... Or so my agility instructor tells me last night. Followed by: "We won't turn him into a border collie overnight, but we really need to build his want."
What, Ziggy needing more drive? Shocking!?!
And so I begin in earnest. How do I discover what will really motivate this boy? Carrying around a live squirrel would work, but somehow that doesn't seem feasible.
So I turn to the experts. This weekend: Sylvia Bishop. I've audited her clinic. I've bought the DVD's. Time to watch them. I'll let you know how it goes....
Looking forward to learning the secret -- though not for Chase, affectionately known as the Blur.
ReplyDeleteOh do I know how you feel!!!! My boys were such...uh...slackers.
ReplyDeleteI hauled the boys up to Washington one weekend (years ago) to take them to a Sylvia Bishop seminar. It was a fabulous seminar but her methods didn't do it for my boys--she's very physical in her training. It didn't work well with Rugby because he gets highly aggressive when you get physical with him and it didn't work with Riley because he turns to mush when you get physical with him. Sigh.
The only way I ever got Riley to make it through an entire agility course was to yell, "HOSE!" every other word. "Tunnel-HOSE!" "Weave-HOSE!". He, to this day, loves playing in the hose more than just about anything so I used it as a kind of motivation (i.e. bribe) to get him to do what I wanted. I've been known to haul gigantic super-soaker water guns to agility trials to serve as his reward at the end of a run!
Of course, then I got my girlie-girl who is so high-drive I need to tone her down about three notches.
Good luck with Ziggy! I have definitely owned both (extreme) ends of the Cardigan 'drive' spectrum...I can't really say one is any easier to train than the other but both can be fun if you don't take things too seriously.