Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Running Contacts and Soleils new BFF

The half day running contacts seminar with Daisy Peel was awesome and I am very excited to teach Soleil running contacts. She'll have a running dogwalk and aframe and a four-on for the teeter.  I have some preliminary skills to work with her on such as building rear-foot awareness and driving independently to a target. The same stuff I taught Summit but with a different end purpose.

This morning we worked on a nose touch to a target. She figured it out pretty quickly and was driving about five feet away from me to touch the target. We'll play with backing up and putting back feet on an object tonight or tomorrow.

Here is a video of the little Miss playing with her new BFF, Nova. This was at the DOCNA trial that we visited on Saturday. I should mention that all the chase games I've been playing with her paid off on Saturday. One time I let go of her leash to unwrap it from around a chair and she darted off towards the rings. Not trusting her recall (she was on a mission) I yelled "reaaaaady" and turned and ran the opposite direction, she immediately switched gears and spun around and chased me in the direction away from the ring. Luckily the ring was empty (this was a two-ring one judge trial). Thursday, Summit has a full day Masters level handling session which should be a great learning experience.

7 comments:

Kathy Mocharnuk said...

OOOH Soleils is so cute with her BFF. She is a feisty one isnt she? I love hearing how you used the chase game, we have been doing that a lot with the SG stuff and the dogs are loving it, I dont know why I have not done it with them in awhile and now that we are they are wondering why we have not been doing it a lot more then we have....The seminar sounds fantastic, I remember when Daisy was posting lots of videos of training the running contacts a few years ago, it was really fun to follow at that time.

Diana said...

Soleils is a bundle of energy. She was giving that BC a run for her money. Lol, very cute. Diana

Chris and Ricky said...

Too cute! I guess it's exciting that Soleil ran towards the ring - ready to do agility!! Glad she had such an awesome response to your chase game! It will be great for us to see you train running contacts with her - hope you make step by step videos!

Morganne said...

Yes, a video camera is on the wish list and I intend to video tape all our sessions of running contact work in addition to other agility related training.

Unknown said...

What a good thing about the chase game :) We do it with Eva, but now we're going to add the cue 'reeeeaaaaaadddddddyyyyyy'!

Soleil and her new BFF are too cute! Let's hope they'll stay BFFs forever!

kiwichick said...

So lucky to have access to a cute puppy like Nova and dog savvy children. I know my next puppy that is all I will be doing.

Jackie said...

She's a fabulous little pup and I home Nova and Soleil get to be friends for a very long time. I was so impressed with how well the chase me game worked we are working it now too. I can hardly wait to see those running contacts.