Trick Training with Props!

We have some new toys!

Ex-sports equipment is a lot of fun for me and the hounds. Both are foam-padded with a tough outer, and have been acquistioned from the old storeroom. They weren’t being used to their full potential!

Kim has been learning to walk backwards up the stairs, which has taken her longer than you might think. She has a decent amount of back end awareness and I know she understands what I want her to do, but she can’t really see the point. She just thinks it’s easier all around if she just walks up front-ways. It is adorable when she does occasionally get frustrated with me though and starts offering every other behaviour she can think of, which I think I resist quite well! For a dog who only started working with the clicker this year, she’s really taken to it. She is a seriously smart cookie, I can only imagine how smart she could tell me she is if we’d been working with the clicker from puppyhood.

Dylan, on the other hand, is a very good and loyal little mummy’s boy and always does what he’s told. Either that or he doesn’t have the brains to think of other solutions! But he picked up the walking backwards upstairs in about five seconds, so we moved on to teaching him a handstand … kind of. http://fjoiris.livejournal.com/ has been teaching her Whippet Boing! to do a handstand, but I think Dylan is probably a bit heavy to pull this off completely. At the moment his back feet are still resting on the highest step, but the balance is coming and his front end is getting stronger, which is really what I was aiming for. His 2o2o in agility is lovely, but it won’t harm him to have a bit more front-end balance and muscle for when we finally get that creepy-contact thing out of the way.

The big ramp I’m just using to practise balancing on at the moment, because I can’t think of anything else to do with it right now! It is fairly hard for me to balance on with one foot. Kim and Dylan can hold their begs pretty well now, apparently they can balance a lot better than I can.

Dylan worked really well at agility last night, probably the best session we’ve had. He can be a lot faster than Kim and is always a lot more responsive, but he does prefer the big open courses where he can stretch out and actually jump extended. Still a lot of work to do on speeding up his contacts but we tried a stride regulator for the first time which did improve things once we’d worked out the best place to put it. I still don’t think he’s going to be fast enough to get out of Grade 3 but I think we should do well enough to put an Agility Warrant on him. As for BAA, we’ll have to see how it goes next week at EMDAC!