Working on the pencil hold last night.. and the pencil broke in half changed focus to moving from front to side heeling positions instead.

bump

some agility stuff today and position changes on the steel drum.
And one super good recall. Harley darted off like a bullet, one whistle and ran back to me just as fast. He nearly fell as he did a 180 turn and stop on top of my feet.

I just finished 37 straight days, then took off 5 for Thanksgiving. We had not tracked since before the OT kicked in, so I made a point of tracking during my time off. We only got to go once (yesterday), but it was great.

We had been working on tracking over less bait and lengthening the distance of the line. I wanted to see if Sadie was retaining any of it since it had been over a month. I laid three 75yd legs with a soft turn in each direction, and three articles. I spaced the bait out farther than ever before.

As soon as Sadie realized where we were going, she lit up, and her drive was high and steady til the end of the track. She tracked surely and steadily, not bothered by the distance between baits. She was solid on the first article, but she missed the second (I took her off the track and put her back on it, and she indicated with some help). She was okay, but hesitated a tad, at the last article.

I have managed to get in some living room training over the past few weeks. Her object discrimination is coming along, and her focus in the "fuss" is improving nicely. She loves the "roll over" command, and we have proofed it in two new venues.

I'm sure we're all working on something

I am introducing Duke to the concept of walking backwards while in 'front' position - it's interesting doing this as luring is not really an option. He's learning to run the tiny obstacle course in the back yard and loosely keeping on my right, I will be working on keeping him on my left next.

He has recovered well from his neuter and is looking forward to more activity. We did get a radiological diagnosis of HD and I'm getting lots of good advice regarding exercise, supplementation and diet from a couple of individuals here with experience with HD dogs.

I have his AKC Canine Partner application all filled out and ready to go - we'll be focusing this next 2 months over working on loose leash walking off the prong and controlling his excitement around strange dogs for his CGC, which I hope to have achieved by his 2nd birthday at the end of February. Our plans going forward include his CGCA and Rally.

We got a lot done this week! More fun work on the obstacle course, I set up our ladder on cinder blocks so he can learn the ladder walk. Every other day hidden 'finds' of food before the main morning meal - Duke has gotten rather good at finding things that he cannot see, including a mostly empty jar of peanut butter that was in a closed bathroom cupboard (he licked the cupboard door, I guess that's his alert!) and it's fun to watching him go back and forth narrowing it down a bit at a time. Worked more on flat collar walking and worked on pulling a wagon down the road with a harness, which he and my son both enjoyed (I was out front with him on the leash, steering and controlling speed). Worked a little bit on an object hold. Worked a whole lot on behaving around a new dog in the house.

New dog (Chance, ~4 yr old Mal) has a new place to live for Christmas where he gets to stay in the house and is set to have a bath tonight and learn to live nicely with another dog. We are working on almost exclusively groundwork with him right now. He is very well behaved with people, doesn't know what to think of cats and wants to dominate Duke, which obviously is not being allowed. We're following pack structure introduction for them, I'm sure he'll get his own thread later but for now it's pretty much just management. He's very pretty.

Good work! I hope the bath went well!


I let a lot of holiday rat-race slide this year, and increased time with my own dogs.

We are doing extra practice on gate behavior, and adding more hand signals for the two deaf ones.

Chance stood perfectly for the bath though he did not get in on his own and refuses to follow a food lure. He figured out what to do with a rope toy though, grabbed it, threw it in the air and caught it on his own. He finally stopped pacing long enough to get a belly rub and for me to get a couple more unblurred pictures.

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-kObJGAGdBQU/Urna3C9C9WI/AAAAAAAAFtw/fk3MqDERc-U/w830-h468-no/IMG_20131224_111342_395.jpg

The boys are still posturing at each other a bit, Chance is not comfortable with Duke in the area that his crate is in and I've covered his crate later at night to give the cats a chance to move around without triggering his furry notice. Chance can come straight up to Duke in the crate with no reaction on Duke's part, he really doesn't care, he just wants to play with the new guy.

Lots of work on loose leash walking with Duke this morning. I'm halving the usual feed for Duke as I expect he'll be doing a lot more on command this next little while.