agility lesson recap

Tuesday morning I drove down to San Jose for our fourth private agility lesson with Maureen Strenfel. I've been taking private lessons only because, due to my work schedule, I haven't been able to find a fitting intro class at a time I can attend. That said, Moe is a wonderful teacher and is setting us up with a good foundation.

This lesson was exciting because we were introduced to new obstacles and got to run sequences of 3-5 obstacles. Real agility stuff!!

We started off doing a sequence of three jumps and a tunnel which were arranged in an uneven circle. I am not very coordinated and this was quite challenging for me. I had to move at the right pace that I was constantly in motion but not moving so quickly that I had to suddenly halt to avoid running into a piece of equipment -- not only would that be painful, but the decelleration would cue Dragon to slow down and come to me rather than continuing ahead. I also had to carefully judge how far laterally I was from the jump standard/tunnel entrance, and where I was pointing, meaning that sometimes my flailing cued my dog to come back to my side and sometimes I sent him wide around the tunnel. Eventually we managed to do it properly. I need to work more angles with our tunnel entrances, just like I've been doing with the bar jumps

After a break we moved on to the new stuff. First, the teeter. We had him hop onto the low end of the teeter and get treats at the very edge, with my hand holding them low to encourage him to lower his center of gravity. We placed a jump standard underneath the weighted end of the teeter so that it would only go up a couple of inches off the ground. Thanks to all the work I've done with him on the wobble board and other slightly unstable surfaces, he wasn't bothered by the slight movement at all. He really wanted to turn in the other direction and run up the teeter, probably because I've done lots of reinforcing for running up trees and ramps. (I have a video of him climbing a steep fallen tree trunk here.) It's important to note that this teeter was outside on grass. Yesterday we practiced with a mini-teeter on rubber flooring, and he was less comfortable with the same exercise, I suspect because it was a harder impact and made more noise. Our homework is to build his confidence and slowly raise the height. Eventually he will have to jump onto the low end from a couch or chair! The final teeter behavior will be running directly to the end of the contact zone, so that he's using all of his tiny weight to drop the teeter, and lowering his body to steady himself for impact. It's critical that he always run all the way to the end so that he doesn't try to hop off early and get hit by the end coming back up. Also I release him to run forward and get another treat, so that he always runs ahead instead of hopping off sideways.

Then we moved on to the a-frame. I've been slacking on working on our nose target behavior, which was assigned after our very first lesson. Bad handler! I need him to drive to a nose target on the ground. I can put the nose target a little past the end of the a-frame, have him hop up, and run forward to touch it. We're using a nose target rather than a paw target to keep him focused low to the ground and try to prevent leaping off the a-frame. We will slowly raise the angle of the ramp to its full height. The final behavior will be a running contact, and it will be used for the dog walk as well.

It's so exciting to be introducing all the new equipment and behaviors! We have a lot of work to do before he sees the obstacles in their final versions, though. And I'll really need to work on flailing better.