Sunday, May 26, 2013

Demo dog

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:

Never Say Never Greyhounds said...

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. :-)