A more exciting obedience and agility weekend

On Saturday we were at a 4-H Dog Judge’s training day. I was there to be learning and I was there to help. I spent part of the day frantically taking notes about how to be even better at judging. And for part of the day I was a dog handler. One of our teams wasn’t able to make it due to the weather and Griffin and I got to be the demo team for Graduate Open and Utility.   He did a really nice job working. After each exercise he would settle on his mat while there was discussion.   He was especially excellent on the moving stand for exam!

I found it amusing that the compliments we got were about how happy he was.   He does appear to be very happy while working, but that should be most dogs, not an abnormal thing!

On Sunday we went to a CPE agility trial and got to watch a lot of 4-H’ers run, several other people we know, and a few students.  One of our students had her very first agility trial (they did -beautifully-, no one would have known it was their first trial!).

Now…at the last agility trial, 2 weeks ago, Griffin was too friendly.  During those 2 weeks we worked specifically on NOT visiting people. We would set up various scenarios where interesting people would be available. Rewards for passing the people. If he visited, we would “confiscate” him and take him to his crate/reset.  He was very unlikely to visit. The last 2 sessions I don’t think he did at all. We went as far as to have people hiding near the end of the tunnel and he would only see him when he came out of the tunnel. We had people sitting and eating, sitting and playing with toys, throwing things, anything we could think of.

And I think it worked!  Look at that bar setter at the end of the tunnel!

He had one short visit on his 5 runs, he didn’t jump up on the person and he very quickly came back to me.   Are there other explanations? Yes. He could have just had a bad weekend last time. He could have had a random good day on Sunday. He could have been tired from Saturday.  I can’t know for sure. But I suspect the training helped.

2/5 of our runs were good.  The other 3? He still ran off.  He ran to the gate but didn’t leave the ring. Unfortunately this organization requires you to be disqualified (NQ?) if your dog is at the gate.  On one of his attempts to get to the gate, someone tried to be helpful and stand in his path. He didn’t slow down and just went between her legs!

To see him trying to leave the ring:

What’s next?  A lot of obedience training. We’ll probably enter (another) trial soon.   We have a few things to work on for that.  Agility, I don’t know when we’ll do another trial. We’ll have to practice running straight towards things he wants, yet turn away. And I need to find some ways we can re-create his trial speed in training so that we can be more effective.  Maybe go back to a group class?