First Agility Seminar

I enrolled Gimme in a one day Novice agility seminar with Stacy Peardot-Goudy.  I honestly wasn't expecting much, since she is still very much a puppy even if she looks all grown up.  Plus we've done very little agility training.  She has had the experience of going through jump uprights, with bars on the ground.  She has also gone over an aframe a few times and over the baby dogwalk in our yard dozens and dozens of times.  Naturally she is quite adept at tunnels having grown up with a kitty tunnel in the puppy pen.  She also likes to play on a Buja board; it is yet another thing she has invented to make me give her treats.

About the only skills I have concentrated on are the foundation recall skills based on Linda Mecklenburg's handling system.  That is so important to the Awesome Paws Handling System (APHS), so we started that very early and its practically second nature to Gimme.  We've done a lot of work with her moving beside me following my hands and I've also done some flatwork - especially teaching her a front cross. 

Gimme's growth plates won't close for another 4 to 6 months, so I'm in no hurry to do more with her.  She has enough kamikaze tendencies that I don't need to add to it.  I've watched some puppy agility classes and the instructors seem to think that just leaving the bars on the ground is enough to protect joints.  I think repetitively luring tight turns around jump uprights is stressful; anything repetitive has a tendency to be stressful.  Puppies do enough crazy stuff without us adding to the mix with repetitive physical training.  I am constantly amazed (and saddened) by the people who feel the need to fast track their puppies in agility.  That's not for us, so Gimme is on the FUN track instead.

At the seminar, when it came to select a jump height - I had planned to do zero height (bars on the ground), but there was a tiny Chihuahua doing 4 inches, so we joined her. 

Needless to say, I expected Gimme to be so distracted for most of the seminar that she wouldn't be able to do anything.  We took a half hour private lesson the day before, which was at the same location as the seminar.  The lesson was devoted to teaching Gimme to follow my hands and walk through the course and through jump uprights as we came upon them.  She did pretty good at it, so I hoped she would be able to do that the next day.

On the day of the seminar, I purposely got there early and was one of the first to set up.  It only took me a minute or two to set up, since I'd left my chair and Gimme's soft crate there from the lesson the day before.  We set up well away from everyone else and I brought Gimme in right away, taking advantage of the extra time to let her get used to all the other arrivals.  She did pretty good, until she saw her old friend Anda - a young BC she played with when she was still a very young puppy herself.  That was very enticing, indeed.

Gimme spent much of the day doing relaxation protocol, chewing on her rawhide and enjoying her peanut butter bone.  As she did at the match, when she got really comfortable, she started coming out of the safe place crate with her peanut butter bone or the rawhide, laying in the grass to enjoy them.  We had MANY walks in the large part of the field set aside for potty walks -- not that she needed to potty, but just to give her a break from the distraction and excitement.  Toward the end of the day she climbed into my lap and lounged there watching the others and even laid her head down briefly.  That is huge for my busy girl. 

On our first couple turns on course, I tried the method we'd worked on the day before and it just wasn't working.  I couldn't deliver treats fast enough to keep Gimme's attention.  She was on leash, so she couldn't leave, but it was just not turning into a productive experience.  After the second turn I thought it through and decided that method was simply too boring in this distracting environment... it was a lot like loose leash walking.  Gimme also started a lot of sniffing -- whether she was looking for treats or giving me calming signals is open for debate.

So anyway, I decided we needed to make things more fun.  My solution was to just handle the sequences as if she really had more training and see what happened -- it certainly couldn't be worse than what we'd done so far.  I started out holding her leash but would quickly drop it and let her drag it.  Gimme did great!  She followed me through the course and was doing all the moves as if we'd actually trained them. 

In the course of the day she did pinwheels, serpentines, threadles, two-seventy turns and forward sends to the back side of the jump!  Other than the pinwheel, you wouldn't see any of those in a novice course.  It was so cool how well she did.  I wasn't luring her, except at the very beginning to get her started.  I really was just handling it much as I would were she trained and ready for novice competition.  It is certainly a testament to how intuitive APHS is that Gimme acted like all this stuff made perfect sense to her, not to mention that it was FUUUUNNNNNNN!

By afternoon Gimme was doing short stays at the startline, allowing me to get a bit of a lead out.  She's always been really good at stays, so it was nice to show them off in this setting.

I lost her attention just a few times and for the most part she would come right back.  That is, except for the one time when she decided check out the wading pool.  She seems to think the water tastes different in different places in the pool.  She would take a sip or two, step forward one step, then drink some more.  She sampled the water all the way around the pool before realizing that her Mum was missing.  Then she ran out looking for me and was quite relieved to find me hiding behind a stump.  She didn't take her eyes off me after that.  She knows from experience during our walks that once my hiding tendencies flare up, there is a strong likelihood it will reoccur, multiple times.

All in all it was a very fun day and I think Gimme had a great positive experience.  She's pretty certain she is ready for competition and should just start at the excellent level.  I agreed with her that she is quite likely right, but that AKC has their rules and they are inflexible on that point, requiring all dogs to start out like novices, so she will just have to humor them.  She only pouted for a minute...