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…
In early November we had our obedience seminar with Fanny Gott. Going into the seminar I was disappointed and frustrated – we had barely done any of our homework since last seeing her in the spring. Griffin had been on very restricted activity over the summer and we only ended up Read more…
Griffin’s training is coming together very well, even with all of his time off this year. We’re looking at event listings and our calendar for the next few months to try and decide which events to do. Unless you know how to look, it can be quite hard to find 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…
We went to Minnesota again to visit the excellent rehab vet and help our friend Megan with a work project. The travel went well and once we actually left, the traveling was more relaxed than our first trip. We attempted to stop at state parks in Wisconsin but apparently you 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…
A big part of the big trip was to get in a lot of training time. It was very nice to get to spend so much time with Griffin and in many ways it was a lot easier to do training when I wasn’t teaching training classes for hours each Read more…
During my trip I got to see many different dog activities and training. Here are few notes about what we did, learned, and observed Herding: Early on in my trip I was at a herding seminar. The dogs made amazing progress in two days, it was impressive how the training progressed Read more…
Long seminars are the best kind of training seminars. In 2-3 days you just barely get to understand the material, you maybe make a bit of progress, you start to get work done, and you start to get to know the presenter and attendees. Then everyone goes home. At longer Read more…