From there we went to Home Depot where we met Susan for a nosework practice. There was nothing really special about it - just good searches. We did vehicles, interior and exterior. Gimme did a nice job, but then she always does.
Agility class tonight presented some interesting challenges. One of which I will try to set up and train. William taped them for us. He's found it is just entirely too time intensive to download them to youtube because of how big the files are. So now we are each bringing our own disks and he loads them up and sends them home with us. I have to run a conversion on them so I can edit them with the software on my computer.
Gimme did really well in class and especially considering she was doing it all in the dreaded panties. Actually she doesn't pay much attention to them. I was glad to use them in class because we'll be running Barn Hunt in them this weekend, so it was nice to gear her brain up to them before then. There were a couple of distracted moments, but overall I thought she showed nice focus.
We had a problem with a specific jump to aframe sequence. Gimme going in the tunnel under the aframe and she isn't a tunnel sucker. Of course the real problem was my line to the aframe, at the last moment I'd have to move wide to keep from tripping over the tunnel myself and Gimme would then get drawn right into the tunnel. We did several things to work her through it. I thought Blynn was going to die when I gave Gimme the "creativity cookie" for jumping on the tunnel and side-mounting the aframe (when Blynn was blocking the tunnel).
In the end it wasn't Gimme's problem. Dogs will always pay more attention to motion cues. If there is a conflict between motion cues and verbal cues, motion cues win. Because of the location of the other jump, I couldn't take the sequence in a straight line. The solution was to simply give Gimme the verbal "climb" cue much sooner, so she could move ahead of me and take the aframe before I needed to move away. Well duh...
She did a good job on her second run. The stop in the poles was a total crack up... I swear the way she snapped back, it was like there was odor there. She's never done that before, so it was kinda weird. I can see the rear cross on the flat before the weaves was really bad handling... so we could practice that. Still I was pleased with both runs how nicely she got into the weaves on challenging entries. I couldn't figure out at the time what Blynn meant when she said I stepped right in front of her at the double, but on video you'll see that I stepped into her at the end of the weaves, which changed her line and made the double "inconvenient".
The sequence I want to try working on at home is the first part of this course, the way Blynn had me try to work it at the end of this run. I want to do it the way I teach a 270 turn... starting with the jumps set for a 180 and then gradually move the second one until it turns into a 270. I'm sure that would make it very clear to Gimme what I was trying to get her to do. She got through it, but it was far from smooth and I'm thinking she didn't really learn anything.
This weekend we are going to our second Barn Hunt trial, competing at the open level. We'll have four runs and only need 3 legs to title. Cross your fingers for us. No matter how it goes, Miss Gimme will have a blast.
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