Dylan,  Training

Dylan's Blog – December

It’s been a whole week of new experiences for my Dyl this week! The Christmas Tree has gone up, which was very confusing, but he’s been very good with it. I did find a chewed up bauble this morning, which was undoubtably him, but I think Kim had something to do with it too, since she looked very guilty and ran away when I picked it up. Our normal routine is just generally disrupted at the moment, what with late-night shopping and unexpected guests popping in, and there being no agility/flyball training.

Also introduced him to some “trotting poles” which in theory will make him think about his paws. In practice, he just knocked them over with his nose, but we’ll get over that. We used to use trotting-poles to regulate the horse’s stride, encouraging him to extend or shorten as required. In this case, even if it just gets Dylan thinking about where his paws are and where they’re going, it’ll help for obstacles like the dogwalk, or jumps. Speaking of obstacles, I got out the big hoola-ring today and propped it up with some sticks. It looked like a very enormous tyre, and after some initial wariness Dylan was running through it without a problem. I’d rather introduce him to things like this now, then the “real thing” won’t be as scary.

We’ve also been doing a little bit of target training outside, but nothing too much. Both Kim & Dylan are getting there with it – Kim’s been practising on the staircase, but I’ve held off doing that with Dylan because of his joints.

Anyway, generally very proud of the lad today, he did a full 25 minutes worth of training. I’ve been varying the length of time I work with him, starting off with only a couple of minutes and then 10, 15, 20, and so on. Tomorrow I think we’ll only do 15 minutes or so to balance it out (depends on the weather!)