Here it is January 5th, and it's 51° degrees! Love it! Love it! Love it! My plan for today was to work one of the easier exercises from Kathy Keats' January Exercise of the Month with Dusty so I could work on my timing with him. Then I was going to use one of the more complex exercises and work it as many ways as I could think of with Belle. However. I quickly discovered that this simple exercise wasn't quite as simple as I thought.
This is exercise #6 from Kathy's series for January, 2012. It was pretty straightforward until we got to #9 and I wanted Dusty to wrap right around the hoop. After working on it with him, I decided to try it with Belle just to make sure she could wrap #9 in either direction. I got a real shock when I discovered that she also ignored my signals to wrap right. Once she finally got it, I tried wrapping her left and she surprised me by wrapping right.
I watched the video over and over, and I still don't know exactly what is going wrong. I suspect the dogs are taking their wrap cue from my left arm. Tomorrow, I'll set up a simple box of hoops and place the video camera on the "landing" side of the hoop being wrapped.
One of the downfalls of training on your own is not having someone to encourage you to try different ways of handling. Since the weather was so very nice today and is expected to be pretty nice for the next few days, I decided to set up Kathy Keats' Exercise of the Month for January, 2012, and try to run each exercise with as many variations that I could think of.
This is the first of Kathy's sequences. I mapped out four major different ways to handle it. The first, in the upper left, is the way I'd normally handle it. The upper right figure shows how I'd handle it from a "bonus line." The lower left represents a way that would not really be favored by me under normal circumstances. The final figure shows another way I thought of to run the course after I did the editing of today's video. Perhaps, I'll give it a try tomorrow.
Just before I broke my ankle, I downloadedThe Agility Coach Notebook Large Spaces Vol. 1 written by Kathy Keats. I spent weeks looking at the exercises wishing I could start working on them. Last week, I finally set up the fourth set of exercises so I could give it a go. Since it's been so hot and I'm still limited in the amount of turning I can do, we've only worked on two of the four sequences. Here's how we did Tuesday:
