Last Friday, before preparations for our first ever USDAA trial and 4th Oktoberfest trial went into hyperdrive, I managed to sneak some time in to finish up some pinwheel sequences with Chispa, as well as some contact training. No, she can’t do fancy turns and such after the dogwalk or aframe yet. She can’t even do those fancy turns and such PERIOD, let alone after a running contact. While I’ve started to work on landing side approaches with Chispa in bits and pieces, fancy stuff is nowhere near ready for sequencing. When I say “started to work on” I mean I’ve gone up to a jump set low, with some bacon and a clicker in hand, and have introduced the concept to her. I’m not keen on wild repetition with any behavior to start out with. I’d much rather teach it like a trick, let the dog think about it, puzzle it out, have fun solving a problem, get lots of cookies, and THEN when there is some fluency starting to develop, keep expanding the boundaries of the behavior. Crawl, walk, trot, run. There’s an order to it.
As we leave the events of this past spring further and further behind (remember, surgery, all that?), and Chispa seems to be continuing normally, I *am* starting to think about long term agility. Maybe we will “make it” to those green green pastures someday. Maybe meaning, maybe *I* will be the limiting factor (well, more than usual). So, with that in mind, I’ve started to train some of the behaviors that I anticipate Chispa *may* need in a few YEARS. I’m still not in any hurry, because I don’t anticipate her needing to employ these behaviors in a sequence for…years.
But, that doesn’t mean I’m endlessly wrapping my 1.5 year old puppy (yes PUPPY) or working on crazy weave pole entries. Shoot, we’re working on weaving twelve poles continuously at the moment. I just don’t get the idea that young dogs MUST learn these things as young dogs or they won’t learn them at all. There seems to be such a rush to skip over the basics. Nothing new, I suppose, it’s kind of been that way for a while. I want understanding, not rote repetition. I want a teammate, not a robot. That takes time and understanding. I feel incredibly blessed to have Frodo to remind me of that even while Chispa and I are starting out. Frodo at this point knows so MUCH, and understands so much nuance that I never directly trained…and Chispa is very, very raw, but oh so fun.
Anyway, videos below. I’m shamelessly pleased with our pinwheels, and ecstatic with our contacts. It’s a moment in time, a rung on the ladder, a step on the journey, and we’re not settling in to or hunkering down to stay in this moment – we’re moving on the moment we’ve mastered a thing, but it sure feels good to have mastered that thing as a step toward other things.
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