We were re-inspired to practice waiting patiently. All of my dogs are very impatient about waiting for their training turns. When we’re at the big training facility I leave them in an office up front and in the last year they’ve learned to be calm if they get left behind Read more…
Griffin and I are working towards competition obedience. We did our first match (practice trial) at an obedience club last night. If I had planned a little better, I would have entered Viktor too! Griffin and I missed the deadline for the trial this weekend because I had lost my Read more…
Griffin had his best lesson ever last Monday! I wasn’t sure if it was going to happen due to a and watching a live stream of our instructor competing out of state the day before… but we had an 8AM agility session. I wasn’t prepared – I didn’t have Read more…
This week we’ve traveled up to Minnesota to take the dogs to the rehab vet again. It’s been an adventure as always – great traveling, I had a second person (and her dog) with us this time, making me a little less stressed about some aspects of the traveling. Read more…
We did our first WCRL rally trial of the year today. Three trials in one day – I judged a whole trial (my first time with Level 3), ran Griffin in all 9 classes and Blaze in two! Because all of my hosting and judging responsibilities my dogs didn’t get Read more…
Griffin and I had a good opportunity to an obedience run through at a new place last night. There are not many places around here offering that option, and this worked out really well because it was a brand-new-to-us location which would be a good test for how he might Read more…
I wish I had video showing exactly what Griffin’s doing with his nose at the gate – he’s so adorable. This is something we need for our competition obedience training. We’ve been adding in an automatic duration nose touch to the gate. In the previous session I was giving him Read more…
I read this blog post today, “Perfection in Training” which is about taking a realistic look at the situation when a dog is ‘perfect’ in training but not in competition (or real life – I hear it a lot in basic manners classes). When I work with students/clients I often Read more…
My first few attempts at this post were 5x longer. Even with only one flight experience I learned a lot. Read more about our adventure here. In the past I had said I would absolutely never fly a large dog – it was probably too dangerous and stressful. Now I’ve Read more…
Griffin has been on restricted activity all month. We managed to still do a lot of training – it just was the things I should probably do rather than the things that are more fun to work on. It’s been hard to not do the sequencing and trial prep we Read more…