Thursday, November 8, 2012

Rip's Training Diary #4


I realize that I haven't posted lately about what Rip & I doing with our training time.  My work duties (travel! projects!) continue to be onerous, so my training time is a bit sparse.  We are making progress, though!

Right now we're working on:
  • Go out games - including hitting the stanchion, taking cheese off the stanchion, and running to a pvc box, turning towards me & sitting in the box.
  • Retrieving - Rip loves retrieving!  We're working with wood, plastic, metal, and leather dumbbells.  Rip now reliably retrieves when I throw the dumbbell (though I still have to hold his collar to keep him in place while I'm throwing).  We're not doing any fronts - I'm just having Rip bring it back to me and drop it when I release him to the treat I've thrown.  
  • A better dumbbell hold.  Naughty Rip likes to play with the dumbbell when returning to me - mouthing it instead of holding it politely.  No surprise there - why just hold a dumbbell when you can hold it, run, AND chomp on it?!
  • Side-passing (horse people will know this term) - I'm training Rip to walk sideways when facing me - moving to stay perpendicular to me as I move back & forth.  Prep for fronts.
  • Heeling!  We love to heel!  Now we're adding in automatic sits and slow pace.  
  • A new trick that I really hope we can pull off.  I'll record it and post it on YouTube if I can pull it off.  So far Rip hasn't had an "I get it!" moment, so we'll see.

What we should be working on but aren't:
  • Agility (sigh. where does the time go?)
  • Stays.  Must start seriously working stays.  I know it's bad of me not be working on these more often.  I'm just so thrilled to have a dog who loves to play that I hate to "waste" our precious training time on the stay.

Since I don't have a training picture, I'll end with a picture that shows what happens when Rip is bored due to lack of training.  Naughty dog.  Or maybe he just wants to play MarioCart on the Wii.


3 comments:

  1. Just build your Stays into the play. Then play can be the reward for stay. It will gain you a nice startline stay when you do find time for agility!

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  2. If you can share how you are training a sidepass i would love to know. I need to get this with Magic.

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    Replies
    1. Dawn - I'll try to do a blog post about it soon. We're still perfecting one direction, but I'll try to get some video, too.

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