So happy with how class went today. Dragon has finally been off the prednisone for a week now. His food drive is still good, but his play drive has increased as the steroids have been reduced. It was so easy to get him to wrestle and tug during class, and that kept things upbeat and exciting. He is happy to run to his crate whenever he's cued, but otherwise he wants to keep working and playing.
He does have a wee bit too much obstacle focus. He ran off a few times to take a tunnel and to the (lowered) teeter. It was very cute when he ran away from me to get on and tip the teeter. He stood on the edge and looked at me with a smiling face. I called him back and instead of jumping off, he ran back across the teeter and tipped it again.
When we were actually practicing the teeter he would slow down a couple of feet from the end, wait for it to tip, and then proceed to his target. Uh oh!! I started standing by the end, holding my hand out, and cuing him to do a hand touch. Then he would move all the way to the end.
I did some deceleration drills to get him paying attention to me again and not just running forward toward random obstacles, and that fixed up the issue.
We practiced front crosses with two jumps, open channel weaves (again with the x-pen), and contacts. On the dog walk I wanted more speed from him and so I put his crate on the down side and cued him to run into it ("naptime!"). It definitely helped! In fact, the first time he ran into his crate so fast that he smashed into the back side. I had one of other students record us and you can see the crate bounce up a bit as he hits it. The second time he definitely put on speed when I gave the cue halfway across, but once down he ran around his crate instead of into it. Who can blame him? Perhaps next time we can put a short, straight tunnel there instead.
Dog walk video:
It's hard to see since both times I'm directly in front of he camera, but he DOES speed up when he hears the cue.
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