Gimme did well last week, but was a bit wild. We didn't get in our usual Thursday walk on the fort, so I'm sure that was why. Once she settled down she did very well and I was really pleased with her.
Blynn gave us two training tasks for the week. One is to teach Gimme to take jumps when I run by them without me having to cue them; it should be an assumption on her part (assuming I'm not giving her other instructions). Second was to teach her to do the send to the back side of a jump on a verbal cue. Gimme does it when my handling is correct, but there are times when it would be more convenient if I could cue her verbally to do it and get to moving down course knowing she would do it.
So it could be something like this. Its not a hard sequence, but
depending on what comes after #3, it might be better if the dog could do
it independently. Blynn is seeing a lot of these sends to the backside
in Excellent.I used the hoop in the house to teach it to her. "Send" with her on the right was easy, but with her on the left it was really challenging. I finally concluded its because she turns so much easier to the right, so the moment I stopped handling it (adding distance), she was trying to get to the hoop - going between me and it. So I taught it to her starting with the hoop set so the side was pointed at us... then gradually rotated it clockwise until it was presented the way we would expect to see a jump. That mostly went well... There was another brief segment where she went back to taking it from the front. I remembered sometimes the best approach with her is to let her sort something out. She did it four times and didn't get rewarded for it, so she went back to doing it my way.
Class tonight started very well. We did have a fly-off from the dog walk - something she rarely does. So we did it over and it was perfect then. Then we got a bail from the teeter. Did it again and then she was flawless and F-A-S-T for the rest of our turn. William may have caught it on tape and if I see it I'll post a link. There was a segment with with back-to-back half-front-crosses and it was very challenging. I got through it both times and was moving so fast to keep up with my speed demon, I fully expected to have body parts flinging off of me.
For our second session, she just didn't do well. She didn't want to do the tire again - even though she did it on the earlier session. We tried working through it with some success. Then she bypassed a jump and only took it when I presented it extra clear. I've noticed a pattern with her that she will go under the tire or bail on the teeter if she's not comfortable and sometimes bypasses jumps too. So we stopped trying to do the course and did a few tricks for Blynn so we could end on a positive note. It may be that the dogwalk fly-off jolted her back and it just took a bit for it to bother her.
I'm going to email Tonya and get her in as soon as I can for a treatment. Next week is conveniently a skip week for agility. And so now I'm going to camp out on the couch with my little girl. I found a warm spot on her back, so will try to do some energy work for her.
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