Kimba Training

Kim was flying last night, we had a lot of fun and some very nice runs. She always works better if she’s wound up by watching other dogs work, and hopefully now she’s moving up the levels there will be more exciting dogs for her to watch before she runs. That’s probably a very un-PC agility comment to make but I don’t care!

Pull-thrus. Did lots of pull-thrus, something we always need to work on. Sometimes they’re brilliant, sometimes they’re really not. We had a few arguments on the top wonky-line of 4 about coming through one of the gaps but we got there in the end, and she did the rest well. When it flows, pull-thrus are easy and we can do them, but when it doesn’t flow, Kim has a tendency to dig in her heels and argue. I’m always tempted to let her win the arguements because secretly I agree that it is stupid and her way is better. Can’t tell her that though, she’d never let me get away with it.

Seesaw. Over the years I have spent so much time on the seesaw with Kim, and none of it seems to have worked. She just finds the seesaw scary, probably from starting out on a really lightly weighted “homemade” one when I had no idea there were actually agility competitions and so on. At one point earlier this year we went back to basics and held the end for her and lowered it slowly, which actually made everything worse, so we stopped that pretty quickly. I think what we have now is as good as it’s going to get, which is a shame. On the other hand, having played with positioning and approaches for the past few weeks I know where I need to be to ensure she hits the contact and I know that I can be in that place every time as no matter where I run to or stand, it doesn’t make a difference to her speed.