Summit and I had the opportunity to perform as a "demo dog" with our trainer at the local humane society's annual "walk-a-thon" event. We attended last year when we just moved to this area and watched the dogs showing off their agility training. This year we got asked to participate!
The walk-a-thon takes place at a local conservation park. The last event of the day is always the agility demonstration. Since I now have a truck I actually helped to haul our equipment to the park and then the whole crew helped to set everything up. Due to how short the demo would be (we ran about 8 dogs) we did not bring any contact equipment.
Kili got to practice waiting her turn. I put her in her ex-pen to wait while I first warmed Summit up and then took him into the ring for his turn. When I came back I switched them out and had Kili work on some Rally in the distracting environment.
I was super happy with Summit. We had some handling mistakes and some general distraction, but I was very happy with how he performed considering this was his first time outside in over a year and a half, and his first time ever with an audience. I even put Kili through the tunnel a couple of times before we packed up and was super pleased with how willing and confident she was. We will get another chance to practice in 2 weeks when our trainer holds their Open House event. Summit will be running agility and Kili will be doing Rally.
Here's Summit's run. I put in annotations for you so you can sort of follow my thoughts through the run.
1 comment:
On your tunnel jump refusal, you are just stepping out each to get around the wing... so your lateral motion might be pulling him right off the jump. I would just look ahead and line your self up so you are running in a straight line from the tunnel to the next two jumps. That you start out far enough away from the tunnel that you run a straight line past the wing jump. Hopefull that made sense. :-)
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