Lessons From and For 4 Legs

Thank you for all of your kind thoughts on Thursday. Sometimes we all get into moods and it’s nice that there are kind people out there that will take time to leave a kind word!

Magnus’ class turned out great. I was not in top form, it is hard for me to train in overload mode, but he did great.

As classes should it revealed some holes in our training, but the best part was I learned how to do some of the exercises we’ve been working on here at home more effectively.

The class is only three dogs, which is wonderful. We get lots of individual attention that way. There is a five ear old Belgian Sheepdog named Zoro. He is gorgeous! He really gets to my love of big dignified black dogs. The other dog is (I think) a Bernese Mountain boy named Berkly.

The Importance of Body Awareness
Proprioception is defined by Wikipedia as, “from Latin proprius, meaning “one’s own” and perception, is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body.”

Our first class was focused on helping the pups get used to getting on strange objects and proprioception exercises. In agility dogs need to be highly aware of what part of their body is doing what and where it is doing it.

Excitement Short-Circuits the Brain
We used getting on a step stool, a small exercise disk, and wobble board to start the dogs getting used to where their feet are and strange objects.

Magnus took all that in stride as those are things we have worked with at home. My biggest challenge is his excitement level. He just gets “ooh, ooh this is sooo awesome my brain is short-circuiting on how awesome this is” excited.

I don’t think it is a bad thing, more of an unbalanced thing, probably due to age and lack of experience in working. So we will have to work on that.

This really came into play with the walk through a ladder exercise. The point is to teach the dog to pick up their rear feet and not touch the rungs of the ladder.

We have been working this at home, but again the excitement level gets in the way. At home he just wants to blast through to the target at the end. He doesn’t care who or what he tramples on the way, that target at then end is his! He does a killer impression of an one puppy heard of elephants. (Yes this is me laughing and sighing.)

The solution is to place a treat between each rung of the ladder so they have to slow down to get the treat. It helps. . . sort of. This needs lots of work.

Shaping Body Awareness
This class is heavily geared to shaping, which I love, but find hard to do in a public environment. Thus far it seems distractions are going to be a bigger challenge to me than Magnus!

My lack showed up in the perch exercise. It is totally new to him to put just his front feet on a box. Presentation of the box is the cue and the goal is have the dog learn to move only rear feet around the box.

The challenge in shaping is my fault really. You get what you pay for and since it was a challenge to get a down out of him I have paid heavily for them. Now the little monkey that wouldn’t ever lay down has a ridiculously firm default down. In shaping down is not a helpful behavior. So another thing to work on.

All in all it is going to be a great class. We have a long ways to go, he is young and has the dreaded adolescence looming, but this is great foundation for both of us.

Links
Perch work:
JRT Skeeter
Crystal and Maisy

Ladder work:
Black poodle

Balance Disk
Zelda (from :25-1:18)

Wobble board:
corgi