Feelgood Dog Sports Blog

So, he waves with his left paw…and now we’re trying to teach him to wave with his other paw. That’s a toughie.

We’ve been working body positions a lot lately: sit – down – stand with hand signals only and verbal only. This is kind of cool because it gets him to practice staying in his body. It also has taught him to listen instead of just zooming into a behaviour.We’ve realized that many of his cue words start with an S sound and he could be getting frustrated (sit, stand, spin, chute)…we’ll going to keep working his ability to pay attention and focus on his projection points to see if we need to rename cue words or use hand signals instead.

We’re going to keep on working on his contacts and have started double targeting…and boy has this made us take another look at Max and Em’s contacts! LOL! We’ve also started teaching “out” to obstacles.I’m restraining myself…about how c-u-t-e this is…dammit I said it anyway!

He loves practicing “around” and “spin” and his recall flattens you! He also likes to practice “switch”…which is his cue to turn away from us.We taught him this the Greg Derret way since he loves tug so much…and boy that didn’t take very long and he does it with his usual zing! He usually performs a behaviour slowly at first and in the teaching phase and as he rehearses it more…he gets really fast. You can sure tell when he’s all of a sudden “gotten it”. This is different from our other dogs…all the other dogs “get” behaviours right away and repeating tends to bore them (whippets) or hype them up (Mal)…this little guy needs it with a capital N. He’s like the others in a lot of little ways and so different from them in many more ways.

One of the cutest (and I mean it for the 59th time) that we taught him is “rest”…which is his alternate behaviour for begging for food while we’re eating or whatever. He rests his head on the couch or your leg…instead of leaping onto your plate.

That’s it for now…

So, what’s been going on with Bash since his first Christmas? We decided to teach him to wave…since it’s his Grandma’s favourite trick!As far as agility goes, a light bulb had definitely “gone off” with his 2on-2off position…of course he is still young but he performs it extremely well on stairs and on equipment. He runs a full size dogwalk and a full height teeter. He occassionally (on his own) runs a full height A Frame. Since he is comfortable with all equipment we are now only focusing on reinforcing accurate and fast behaviour.

Runs through his channel weaves…we’re taking our time with this one (when he lets us!! haha) as he’s only 9 months old. He “knows” jumps, tunnels, hoop, and chute. We have not started sequencing more than 2-3 obstacles…but have worked on speed circles and “go”…which he loves.

Oh yeah, and he does the cutest automatic down on the table!

We have now been able to bring him into a couple of agility trial buildings and he’s been awesome…great attention and focus. At the last trial we got to see his sister Mayhem after quite a few months…boy they’re CUUUTE!

He is loose in the house with the rest of the big dogs for most of the day…we do have to give the rest of the house a couple of hours break…so he does go for 1 or 2 naps during the day…nope, he still doesn’t nap on his own… He’s at the toy shredding phase…and many toys we’ve had forever are mangled beyond recognition. Thankfully he seems to enjoy the toys that nobody else likes…

That’s all for now…check back soon for the more grown up adventures of our little Bash boy!