First, last night was agility class. Gimme wasn't as focused as she can be, mostly because she hasn't gotten to run for five days. She really needs that about twice a week. It didn't help that the arena was pretty messy either; tons of "field cookies" to self reward with. She did better when I remembered to bring out the peanut butter...
After that I went to my parents and fed them dinner. After dinner we did the Gimme Show... showing off the latest tricks we are working on. They were suitably impressed with her learning to crawl backward - its very cute. Unfortunately, she offered me a "grape" (roll-over) in a spot I would never have cued it, and rolled right into the low brickwork curb around their wood burning stove. I know it hurt a lot.
After that she wouldn't even do grape in another spot where she had plenty of room. I spent about ten minutes encouraging her and she finally did it - so she got paid with a leftover slice of pepperoni pizza. Today she is doing grape very willingly.
Tonight we were supposed to be getting introduced to food distractions in a container search. Our trial is just 5 weeks away and I think we should have been doing that a long time ago. When we got to class Joyce was setting up to play another game. It was a fun game, but doesn't really get us ready for the challenges we'll face at a NW2 trial.
Thus, I've decided I need to just get busy and do what I can to get us ready,
instead of relying on Joyce. She is giving us challenges that are barely
more than NW1 stuff and calling that prep for NW2. There are two of us entered in the NW2 trial the
end of April and I know she isn't covering half of what we'll need... so I'm
just going to have to get in gear, make a plan and train it on my own.
Tonight our class consisted of multiple chairs scattered around the room (11) and multiple hides under the seat. Joyce said she wasn't going to tell us how many there were, but quickly let slip that there were 6 hides. The goal was to see how many each dog could find in 3 minutes. Naturally Gimme did the best, finding 5 of them. This was despite being distracted by people from the private lesson (upstairs) coming and going to the bathroom. No one else got more than 3.
The second time Joyce set the chairs in sort of a row and turned some over and some on their sides. Again Gimme found 5 of them. All the dogs improved and a couple found 5, but that might be because their owners were kinda helping them, by subtly guiding them near chairs where they could see the odor. I didn't help Gimme, but then, she doesn't need it.
Gimme did get into some major paw whacking toward the end of the second search. Joyce sees that as evidence that a paw indicator is going to cost us faults. I think Gimme did it because we stayed there so long because she hadn't found the 6th one yet and was caught up in converging odor - Gimme was basically doing her best to get me to pay for that one again and when it didn't work, she got frustrated. She would never be faced with this kind of set-up in a trial... besides I'm willing to take the occasional fault to maintain her enthusiasm.
For the third search - we had 7 chairs in a row and one hide. Gimme took waaaay too long to find it. It didn't help that our friend Mary got up right as Gimme got started, to go get Grafton. So Gimme had to go visiting and that ate up time.
I did ramp up my enthusiasm for her finds throughout class and could see that she liked it. I am also encouraging her to pull into her harness at the start line. Joyce didn't like that... oh well... I have some ideas for how to train that a little at home. I want her to know she can pull hard even when she has not yet been given the search cue, in preparation for implementing some of the things Josh suggested.
After class we went walking... my toes are still cold...
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