Ideas To Throw Around

I'm starting to teach Yoshi "stupid tricks". I think it will help him have hind end awareness as he never gets good footing..maybe because he needs some extra help. I need to interact more with him and teach him new things so agility wont get to be the same old same old. I am starting to work with him with mini sessions with learning tricks. Since yesterday he has learned basic versions of "crawl", "sit pretty" (though I wont call it that!), "bow", and "praise". I also started on picking up certain feet on command (this one will take a while!) I havent started the clicker on the tricks yet as I was seeing how he reacted to this new routine first. He seems VERY interested in this new thing so I am going to bring out the clicker probably today during our next session. I am going to start working Yoshi at my parents a bit more so I can get him sharp for the trials coming up. Our last few lessons have not been our best, but I might be looking too deeply into it since I am getting nervous! I might schedule a private lesson with Rachel if I feel like we need it.

I am going to get brave soon and start trying to run again... it will kill my shattered foot and shin splints but it will be good for Yoshi.

I went to this website of a VERY successful handler and dog (World Champions) and I got some REALLY great ideas from her, and she really makes training sound more fun to look at it from her point of view. I have some great ideas to try out now.... here we go!!!

Em- I didnt see a blog to reply on so I am writing on here. Yoshi wont be doing USDAA because he is 17" tall which would require him to jump 22". I dont want to do the performance division because I feel like he has a lot of potential and want him to go as far as possible. He could not hold up to jumping 22" due to his straight shoulders and he physically can barely jump that high to begin with. There are a few USDAAs here, but so much more AKC and I really want to concentrate on AKC with him since he can go all the way in AKC. I will do USDAA probably with my next dog, but just not with Yoshi as it is not very fair for him.

Class Indoors

With all of the rain we had, class was indoors last night. Which is a good and bad thing. Bad because its smaller in there and Yoshi cant get a grip on the mats very well..for some reason he never gets his footing very well. Reliant might be just a dream with him, because he has terrible time getting footing anywhere, he scrambles and tries to go faster..if he would just learn to settle a tiny bit then he would be able to go so much faster than he tries to.. goofy dog. Anyways it was good because he does need practice getting his footing..and because since everything is a lot closer together it got me on my toes and had me calling him off obstacles a lot more. He got some VERY hard weave pole entrances like a champ. I mean he was almost knocking his face in them and not even blinking he was just weaving like crazy. At one point, one of the entrances was almost a 90 degree into them and at first I compensated for him and turned him out a little. The next time I did not move and wanted to see if he got it himself... and he did! Not bad at all! Not much else to really say about the class. Just some normal stuff. The A frame/tunnel stuff sometimes still gets us. I might get out my old a frame for december and do various tunnel and a frame exercises. Along with I need to brush up his dogwalk contacts. Of course I think Im going to work at weave poles from higher speed stuff as Novice typically doesnt have so many crazy turns and so I need to make sure we are up for a high speed into weaves because the weave poles MORE likely will have a more straightforward entrance.. I dont want him to blow an easy entrance! I think Im just going to set up some stuff and hopefully my parents wont go mad with agility equipment in their yard for a month.. hey at least I warned them =)

I sent in my entry form for an AKC show the 2nd week in January and also for his CPE the first weekend in January. We are waiting for Flashpaws in Katy to open..which if you dont get your entry in right away it will be full the next day...so I am waiting on pins and needles. With all of the AKCs and CPEs (3 of CPE) in this area, Im going to have a full spring time here. I think we are sticking with just those two associations for the first of this year. He cant do NADAC, USDAA (which we wont do anyway), or ASCA until March 08 anyway. Maybe we might try one of them out at the end of this next year and see how we like it.

Interesting Times.... *sigh*

Yoshi only had a Tuesday night class because well..Thanksgiving was on Thursday so PAWSitive just didnt have their classes at all for the week. The grounds were a bit soft and soggy so it made for a different sort of class. All the dogs were more cautious and not up to normal speed. Which made me feel like I was handling in slow motion. I definitely feel like we did not gain anything really.. it made me frustrated, but I did see something to work on when the weather dries up. It has been raining nonstop. Anyways, he needs to come consistently to the side I call him on and so we dont crash together..... he tends to want to go behind me instead of coming to the side I call on. It wont take long to get him to get it down though.

Other than that, just continue to brush up on weaves is all we need... I feel sort of bored because there has not been much to work on.

I wish he wanted to play more so I could spend more time just playing with him, but he would rather sleep all day.

Anyways, Thanksgiving was a fiasco..I was yelled at throughout the day by someone very angry. Nice way to spend your holiday...around someone who gets mad at you for every little thing you say or do.

Last Thursday Night Class

Well we went to Yoshi's last Thursday night class. We are finally going to move up to a competition class (even though we have already been in one for 3-4 months at Rachels) so I am going to try to shoot for Wednesday night since I am at Rachels Tuesdays.

We were supposed to do Pairs, and we did for a while, but there were only two of us in the class so we did the full course at the end. The course consisted of 22 obstacles and Yoshi completed it in 40 seconds. I was very happy about that!!!

Yoshi didnt like Pairs too much. He HATES having to watch another dog run and it makes it hard for him to concentrate, but he compensated and did fairly well except he was "cussing" at me the whole way. lol

I had to end up taking Yoshi out of class early. The stress of the decision with Hemi and my living situation must have gotten to me and I felt myself getting annoyed when Yoshi couldnt figure out a send bonus at class. I just decided it was best if I just left before I messed up anything.

I just wasnt in a good frame of mind to be at my best to work with Yoshi and definitely didnt need to be the one causing problems with me and his relationship so close to show time.

I just need to relax............. these decisions are driving me mad!

Getting Excited

Well I sent in Yoshi's first AKC entry form in a few days ago. His first AKC show will be the 2nd weekend in January. We signed up for all three AKC classes for both days because the other two AKCs that month I dont think have FAST included. I am sooo excited. I think I am more excited about the shows coming up than I am about Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I need to register him for CPE because there are 3 CPE trials this spring at the place VERY close to home (with the first one being his VERY first show)..I think that might be one of our main "other" organizations to run besides AKC.

I barely can sit still thinking about it. I just cant wait to see how he does against other dogs and how he reacts and this will be my first time showing a dog of mine. I have trained several dogs of mine, or rescued dogs from my parents since I was in elementary school..so this had been a long wait for me!

He has class tonight so I will update this very soon.

Classes From Last Week

Yoshi has his two regular classes last week and he did very well at both of them. At Rachel's we did some more coursework..where he nailed the weaves every time. He did pretty good but sometimes I am too slow in calling him off of obstacles.. I need to be on my toes more. The course was set up to be a very fast course, which in turn, made it the hardest on me out of the class because i have the fastest dog. LOL there was a part that I didnt make it to at first, so for the next go round I had to absolutely haul butt to get to where I needed to be.. it was pretty funny.

For Thursdays class at PAWSitive.. we worked on FAST...the send was Open level.. and our best run was 62 points in 27 seconds. The instructor tried to push us to do a perfect round..but Yoshi started knocking too many bars. Though 60 points is enough to qualify in excellent so I was pretty happy with how much we did accomplish.

Yesterday I took Yoshi to go play with his girlfriend Rainey. I also helped Debbie work with Rainey on her contacts..she is going to be another competitive sheltie around here!! We did some coursework..and let them play and they had a lot of fun.

Then...

DUN DUN DUUUUNNNNNNN...

Bath time for both dogs. Now everyone is fluffy and clean. However, I am finding a LOT of ticks on both dogs and it is REALLY grossing me out. They have been on preventative.. but I think they are getting them right outside the apartment when they go potty. I guess I am going to have to talk to some people about this because they had a LOT of tiny ones on them like they had just been picked up...its horribly disgusting.

I also have noticed that Yoshi has had some irritated looking skin for a little while. At first it wasnt bad looking, now it looks pretty inflammed. They are little circular areas where they lightly scab over and the scabs then look dirty when he is due for a bath. When I bathed him yesterday and got rid of them.. the circular areas were VERY red looking.. what could this be?? He is not scratching or licking the areas that I have seen so it never looks like it bothers him..but it just looks like it isnt getting any better with changing weather (I was thinking a certain type of grass or something was doing it but Im guessing its not now) im guessing some sort of allergy? I just dont want to take him to the vet and spend another $120 for them to tell me something that I could find out for free.

Yoshi Makes Me Proud

We went to Pawsitive for the Thursday night class and we had Gamblers practice..which I will never run Gamblers (USDAA) with Yoshi, but he will run some other variations derived from it at other associations. Can I just say WOW?! I have NEVER seen him run like he did..which is really saying something. He just was ON. Totally amazing.

Since the class consists of mainly novice dogs, she gave us 45 seconds for the first part before the gamble...which meant A LOT of work for me. The first course I did I ran out of my course almost with 10 sec left. The next time I did: chute, weaves (12), jump, jump, jump, a -frame, jump, jump, teeter, jump, jump, dog walk, jump, jump, turn back and go around to a tire, dog walk, jump (43 points)..and still had a couple of seconds left...LOL and I had gone all around the course and was almost running out of things to do.

He did really good at the gamble. The only dog to get it consistently. YAY!

Did you catch on when I say he did weaves????? BEAUTIFULLY!!!!!!!!!!! AMAZING!!! He never missed a one! Yoshi knows when I need cheering up =)

What even made the lesson better, is the instructor was like, "What breeder is he from?!" She told me he was such an amazing dog. I then dropped the bomb and said he was only 14 months old. She was really impressed by him. It really made me feel good about how far I have come with my very first "real" agility dog.