eye recheck, and agility recap: Focus and Motivation class, week 5

This morning we had another checkup with the ophthalmologist. Everything is looking good. He still has blood in his eye (it takes a very long time to reabsorb) but the healing is continuing without any problems. We are cleared to practice the teeter again!! He is no longer taking the Atropine, and the Neopolydex and Cosopt are now only once a day instead of twice. The Prednisone is continuing twice a day. The next checkup is in February.

Tonight was the last night of this agility session -- next week we become an offical Agility Foundations class!

Today was great. Dragon did not try to sniff/explore during the working time at all. His focus was nearly 100%. The only couple of snafus were when I told him to "take a break" out of habit to let him know that an exercise was finished, and he disengaged and wandered off. Whoops! I need to remember to use a different transition when I actually expect him to stay by me. Usually I pick him up or trot with him to a different area to start a different exercise. He was also more comfortable staying on his mat and chewing his bully stick when I had to move closer to the instructor to listen.

We warmed up with more circle work. I've been working specifically on accelerating during both circle work and obedience heeling. We moved on to running to a nose target. I baited the target a couple of times but for most reps it was empty and he still stopped on it as I kept running past. Success! I just need to watch out because I tend to turn my body toward him to check whether he's stopped, and I know that that's a huge cue to him. I now need to practice having him run to the nose target as I do increasingly more distracting things, such as front cross, run in a different direction, do jumping jacks, etc. We also practiced running to the target over a flat plank, and down the weighted side of a teeter that was lowered nearly to the ground.

We practiced running between jumps standards and coming to front if I was stopped, running toward a toy on the ground if I was moving forward, and running to me and continuing on toward a thrown toy if I was moving forward. We're a bit ahead of the rest of the class in this, although I do need to practice it more. Dragon was more confident in discriminating whether to run ahead or come to me compared to last time we practiced. I need to practice running ahead toward a thrown toy the most.

At the end we played the bang game with the teeter. It was only a couple of inches of the ground and it moved very slowly and made almost no noise when Tiny Dog jumped on it, haha. I was super proud that he was comfortable on it, though. Our months of work are really paying off! At the end of class I raised the end to about six inches and practiced having him hop on and ride it down, and it was the perfect level of difficulty -- he didn't jump on smoothly at first but after a handful of reps had no hesitation.

Another wonderful thing is that he tugged with me! After running to his food toy he would pick it up and tug with me for a few seconds, and then I would mark and reward the tugging with the food inside. It's working very well -- a few times he was super into the tugging, pulling backwards with his whole body, and didn't even let go when I clicked. I have my dog back again!