Agility Night

Last night was Kort's agility class. It was fun & challenging at the same time. We worked on the pinwheel formation to get our dogs to look for the jump. Kort would take the first 2 jumps, but either cut on the inside back to me, or go around to the outside of the 3rd jump back to me. It looks so easy, but in the beginning, it's really not! I now know that I should have dropped my arm after he took the 2nd jump, then turned my body toward the 3rd as he landed off the 2nd jump. By keeping my arm raised I was pushing him around the 3rd jump. Complicated stuff huh!!
Here is a picture of our pinwheel formation from last night......

Our other exercise was Positional Cues. I really enjoyed this. We had to place our dogs in a stay in front of a jump....go & place some food beyond the jump, come back & stand approx. 5ft from our dog. We then raised our arm to cue the dog an obstacle was in front for him to take....however, the dog had to learn to look forward & NOT at our up raised arm. The objective of this is not only a good start line stay, but to cue the dog to look forward for the obstacle. It took Kort about 3 min. of staring at my upraised arm before he looked forward toward the food. As soon as he did, I released him with an "OK" command, & off he went , over the jump, toward the food reward. It got harder as we had to keep moving our dogs further back so we were cueing them from a greater distance. All the dogs in my group rocked this!! It was so fun to see them all thinking it through, like, "how come there is no food in mom's hand??" "There is always food in her hand!" Here is a picture to help you better understand....the dogs positions are on the left,in front of the jump, while the handler is on the top, slightly behind the jump to the right, we would move our dogs into the 1,2,3 positions, but last night we remained in the #1 position.......

The trainers at Go! Dog Go! agility sure know how to challenge us & make it fun at the same time. They rock!!