Sunday, September 30, 2012

Puppy Agility Workshop

Yesterday, Keltic and I went to a puppy agility workshop hosted by one of the best agility instructors in our area.  It was an all day seminar hosted in her own agility field. Yes, she has her own agility field, they live in a rural area and they have created their own agility field on their property about 500 meters from the house.

All the puppies at the workshop were between 5 and 7 months so were pretty much at the same level although you could see that some had more foundation work then Keltic. I think we were the only ones who have never played "crate games", and I'm not sure we will either.

The agenda for the day included:

How dogs learn,
Reinforcement,
Impulse control,
Proprioception,
Shadow handling,
Restrained recalls,
Acceleration and deceleration,
Extension and collection,
Foundation work for front crosses and rear crosses, and
Beginning distance work with cones.

It was a very ambitious program and by the end of the day I think not only were the puppies pretty worn out but so were the humans.

Aussie puppy Fudge Ripple doing some ball work
I've done very little with Keltic in terms of his agility training but he did just fine. He didn't seem to mind the things that moved under his feet much at all.  He didn't want to have much to do with the ball though but he did get on the discs no problem with two feet anyway; we'd have to work on doing all four.

Keltic's buddy Sam working with the teeter board.
He also did fine at restrained recalls although I had difficulty just getting the toy in the correct hand. He did a good job at the deceleration exercise but I can already see the effect of doing heel work for obedience on only the left side.




On both the restrained recalls and deceleration exercise,  Keltic comes up to my left side and stops just wonderfully but on the right side he tries to go behind me to get over to the left side.

On the jump grids, he did great on the collection grid, especially considering we had never done more than one jump in sequence before. He was a good boy and held his sit stay, letting me lead out to the third jump and doing all three jumps to get his toy. I do have to get him more motivated for tugging and his toys so that he will really drive out to those jumps.

We have lots of work to do over the winter and next spring and summer.  Now though we have lots of exercises we can work on to help develop those agility skills which the seminar presenter says largely boils down to being able to send, run and recall.

8 comments:

  1. What a beautiful agility field!

    Sounds like they gave you lots of "homework". Keltic is going to love it.

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  2. Cool opportunity! Sounds like there was a lot of good info.

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  3. Wow that was a lot to do in one day! Clever Keltic he'll be a Star :)

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    1. Well we didn't do everything, some things were demonstrated with only a few puppies actually doing them. But yes, it could have been a two-day workshop.

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  4. What a fun day! Looks beautiful with all the fall colors.

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  5. When you said "All the puppies at the workshop were between 5 and 7 months" I thought how out of place Keltic must have been seeing as he was only 9 weeks old... and then it struck me... he's already had his 6-month birthday! LOL

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