Monday, November 15, 2010

Foundation - the real story

I attended a Carrie Jones Seminar this weekend. The first day was at the Master's level and the second day was Foundation. I want to focus on the Foundation topic since that is what is of interest to me this morning.

With the other two dogs I never had an opportunity to attend a foundation seminar. Mostly because they weren't offered or they were not available to the masses (I didn't belong to agility clubs). So, lately I have attended two foundation seminars. The first seminar was Tracy Sklenar and the focus was a lot of "Say Yes" training stuff. Fabulous information and Tracy was amazingly entertaining! The second was Carrie Jones and covered the basics of sit, stay, down, tricks and the FC, RC, push and pull basics. Again, good information, just really just the basics or beginning of foundation work.

Now, I have attended novice seminars and your dog is expected to already be sequencing obstacles and have contacts (not perfect however). So, to me it begs the question "Isn't there something in between these stages?", "Isn't that prior to 10 obstacle sequences stage REALLY important?". Too me, that is foundation work as well. You begin to get a fair amount of movement into play, combinations of skills are expected (stay, jump, read my motion). What is the best way to bring those together?

I would love to attend a seminar on how you begin to pull some of these skills together. Great, I have done some flat work, one jump work, cone work. Yes, I can read some books, blogs, and web sites, but this stuff just doesn't seem to be out there. I have to piece it together. Am I missing something?

I know that the one dog I did train with the foundation skills was not able to go from "one jump" work to "sequences" automatically. We had to build up to it. Who is going to be first in line to provide the resources on putting it all together?

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