Group lesson

The theme of today's lesson was distance handling, including these two sequences. My artistic abilities are limited as is my proficiency in Paint, so kindly use your imagination to picture in these schematics a frame, a tunnel (heh), some weaves, and three jumps.

In exercise 1, I was glad for the opportunity to work on the frame/tunnel discrimation, and thanks to some patterning we did first, Walter was doing "out tunnel" pretty well. (But, later on when we tried the same exercise using the frame instead of the tunnel, he kept going to the darn tunnel.) This being a distance exercise, Walter couldn't find the weave entry to save his life (kept entering on the wrong side), but no surprise there since weave entries have admittedly been a big gap in our training. I'll be bringing out the living room weaves this winter I think.


In exercise 2, the goal was to be able to stay in the spot marked H. After he popped out between poles 5 and 6, the instructor tossed a toy for him a couple of times after the weaves, and then, lo and behold he completed the sequence on two of two attempts, with the instructor throwing a toy for him after the frame. I have to admit I was surprised that he did so well at this exercise and need to trust in his abilities more. He may still be a "baby" in so many ways, but he's no longer a baby agility dog. :-)

Running list (no pun intended) of winter projects:

- circle work with him on the inside
- weave entries