The Barrels are Coming

Sooner or later, a barrel is going to make its appearance at one of our NADAC trials, so I decided it was time to train Belle to go around one as tightly as possible.  The two Regular courses I've seen online featured a barrel after/before the dog walk, but since we're working on retraining to a running dog walk, I decided against trying that for now.  I came up with this set-up that uses four hoops and a barrel:

 In the video that follows, we did two basic sequences:

1.  A three-hoop serpentine to the barrel to the fourth hoop.

2.  A 180 (using any two adjacent hoops) to the barrel to a third hoop of my choosing.

There are a host of variations possible with this set-up, plus you can add more hoops to the arc around the barrel to increase your options even further.

I was surprised how quickly Belle pattern-trained to the serpentine.  You'll see us working through that little wrinkle in the video.