Sisters (2)

Class was again ever so fabulous this week. Gracie is turning out to be quite a focused agility teammate. She is soon going to be nipping at Mimi's heels in class and in the ring, metaphorically speaking, of course. They are now in back to back classes but I hope that we can move Gracie up into Mimi's class soon.

I did forget a couple of times that Gracie is still green--I can't handle a sequence for her exactly as I would for her sister. But besides needing me to stay closer to the obstacles than I would with Mimi, Gracie also reads the course differently. The differences are subtle. Both dogs are small, fast, spend lots of time sproinging in the air, turn on a dime, and in many ways physically perform the same. But Mimi is edgy. I feel like we are always just a bit out of control. I have to move so fast to keep up with her, to stay ahead of her and give her information about the course that I hardly have time to think. Gracie is excited and moves plenty fast but I don't get the same sense of careening around the course with her. The difference is not the same as that between an experienced dog and a novice dog. The sisters are so similar yet not at all the same.

When I was in Utah for the holidays, I visited a friend who does agility with an aussie and a parson russell terrier. She showed us a video that she made of her terrier doing this amusing trick: putting all four feet in a tiny little bowl. She started off by teaching him to do this in a larger bowl.

I set the bowl trick up tonight for the sisters using a 9x13 pyrex glass baking pan. Gracie nailed it in one session, and in the film below, she's doing just the end performance again for the camera.

On the other hand, after spending nearly twice the time working on it, Mimi never really figured this one out. Oh, of course, she got that it involved the blue bowl but that's as far as I could take her. There was lots of leaping about and random placement of feet in the bowl but she never once deliberately put a hind foot into it. She was chomping my fingers to get to the treats, which is unusual for her, and which clearly indicates that she was more excited/stressed than normal.

Which reminds me. To update everyone on the training I'm doing to help her with her fear issues, I continue to randomly use my little PA system when Mimi plays ball with me in the house. She is flinching less and less--and tonight I even made the thing squelch out some feedback and she still brought the ball back to me. I hope this weekend the weather will cooperate and I can take it outside to my training field. Once we take that baby step, then we'll take the PA show on the road--to class, that is!