Raising a Riot

Private Lesson and Grid Work

We had a great day off. Cisco and Riot had a private lesson with Claudia and Riot worked really well. I learned some new handling techniques and Riot continues to amaze me at how well he can read things. It’s so hard to remember he’s still a baby. I asked Claudia about running him at 26” for USDAA. She didn’t see any reason why he couldn’t, but warned me that some dogs do have an issues with that 6” height difference between AKC and USDAA, other dogs don’t have an issue with adjusting.

Last night Riot and I had Handling 3. Typically the sequences in handling 3 are from masters or excellent level courses, but tonight was grid work. Of course my first through was blech grid work, this should be easy. Well of course I was wrong and our grid sequences were some of the harder sequences we’ve seen this session. The thing about the grid is because of the tighter spacing, the dog is forced to collect more and these big jumping dogs need to work to adjust. This was really good for Riot as the more confidence he gets, the more of an issue collection is going to be.

I’ve also learned the very important lesson that is if my mouth doesn’t open quick enough and there is a tunnel ahead, Riot is taking it.

Overall, it was a really good day. I asked on Facebook about a baby dog team for Riot for the Mid-Atlantic Agility showcase in April (this will be Ri’s first USDAA trial). Someone decided that it would be great to pair Riot with Elsie’s Prowler and Judy’s Annie — two very experienced dogs who have plenty of DAM Q’s. So Riot and I will have two wise ones to guide us through our first DAM tournament. I’m looking forward to it!

Private Lesson

We had a private lesson today with Claudia. Finally they got to have some activity — we’ve been out of classes for 2 weeks and it’s been too snowy outside to get any training in.

We ran one course. It wasn’t terribly difficult, but it was quite technical.

We actually did a lot of work on technical skills — discriminations, queuing deceleration and turns, extension and working on rear crosses. Skills is what we worked on for the remainder of the lesson — which we really needed.

I got a lot of good advice today. Probably the most important thing was that I need to get better about giving Riot more positive feedback more often. We were working on rear crosses and started the sequence with a jump, followed by a tunnel/dog walk discrimination (taking the tunnel), followed by a jump, rear-crossed to another jump. The first few times we did this, we didn’t have an issue with the discrimination, but the more we did it, the more confusion we saw with the discrimination. Part of this probably was that never once was he praised for making the right decision and doing the tunnel. I asked Claudia to get on me about that in pre-comp next session.

First Full Course and Handling 2 Week 5

Today Cisco and Riot had a private lesson with Claudia. My plan was to try a full course with Riot (since he’s only seen a JWW course and not a standard course) and then have Claudia tell us what we needed to work on.

I ran Riot first and he rocked the course. He did better than I expected and left me feeling a lot more confident with him. Our first course was 20 obstacles long and started with a tunnel. It was tunnel, jump, dogwalk (which he nailed even with a tunnel underneath). From there was a 90° left turn to 12 poles (which he nailed) to the tire and a front cross to the a-frame (which is nailed). After the a-frame, there was a difficult line of a double, a jump, and the far end of a tunnel to another jump to another tunnel. He took the right end of the tunnel, but I had a hard time finding the right position to get him to take the jump exiting the tunnel. After the second tunnel, I managed to layer the jump, but the rear cross on the flat didn’t work so well.

Overall he did really well. We went back and worked through the sequences that involved rear crosses — I really need to work on my timing of them so that he better understands what I’m asking of him. That course was a lot harder than anything we’re going to see in novice and he did really well.

After running Cisco, I ran another course with Riot. The start of this course was harder with the exiting end of the tunnel closer to jump number two than the end they needed to enter. I started with a two jump lead out, but Riot’s eyes were fixed on the wrong end of the tunnel before he took off for jump number 1. We worked through the leadout and rewarded Riot for the correct position and finally got the leadout. Again, contacts were no problem and his weaves were beautiful — they’re fast enough now I need to jog to keep up with him.

I actually was able to layer the dogwalk to the 180° turn to the double with him. There is no way I would have tried that at a trial with him, but seeing that we could get through it here says that in another 6 months I’ll probably feel comfortable doing that in a trial. (And admittedly this makes me a little giddy for trying out gamblers with him.) The last part we had trouble with on this course was the weave poles to tunnel in a dog walk/tunnel discrimination. The dogwalk/tunnel was about 10 feet beyond the weave poles and at a right angle. He wanted to cut behind me and take the dog walk. But we worked through it.

We ended the lesson with a review of the broad jump which Riot hadn’t seen since his Foundation classes (and apparently completely forgot how to do).

Then tonight he had handling II. The first sequence was really nice. We did it twice once with a front cross and once without. The second sequence was jump, u-tunnel, jump, … I was not expecting him to swing wide out of the tunnel, but he did and started to make a bee-line for the other half of the class that was migrating over to his side. I yelled, “Ri come!” and he stopped looked them and then laid down facing them? I’m very pleased he didn’t go and visit and create a ruckus, but puzzled as to why he laid down instead of coming. That got a chuckle from the class. The next attempt I started calling his name and we had no issues.

For the second side we had a very nice first run. I had a nearly 3 jump lead out and a nice send to a tunnel and then managed to run way ahead of him on the line and he took all the jumps. Our second sequence was jump 180° jump to tunnel. I set him up and stood between the jumps and released him. He stood up, stopped, and stared. There was someone carrying their little dog across the other side of the course and he didn’t like that very much. I set him up again and he didn’t read the turn taking the jump 10-15 feet ahead of the first jump instead of wrapping. Set him up one more time and he did the sequence perfectly.

Overall, it was a pretty good day.