Weave Got Rhythm, Have You?

It has been a busy week here at the little house with lots of dogs! I hit an all time high this week, 18 dogs and counting! I have a Momma and a litter of seven pups though, so pups at two weeks don't really count (at least in my books anyway!). OhLa has been having a good time, she is very interested in the pups. Much to my relief this temporary fostering will be over tomorrow and we will be back down to a much more reasonable 10 dogs.
This week in training, we started out building dog walk confidence. Dog walk you say? Why yes, when I was in abbotsford running the other brats in the regionals, I bought one of these:


Since we have already trained the teeter, the more scary of the obstacles with skinny planks the dogwalk was a cinch. It helps too, that OhLa has discoverd jumping off the top railing of my deck will land her in the agility yard (much to my horror she does this regularly). She can be seen from the kitchen window randomly running back and forth along the dogwalk all by herself funny girl! She has not however learned that the art of nose targeting applies to dogs who are running full obstacles.

We also spent some time working on weave pole footwork. She has the idea of weaves down, but she didn't get how to move with rhythm so for that, we went to the old style chute poles. If I had enough sets of two I would use those, but we don't so we improvised. What I really don't like seeing the video is how easily the poles move out of the way, not good it really teaches the dogs to push the poles which you don't want. However, a little style practice and we'll go back to the other set.



We finished up this week with an agility fun match, yippee! OhLa's first time out with a judge, other dogs, and a real trial atmosphere. She did really well, I was very proud of her! We ran around a few jumps, did the tire backwards and needed to have the chute held open (Woops! Forgot to teach the chute!) BUT huge success in my books: she didn't run away to go visit the other dogs; she sat, waited and held her start lines all three runs; she did all the obstacles nicely including the strange teeter, the newly learned dogwalk, and drum roll please.....6 straight weave poles! Not only did she do them, she did them fast and with perfect footwork, someone even commented on how nice she weaved! She jumped the jumps, responded to my front cross cues, and stayed with me through 18 obstacles (with lots of treats inbetween of course). I was very proud of her! Of course, I forgot the camera at home so no proof! Now I need to work on the tire, the chute, the table (it has been a while for that one) and I need to teach her how to rear cross. And of course the ongoing work of weave poles. So much training, so little time!