And now for something completely different

Agility!

I've been saying from day one that Jesse and Kola should do agility together. So I signed Kola up for agility class. At present I'm taking the class with Kola and Jesse is observing. I think I might phase myself out and phase Jesse in. The class is with Chris Primmer and its at Brigand's hideout. Last week we worked on "leave it" "touch" "spin right" "spin left." The "touch" command right now means, "eat the treat on the plastic disk." I'm thinking that the idea is to keep the dog from coming over to the handler for re-enforcement and instead going to a target for the reward. That way in the middle of a course you don't trip over your own dog coming to see you for treats. We also did a little bit of low jumping.

Jesse is much better at directing Kola over the jumps so I filmed him doing it instead of me.
This first video is the two jumps together to form a spread jump.


This second video is two jumps in a row with a treat in between.



Tomorrow we will learn weave poles. Should be fun.

All by ourselves

So Dave is out of commission this month and that leaves his students to practice on our own. Kola and I worked some 2008-born sheep in the big field. I like these sheep. They are very small, and they think they're very hungry. They are just light enough that they'll stop and eat if Kola stops to sniff grass, or get drawn to the fence and their buddies if Kola is sufficiently out of position. They are not so light that Kola cant work her way up to the slowest one and sniff its butt. Sheep-butt sniffing is kindof Kola's reward for getting the sheep to trust her. Its not a policy of mine but thats just the way it worked out. When she's wild they skitter off before she can sniff them, and when she's calm she can sneak up to them without pushing them past me.

Something that really helped our training session today was replacing a generic "AH!" reprimand with "out!" correction. When she gets a generic reprimand she stops herding and comes over to seek my forgiveness. Thats not what I'm looking for. Since the thing she does wrong most frequently is cut in too close, "out!" plus pressure seems to be getting the message across. She doesn't quit working the sheep anyway. She doesn't always swing out very wide. Actually she never swings out very wide but often she'll get out a little and almost always she'll stop cutting in further. These are both valuable things, and things I think I can shape further into a proper "out."

Saying "out" really helped her swing all the way around to the balance point when she wanted to come in too early and push the sheep in a circle. The other thing that really helped her balance was that I started turning deliberately towards her so that her being off center was even more inconvenient. See, she likes to hang a little bit to one side (her left side I think.) If the sheep are between us this pushes the sheep into me and I often wind up turning to get away from the sheep. When I turn with the sheep she's automatically on balance and thus rewarded for being off balance in the first place. So today, since these were such little sheep, I just shoved my way past them turning about 60 to 90 degrees in Kola's direction, which threw her way further off balance than a comparable turn in the other direction. I did this so often she started anticipating this and moved more towards the center. Yay!

One little guy broke off from the group and I ran with Kola to go get it. (Kola tends to chase rather than herd in these situations.) I got her thoughts more towards herding and she brought the sheep back to me, O.K. Then she sprinted ahead of me and I couldn't figure out why. Duh! She was going back for the sheep we left behind. That wasn't my plan but she couldn't know that. On the one hand, her leaving caused me to lose the sheep we were fetching in the first place. On the other hand, I like the fact that she is seeing ALL of her sheep.

She was pretty tired today, and she tends to melt a little in the sun. It makes it easier for her to go "easy." All in all I was pleased.

Also, Jesse re-proposed to me in the middle of the field when we were done with our sheep and gave me the diamond ring that had (unbeknown to me) just come in the mail. That was nice too.

Finally, I'm looking forward to Monday the 22nd because we are signed up for our first agility lesson with Chris Primmer. Should be fun.

Junior Herd Dog

I thought I had posted about this already but apparently not. Kola got her Junior Herd Dog title on valentines day. She also got a whoppin' huge green qualifying ribbon to go with it.

From The Kola Nut

The first day she was really really good. The second day she was out of her fuzzy little mind, but still got the job done. What a good dog!