April 8th Practice

In Attendance:

lupine
tea
zydeco
kort
bosley
gyp
pixel
roxy

What we did

Sending up the line to the box with a food bowl on it. This worked great to give the dogs confidence to race to the box and back to us. Pixel is the only one still missing the first jump. :o)

Sending to the box with a dumbbell with two jumps.

Sending to the box with a dumbbell with four jumps.

We started both of these exercises by running with the dog, and built up to just sending them alone.

Ended on discrimination- again everyone is doing a super job. It's neat to see the wheels turn when the dogs accidentally grab, or sniff at the wrong dumbbell. We had LOTS of success last night with this.

Next time we are going to work on just Box Work- teaching the dogs to check all four spots by going around the box and not through the box :o) This will make our box loader a little happier.

More discrimination- we will work on the flat but with four dumbbells set out in the layout of the box. Once the dog is solid we will move to the box.

More jumping- we need to get our dogs to chase us back down the line and encourage more speed on the way back. Some dogs still need to work on turning back to the jumps off the box. (PIXEL!)

We've also decided that November will be our first official race. I will start the paperwork in the next few months.

Oh- and our box and dumbbells arrived and will be painted and ready to go next week! We are meeting on Thursday the 15th at 7:40.