldn't resist taking some pictures.
Day 2 of the Rally trial was very similar to day one, with two minor differences. One being that Dare improved her score to a 99 and the other being that even when she tied again for first with another dog, she had the fastest time today, so she took first place! Woohoo! Here's the video for Day 2.
Day one of the Rally trial went great. Dare was first dog in her class, and despite my nerves, she did fantastic. She had a bobble at one station where she was to come into front and then finish right. She hesitated to sit, like she was confused about what exercise we were doing, but she did it, and I think we must have only lost a point or two. After that, it went really well.
When we went and checked the scores, she had a 98! Woohoo! There ended up being three dogs with a score of 98 when the class finished, so we were all in a tie for first place. But they break the tie by time, and we weren't as fast as the Border Collie, so we got second place. But what an awesome way to start the weekend. :-) Here's the video.
It's long overdue as always, but here's an update on how Dare's weave training is progressing. The last time I posted, we had closed the channel, but we still had grid guides on all the poles.
Since then we've been able to exchange all the grid guides for less visual weave wires, and now we're in the process of removing those one by one. You can see the progression in the videos.
Now with more wires, less grids...
Grids only at the entries, and working on me in various positions...
With only 7 wires on the twelve poles, (note the sneaky little spin move to get the treats that she fakes me out with at the beginning) LOL
Yesterday was Dare's first official trial of any kind. Utah held it's first ASCA Rally Obedience trial and I thought it would be a great thing for Dare and I to try. We had a great time! There were about 17 dogs in our class, which is pretty big for ASCA in our area. Since this was the first Rally trial ASCA has held here, there were very experienced dogs mixed in with the total newbies. I figured it would be an accomplishment if we were even able to qualify, but if not it would be good experience anyway.
Well...Dare not only qualified, she tied for first place with a 199 out of 200! The tie is broken by the fastest time, so we ended up with second place. I'm still just walking around on cloud nine. What a nice way to debut! Here's the video:
I can see lots of footwork errors on my part and I think that our friend that we train with will still have lots of little hints to improve our heeling, but all in all, Dare was awesome. :-) If you watch close you can see where just before the figure eight station, Dare hops up and gets her leash tangled between her legs. The judge let me fix that though, and apparently didn't deduct any points. So, that was nice.
One of our friends was nice enough to not only video, but also to take some still pictures for us too. Thanks Katie!!!
Oh, and I almost forgot. The really cool thing about ASCA's Rally program is that if you get a score of 195 or higher, you get what they call an "X" Q. If you get all three of you Q's that way, instead of the regular RN title, you get a RNX title. Isn't that fun! It's definitely something to work towards. :-)
So, Dare and I are just a couple of big copy cats, but I just had to try to teach Dare Ricky's suitcase trick. I hope he doesn't mind that we copied him. :-) Here's what we've got.
Thanks for the inspiration Ricky! We sure are having fun with this one. :-)
My friend reminded me that today is the year anniversary of when we went to Florida and picked Dare up. I couldn't resist uploading some of the video we took of her the day we picked her up and our first night at the hotel. I couldn't believe how confident and curious she was. I guess that's a big compliment to her breeder Judy Guaraldo. Dare has been exactly what I hoped for, from day one. :-)
Fast forward one year and here's what we're up to. We're another week into our weave training. Well, minus the long weekend we were gone. Anyway, Dare is now weaving straight poles, no channel. I have also opened up the grids, so it's not a complete closed path through the weaves. She's doing great! I'm going to keep working this week on different entries and varying my position, before I start taking off the grid guides and replacing them with the less conspicuous wires. At any rate, here is a video from this morning, (please ignore the lovely pajama pants). LOL
Dare has been a busy girl. In addition to her jump training, she just started her weaves too.
I spent a lot of time toying with the idea of training Dare using Susan Garrett's 2x2 method. I love the thought of the dogs figuring it out on their own, and having such a good idea of how to find the entrance. However, even after watching the Susan Garrett DVD, I don't think I have the confidence to try to train it. It's one of those methods where...if I thought I could get some help when I got stuck at a certain point, maybe I'd feel more inclined to try it. Since I don't really have anyone close to help me through the process though, I think I'll stick with something that I understand more easily. I figure I can spot if my dog is struggling because I've moved the channels in too quickly, or started removing guides too soon, etc. LOL
So, we started about a week and a half ago or so. here is video of her first day, channels fully open.
And a few days later, you can see the channels are closing just a little.
and yesterday...the channel is a little closer again, and I'm trying to vary my position in relation to her weaving. I want to be able to send her ahead of me, run along side and also be able to be in front.
I'm also really making an effort to use both food and toys as a reward. I tend to be more comfortable with the treat reward. I think that part of it is because I'm not that good at tossing a toy in the right spot. LOL (you'll see an example of my poor tossing skills in the first video). I've actually been out there practicing my tossing of the toy when we're not training to try to improve. Poor Dare, she's just got a dork of a mom to contend with sometimes. She's doing really well though. I'm really pleased with her progress.
I don't think I've written much about Dare's jump training it up to this point. Probably because I've been a little, (ok a lot) perplexed by it.
I started out thinking that I'd use Linda Mecklenburg's methods. From the start, I just noticed something about Dare's jumping style that I didn't like. Even on the first exercise which just involves you starting out sitting or kneeling beside the jump and the dog offering to jump back and forth, getting their reward at ground level to keep their heads low. Dare got the idea of jumping back and forth all right, but she would often just seem to spring all four legs off the ground at practically the same time in what my husband says looks like a motorcycle jumping. LOL
I tried from that point doing exercises which encouraged her to collect over the one jump, for instance: jumping and wrapping back to me on the take-off side. Some days it seemed better and others, not so much.
Then I got a message from the person who has her littermate and she was having lessons with Susan Salo. She sent me examples of the first jump grids that they had done. So, I set it up and Dare's version of solving the jumping puzzle being presented to her was to rush to the end to the target and if it meant jumping two jumps in one huge leap...fine. If it meant taking off early and just crashing through jumps...fine by her too. I did that a couple of times, and decided that was not helping. LOL
I went back to the exercises that encouraged collected jumping and didn't do big lead outs and didn't run beside her, because I found that both of those things also had a tendency to end up with less than desirable results.
I was really getting frustrated and worried when I came across the Clean Run article on Early Take-off Syndrome. Now I'm not normally one of those people who is quick to jump on the bandwagon of the latest diagnosis for people or dogs. But this article freaked me out. In the end, it basically offered some suggestions that some handlers have found varying levels of success with and said that they don't know what causes ETS or how to cure it. Talk about poor timing for me to read an article like this! LOL
Of course, I couldn't help myself and entered Dare in the funmatch even though we are struggling to figure out this jumping stuff. Consistency is obviously not a strong suit for me.
Then I ran into a friend that mentioned that she had been referred at one point to a person in WA for help with jump training and analysis. Her name is Andrea Dexter. She was quick to reply and said that she would be willing to take a look at Dare's jumping and see what she could suggest. :-) So, she had us video 3 exercises and upload them for her to analyze.
I have to say that it has been so educational for me to have her help. I will be the first to admit that I have a lot to learn. After we did the initial jump analysis I decided to get her foundation jumping DVD for a couple reasons. I like her manner of explaining things. It's simple and yet detailed and very organized. Another reason is that living where I do, I don't have ready access to experienced trainers on a frequent basis. Because of this I often find that even when I get books or DVD's that have great methods of training...I get stuck on an exercise and need help. Unfortunately, calling up Linda Mecklenburg or Susan Salo and asking for help in explaining what I'm doing wrong, is not an option. So Andrea's method has a huge advantage for me. I can work through the DVD and if I get stuck, I can just video what I'm doing and send it to her for help. How cool is that?
So, we're going back to basics again. But this time with a positive attitude and more confidence. :-) Some of the things we are working on are exercises to strengthen and raise awareness of her rear legs. Some of them we'd already done, and some we hadn't. Some are as simple as teaching your dog to "back", (which Dare already knows), also to rock back and push off with their hind legs, first into a sitting up position and then into a stand (which we hadn't done much). Then we are doing one jump work again, which will include baby front and rear crosses etc.
Anyway, this post is turning into a short novel. Sorry! If you're not snoring by now, or about to click over to the next more interesting blog, here is a video of Dare working on one of the very first exercises with one jump. We still aren't up to full height. I want to make sure that she's consistently using her rear at 14" before I go to 16".
Today was Dare's first agility funmatch! I knew it was going to be a really relaxed environment and so I decided to enter her in Pre-Novice. If it hadn't been with this group, I probably wouldn't have entered her yet, since we haven't even been running full courses at home, just sequences. There where some real highlights for us, and some not so great things too. The good news is that the good things waaaay outweighed anything else. At least in my mind.
THE GOOD: She held every startline! Yay! She did her 2o/2o on her Dogwalk in both runs. That might not seem huge, but a dog that ran after her on the first run was scared of the dogwalk, and so the handler had squeeze cheese and she put dobs of it on the dogwalk to coax her dog across. I almost didn't run Dare in the second run because of that. I didn't want her to get out there and then have her think that dogwalks were for sniffing. Several other dogs did the dogwalk without stopping though, so I decided to chance it. Dare never even paused. You can hear my friend videoing, saying "don't stop to sniff" LOL Maybe it helped.
THE BAD: The bad was all on my part. I just got back from a handling workshop with Stacy Peardot-Goudy on Tues., and she really emphasized to us, rewarding for pieces of things that go well, or that we want to reinforce. Seems simple, right? But like she pointed out, almost all of us stop and reward for contact performance, but when we struggle with jumping or weaving, or difficult handling sequences, we do them until we get it right, and usually instead of rewarding...we just keep running. She says it's probably because it's rewarding to us to continue, but is it really reinforcing to the dog? I had good intentions of stopping at certain points in the course to reward, but wehn I got out there, when it was going well, I just kept running. LOL When it didn't go smoothly, like when she'd refuse a jump or bail the contact on the A-frame, I would go back, fix it and then keep running. Ugh! That's bad. I really have to make a conscious effort to work on that one.
SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN: Dare's first A-frame was far from ideal. I really don't think it's her fault though. The club had it lowered down so far that I think it took Dare a bit by suprise. She came over the top and never got a toe in the yellow before she bailed. On the second run, I told her to take it easy and she did fine.
Anyway, here's the video from both of Dare's standard runs today. It was a fun day!
Thought I'd share how Dare is doing on her contact training for agility. Her dogwalk is full height and now we're just working on increasing speed, varying my location and stuff like that now. Here's the video of her 2o/2o on the dogwalk. You'll see that I missed her foot coming off because she had it back on before I turned around on the last repetition. LOL
Now for the teeter. I'm ready to take it up to full height too now. I think I'll stick with having keep all four feet on the teeter rather than a 2o/2o because I think there's less chance of it bouncing back up on her. Anyway, here's the teeter video.
Last of all...the A-frame. This is the newest obstacle for her. She seems comfortable with it at home, but the other day at a friend's house she ran up their full height A-frame and just absolutely launched herself airborne off way above the yellow. I'm sure that part of that is that she haven't worked on the A-frame at full height yet. I wonder if the pitch took her a bit by suprise. Nevertheless it really reinforced that I want to have a consistant performance at the current height, before I move it up any higher. Here's what it looks like so far though.
This blog is all about my Sheltie, Himark's Double Dare. She is a dream come true and this blog is a record of our training together for agility, obedience and just for enjoying life.
