Sunday, October 5, 2008

Split's first USDAA

Randy ran Split this weekend in USDAA. It is so hard to watch your son run the dog that you train as well. I am nervous for the dog and the child.

They did fairly well! Lots of of courses...Randy needs to refine his cueing. USDAA has 12 weave for beginner dogs. Split does not do 12 weaves in public for some reason. We are working on that. Probably the topic of my next blogging.

The two Q'ed in Snooker however. Randy does an excellent job thinking on his feet. Split took a wrong turn, Randy compensated and got them back on course. It was wonderful to watch. They were so smooth.

Back in the water again...USDAA

Since Tip had been doing so well on her dogwalk contacts lately, I decided to try USDAA again. The reason we did not do it for a while was that I could not train the contact in the ring effectively.

To make the story short, she got both her dog walk contacts! One was a beautiful stop and wait, just what I want, the second was a slow down and see if she yells at me. Not happy about the second, so she is obviously enjoying living on the edge. But, this is progress.

She ran fairly nicely all weekend. We had one run where she was blowing me off. Funny, I talk to a lot of people that don't believe that she blows me off. They say she just doesn't know what I want. A very great case of, you have to live with her to truely understand it.

We ended up Q'ing in Gamblers (a tie for the highest points in the trial with Sybil ,a nationally ranked dog), and standard. We came really close on jumpers (Tip slipped and hit a bar), snooker (I didn't get turned fast enough and she took an off course at the very end).

Maybe we can get back in the game...