Pouliot Seminar

Another great day.  Michele Pouliot is amazing.  If you have any interest in freestyle, she is definitely the person you want to spend your money seeing.  Her routines are so creative - it just amazes me how she thinks and comes up with stuff.  Her approach to teaching things is also very creative.  What a day.

And to make it even better, Gimme had another great day.  She did very well on all her work sessions.  The morning wasn't as good as it started yesterday, but then when I simplified and made it easier for her, she really got into what we were doing.  I was very pleased with her focus and attitude. 

Again at lunch we did a long session of playing look-at-that so she could just look at the things that distract her and get it out of her system.  So in the afternoon the first two sessions were really good.  She was very focused and working very hard.  There we are working just twenty five feet from the nearest dog team - and there were a dozen of them. 

I was so thrilled with how she did this weekend... with just a little bit of CU work, she was able to mostly ignore the other dogs.  Not ignore as in compelled to ignore, rather ignore as in not really interested in them, preferring to win treats from me.  That is a very huge milestone.

During the last session of the day she didn't do well.  She was well-behaved, just unable to focus.  That's understandable - there were a LOT of the teams that were pretty wiped out by then.  So I just made it all about rewarding any effort to keep her attention on me, which was about all she was up for.  I was very liberal with the treats, so it was a good experience for her, even if we didn't accomplish anything in terms of what the session was for.

When we got home she just crashed for the evening.  Today we had a nice shaping session and has been crashed ever since then.  Tomorrow we'll get to walk on the fort, so that will be nice for both of us.

BTW I met another lady with a Papillion that is working the CU stuff.  Both she and her dog were nice.  The dog was doing really well handling the distraction.  "Control Unleashed" works and I highly recommend it.