Monday, March 1, 2010

Let me tell ya what I want - what I really, really want...is yellow!

Over the last little while, I have been working on a 4otf in practice with Cheetah. It has been fairly successful and has been very successful for several students dogs. The problem really lies with the simple fact that there is only 1 criteria that I care about. I don't care if you stop 2o/2o, 4otf, 1rto, or belly slide through I WANT YELLOW!! After pondering this sad fact of my psyche, combined with the added admission that I am a adrenaline junkie and that only leads to one conclusion....you guessed it. I must figure out how to get a running dw/aframe on cheetah and NOT get it on the teeter. So here we go - running contacts take 4,563 ( actually I guess its only 4 or 5)

Poor Cheetah, she's going "what are we doing with wood today you psycho-path?" Luckily, she is game for whatever as long as there is a cookie involved. At last weekends trial, (see video)

She missed 2 dogwalks and it was rubberized. I really liked it and I needed one that I could lower and use flat on the ground if I was going attempt to train running contacts from the Dogwalk perspective. Up until now, I'd only looked at the aframe and that was not real successful. So with the fact that my current dogwalk was homemade on saw horses and couldn't be lowered and was getting unstable to the point that I held my breath when she got on it ( many months ago when there was no snow on the ground) I decided to take the considerable plunge and buy the dogwalk.

I stored most of it in the shed until we have a spring thaw, but I took one plank down in the basement and for the last week, I have been doing Silvia trkman's method with her. I only have 26 feet across, so it is not really enough room to "run" off of it but it is at least giving her the idea. I am using the clicker and feeding mostly from my hand, although I have put her food bowl down when we were on the last rep and she did go to it- if I said "get it" as she was going across the board. Last summer I had played briefly with a plank on the ground and her food bowl, but it made her stop in a 2o/2o - even though it was 20 feet away. Now, she is doing better with that. I just did 12 reps and recorded them finally, so I will get them up asap.

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