Maturity

It’s been a busy week for Rio this week, she had a bath on Monday, agility class on Tuesday, and obedience class on Thursday!

She was super at agility, we were building on the wing wrap work we’ve been doing for the past few weeks and she was excellent. The jump height is increasing (I think we’re up to 10″ now) and she’s occasionally overextending, but she works to get the wrap and I’m happy with it. We’ll start bumping up to 12″ this weekend and see where we go. I’ve been sort of lazy on training at home, otherwise we’d probably be much higher than that by now. She’s so much more focused, despite the presence of the other dogs and handlers, including her new fancy Rizzle. (Rio and Rizzle have met three times, but apparently have recognised that they are kindred spirits and would really very much like some time to race around being lunatics together). She’s also impatient and noisy and I love it! She does have a tendency to run off and offer some equipment if I’m not fast enough in setting back up; I should probably work on that, but I think it’s kind of adorable.

We also got to go and do some pet obedience, something I haven’t done in a proper class for 8 years or so. I was a little bit nervous, thinking Rio would be the class hooligan, but actually she was great! We mainly worked on loose lead walking, which is something Ri does struggle with as everything is SO EXCITING all the time, but it turns out she can do it, she just doesn’t really want to.

The class is run by North K9 (http://www.northk9.co.uk/). My friend Claire started North K9 earlier this year, and is hoping to quit her current job to take up dog training full time. Since she’s awesome at it, I wanted to support her. I also figured it would be good for Rio to get some more structured training and socialisation, we can’t really do too much of that. I’m also really excited that so much of the class is focused on playing with your dog and reading canine body language as well as “traditional” obedience. (Rio and I were top of the class for Play. We’ve got that one covered!)