Another session with Theo. From watching it myself, I can already see two areas to improve:
1. Have a plan ahead of time – where we will be doing a sequence, where we finish, how we are going to move back to start again. I had slow and kind of boring transitions.
2. The transitions – rather than just pulling him by the toy, I think it would be more fun if I made the transition a fun game with a stop, then run to the new spot.

I edited about 2 minutes out – we worked for about 5 minutes total. I took out some of the time when it was just more of what is already included.

I’m not sure! Possibly either online or at SE events. I also have a lovely Double J BC and two senior rat terriers. My older rat terrier, Gus, had a fun agility career before he had to retire because of a mild back injury (that I didn’t want to take any risks with). 🙂

So he does offer me obstacles. It’s a bit like what he was doing when I had Ben run a little course while we ignored Theo. If I’m prepping to do something on the course, he will offer me jumps, backsides, sometimes a tunnel. All of his own initiative. I cheer him on when I see him do it, but I’m not always ready for an actual reward.

I could be ready for this and use his choice as a trigger to run to a toy – there’s another tug toy he loves that is easier to stuff in my pocket without him knowing that I have it. Or I could just keep some treats or a ball to throw. He does love chasing balls.

I sent some maps via facebook messenger since I’m not sure I can upload them here. If you want to number those and post here, that would be awesome.

One thing that happens some of the time when I place toys is that Ben will drop the bar as he dives for the toy. How should I handle those attempts? Better placement of the toy? Ignore? Simply redo?

When I was in class with Ben last night, we were doing more typical American style courses, but I felt like our teamwork was better!!

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Mary Basu.

Some more turns and I made up a “zoom-zoom” course on the course I currently have built. It looks like this, though I couldn’t easily fit it all in the camera. I did the second one a couple of ways. Bad editing on this one. And since it’s getting dark early, I had to use a filter to lighten it up.

Here’s our latest work. I was trying to get him to drive faster into his turns and paying attention to his engagement on the starts. We’ve done some stuff online as well as I experiment with what seems to work the best – I think to start, just plain food seems to be most effective. I’ve also done some starts in front of a tunnel or when there is a jump and the tunnel is the next obstacle. The tunnel gives him a nice target to focus on (this was something we did yesterday and I didn’t video it).

We worked on turns and tunnel threadles over the past few days.

This past spring I retrained the tunnel threadle to the off side and gave it a unique name that is just used for the tunnel (zoom-zoom). We got to a decent performance, but like most things, I moved on to other things and never really proofed the behavior so that I could really trust it. So I played around with a few things to work on Ben’s understanding with harder challenges.

We are going to start our low height/no height turns tonight. 🙂 we don’t have any shows scheduled for the future right now so we can really work hard on our homework.