Agility Games with Archie

CircusK9 waiting somewhat patiently for something to happen. Yes, that is the top of a side table resting on Archie's crate. There isn't room for both a table and his crate.

I had a little talk with my agility instructor after class on Thursday. Oh, not what you are thinking, not at all. I told her that she needed to keep reminding me that Archie was just a baby and that we had plenty of time to get him ready for this agility game.


See, he's amazing, really amazing. He clicks onto new concepts so quickly it can leave me a little breathless. 

But that also means that my expectations are getting pretty high for this little guy. And I don't want to screw it up. 

So what if he decides to buzz off and check the end of the Aframe instead of holding his stay at the start of the sequence? The magic target is empty, he won't get any reward--the mistake has no other consequences at this point in his training. I'm learning that the best way to handle him is to call him, once, and wait. He already knows that the game is played with me. We have to let him work the various angles of this on his own. And that's really hard for me to do, to let him make those mistakes and wait him out. I can see how quickly it pays off with him, so I was asking my agility instructor to keep reminding me that I need to be patient.

In class, we continue to work skill stations for half the class and the other half we get to run short sequences. The really fun skill stations show up again in the backyard. Right now, he's totally rocking a station comprised of three cones set in an L-pattern. The idea is to send the dog around a cone and either pivot so you pick him up on the same hand, or cross so you pick him up on the other hand. And the handler should stay more or less in the middle, so the dog has to independently go out to the indicated cone. And the distance between the cones slowly gets larger. I am not entirely sure why he likes this particular exercise so but I get amazing speed and focus out of him with it. 

Archie is a chill little dude.

Oh, and he did six regular weave poles this morning for the first time, both sides (on-side and off-side). I knew he was close to this important milestone but I had been working three poles pretty intensively for the past couple of weeks. He needs to understand how to get into the poles on his own. And the turn from the second to third pole is in fact the hardest one, the place where many dogs pop out of the weaves. While we still need more work on the skill of entering the weaves at speed and from any angle, I am now sure that he understands the point of that complicated obstacle. That's such an important accomplishment--and just think, he's still a baby!