Dylan's Blog – April

The weather has cooled down a bit so Dylan and I have been topping up on our training outdoors. We’ve cracked target training — he runs to the target and downs on it whilst touching it with his nose, which is exactly what I was looking for! After a long discussion with various people (part of which I alluded to way back in September, but never went into much detail over) I decided to go with the 4-off position for the dogwalk and A-Frame, as found at the Agility Addicts website. I’m going to start asking him to do it on staircases at home over the next month or so, and then I’ll see if I can find an A-Frame/dogwalk, somewhere!

I’ve also sacrificed some of my stick-in weaves to Dylan, and have bent them at the base so that they’re V-Weaves. Kim learnt to weave with v-weaves, and I’d like to do the same with Dylan, although I’m probably going to use the channel-weaves as well. At the moment the weaves are bent almost flat, and there are only four of them, and so far I’ve just let Dylan have a sniff and walked him through a few times. He’s certainly not going to have the same problems as Kim (whose legs are too short for the left-right pattern!) and he enjoyed himself.

It’s Dylan’s 1st Birthday this Saturday. I can’t believe he’s a year old now! I’m still in no particular rush to get him out on the circuit for his 18 month birthday. I think I’ll aim to have him running at the Northern Winter Series over the winter season, with his first show this time next year at the first EMDAC Summer Series show — April 19th/20th, so it’ll be the day before his 2nd birthday, but it’s all a bit provisional depending on how his training goes and how Kim is doing!