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The comedic adventures of Riot, Gaylan's Laughing Out Loud RA NA NAJ GCGMy Other Dogs
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Worked some contacts today. They weren’t half bad. He’s not driving to the end as much as I’d like, but for the most part has a pretty solid 2 on 2 off. He does stop short on occasion, especially if I’m behind or not moving. I’ve got a ton of distance on him which is really nice.
Our contacts are coming along. I took the boys over to ACA to work contacts for a little while this afternoon. Riot nailed all of his contacts in his first working session.
After I worked Cisco, and brought Riot out for his second session, he was a bit more amped. I wrapped him around a jump and he took the dog walk without me giving him a command. He completely blew off the contact. I’m not sure if it was him being amped or the fact I didn’t say “walk-it” that caused him to blow it off. The next time around, he again stopped a little short of the bottom. Over compensation of before? Other than that he hit all his contacts the second session. I also upped the jump to 22 and 24 inches on him and he didn’t have any problems with that either.
Like always, eventually things seem to come together with Riot. It’s not necessarily that I need to fix things with him. It’s more I think he needs to understand and sort it out in his own head.
I’m looking forward to seeing how he does on a standard course. There are a few run throughs in November I’m going to try and take him to to get him used in running different environments.
We had no dog events this weekend and nothing planned.
It was mostly a low key weekend, but we worked the teeter and did some board work on Saturday and today we threw some bumpers. For a dog that doesn’t always want to bring them back, he sure does have a love for the game.
Up until now I’ve thrown only three bumpers and quit with Riot as not to overdo it. Tonight, since he was so wired and amped up for the game, we did 7 (and he’d probably have done more if I let him). He brought back all 7 much closer than he usually does and even hand delivered 3!
Riot also is responsible for recycling our plastic bottles. We’ll hand them to him and he’ll happily cary them into the kitchen for us. I need to get him some place to put them, but for now we take them back from him. Today, I decided to see what would happen if I told him to sit. He’d immediately spit out the bottle and sat.
I’m looking forward to force fetching him… well, maybe not the process, but the result.
I’ve mentioned before that a lot of times if we have trouble with something, we go back to it another day and Riot has it figured out. Well we had trouble with serpentines in handling 1, we had trouble with them when I tried to fix them in our backyard, and we had trouble with them when we saw them in handling 2. If you had seen us today, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you we were having problems with them. First of all, they were beautiful and second of all, all but one were handled from the right side. They felt good too. Not as good as Cisco’s who has had a beautiful serpentine for years, but like from a dog far more experienced that Riot is.
I had taken the boys over to ACA to work contacts outdoors and someone was nice enough to have left a beautiful serpentine out among the contacts. We did work contacts and did a pretty good job. We still need some more work with driving into position. I probably didn’t do as much work as I should have, but I was having so much fun with the serpentines.
Riot is turning into such a teenager. I’ve never had a dog who wants to pee on everything before. And he’s very distracted by things outside. The shelties across the driveway barking at him provided a good distraction — too good at times.
He did much better today outside than last week outside. So I have have hope we can regain out focus.
I took Riot over to ACA with Cisco this afternoon to work on contacts for Cisco — since I was working contacts for one, I might as well work contacts for the other.
We’re lucky enough to train at an indoor facility that we can use year round. It never occurred to me until today that Riot has never done agility outside. I did run him over a mini dogwalk outside when he was about 4 months old, but other than that, all of our training has been inside.
Apparently we need to start training outside. I was considering entering him in a trial at the end of next month just to see how he handles a trial situation and where we are, but it looks like we’re not going to be ready to work outside. It was like he’s never been taught to target.
Either that or we’re hitting some teenage boy defiance stage. Life with Riot this weekend has been trying. He’s still a good boy, but he seems to be developing some selective hearing. Hopefully class tomorrow night will bring back the Riot I’m used to dealing with.
