Weave Entries, amongst other things

We’ve just moved to our winter venue for training and so I was really looking forward to working Dylan as it was a brand new environment for him. Apparently he really likes working indoors! I’ve never had him so enthused or speedy, which was both great and a bit of a worry because I really need to get my handling into gear.

We worked on the dogwalk and on weave entries mainly. Dogwalk went very well, he missed his 2o2o once and stopped off the board, but still got the contact and he made the effort to stop, just going a bit too quick. Weave entries were … better? Dylan is developing a bit of a hang up on entries and I really want to stop it before it gets worse, so I planned on working him on straightforward entries, with the channels opened up a smidge and playing ball after every nailed entry. He missed probably 30% and did classic displacement behaviour like at Lincoln on all missed occasions; head up, looking around, pretending both me and the weaves don’t exist. That started to improve by the end of the night as well, he was coming back faster for a second go round and not panicking as much, and the slightly open channels were a bit more inviting too.

I’m wondering if the weave entry issue has come from the Introductory Final when he get pretty stressed over the weaves. He found the whole atmosphere overwhelming and I was more tense than normal. Over the rest of Finals weekend he was great with weave entries, picking up some fairly difficult ones from a distance and not worrying at all. At Yorkshire Bouncers he started missing and it was worse again at Lincoln, so we’ll just have to see how it goes this weekend. I’m not really sure how to tackle it in competition, I don’t want to pull him off and set him up before the weaves but I also don’t want to let him keep going and missing.

One positive is that he’s stopped popping poles — once he starts weaving he keeps weaving to the end. One step forward and two steps back?!

Finally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI6FrxGkiC0
Refusal or not? The judge obviously had to think about it because they didn’t raise their hand immediately, but I wouldn’t have called it. Yes, it is an overly long pull-thru and it’s messy, but I wouldn’t have said it was a refusal even by FCI standards. Tough call!