We had some fun surprises this week when the 2015 rankings were posted for some of the programs. In WCRL rally we may 6th in ARCH points – only the preliminary results are posted. I’m not quite sure how that happened as we’ve never had enough points in the past – Read more…
One of the things we’ve been working on is setting up specific courses and/or sequences and running things created by other people. When I set up my own exercises I end up with more common patterns and I don’t get the same practice in remembering a course. We work through Read more…
The day after Rudy went home, Kate came for a visit. I worked with her a few times as a puppy and now she’s been with me for a week to work on better house manners and some retrieve foundations. She’s six months old but far bigger than Viktor! I Read more…
I’ve experimented with various systems/plans for tracking training sessions and making rough (or detailed) plans towards our goals. I’ve also had various ways to roughly track student progress to be sure group classes and private lesson clients are making appropriate progress – and to see if changes to the lessons Read more…
No new update on his health. We still have about a month until our next visit. He’s still on restricted activity with swimming 5 days a week and about 15 minutes of low-activity training walks and then some almost-no-activity training. In many ways he acts like a much younger puppy. Read more…
Last month we did our first AKC obedience trial. It was very small – I thought that was probably due to the show being on Friday. I’ve learned that it was probably more about the trial grounds/location. Yesterday’s trial was also a Friday but much bigger! Many more dogs entered, 3 Read more…
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…
I heard about Retrieving for All Occasions over a year ago – and that it would eventually be available in English. I held off on buying it, knowing that I would reference and use an English version more than a Swedish one. And now it’s finally available! As an e-book now ($15) Read more…
Stimulus Control is an important part of training – we want our dogs to understand when to do specific behaviors. This can be part of having reliable responses and is especially important for some types of competition training. A short version: The dog should respond to the cue with the 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…