Mary Ellen Barry Seminar
I’m a big behind, but Riot and I attended a foundation sends and recalls seminar with Mary Ellen Barry at the beginning of May.
I had a moment of panic first thing in the morning since Riot was one of the greener dogs at the seminar and most of the other working spots were filled with very motivated border collies. But Riot did really well holding his own. We learned so much and Riot as always provided the comic relief.
We were working on a lateral motion rear cross and the jump was positioned so that he was jumping toward the seminar participants. E-Z was hanging out with the crowd, so initially when Riot jumped funny over the jump paying no attention to where I was going, we assumed he was looking at E-Z. So Mary Ellen sat down in front of E-Z and we tried it again. His jumping was even more odd the second time — he was springing over the jump rather than jumping and he was wiggling his body really funny in mid-air. Apparently the look on his face while he was doing this was quite comedic too. The look of puzzlement on Mary Ellen’s face was pretty priceless too. Apparently Riot was hamming it up for the audience, because we turned the jump 90° and he proceeded to perform the exercise perfectly.
One of our exercises later in the day was practicing recalls over the jump. I could see Riot’s brain thinking hard through every repetition, so we stopped a few times while we were practicing and did some spins and some hand touches and just some goofing off. He did really well on all his repetitions and I didn’t want him to burn out, so we were having a good time.
Overall, he did really well. I was very proud of how well he paid attention to my body cues. Now to get him to pay that much attention through an entire course. We got a lot of good exercises to work on this summer. I was just bummed we couldn’t have attended the other two days too. Hopefully we’ll be able to take them in the future.
