Agility class super stars, ...well, sort of at least in my eyes!

Well, It FINALLY feels like we are getting somewhere in agility with the border collie gals.

After 4 years of training and recall classes, breaking things down, blah, blah, blah, you get the picture.... Liz had a great class this week. We walked in and they had rototiller the yard, bringing up all new smells and Liz acted like it was a totally new place. I could not get her head up,she was very distracted and stressed, I thought we were hosed for the night-and Deanna later told me she envisioned chasing Liz around the yard all night long.

The great thing that is happening with Liz is that she is loving agility enough that once I get her going boy she is just right on it, and does really well. When she is distracted like she was that night she has no tolerance for any mistakes, and when my feet indicated the wrong tunnel entrance and I tried to put her back in the tunnel she ran off and I had to chase her down...but once I got her back and threw her in the tunnel (well, now I did not throw her into the tunnel, I put her in front of it and let her go, LOL), she was spot on with the rest of the course.

Liz need a little maintance work on the teeter-she is not coming to the bottom and she did not stick her 2020 on the Aframe, but you know the big thing was she stayed with me even though she was really distracted-the rest of it is easy enough to fix at home.

Breeze had her class and wow, we ran all the courses without any mistakes, that has never happened, and this was a hard class, she is on fire. More then being on fire she looks physically terrific-Breeze is very happy spring and the warmer weather is here. I am thinking I will need to get my training, trialing, what ever I want to do in while the warm weather is around before winter next year.

We have had major weave issues and she got the entrances beautifully two times, so I did not attempt them the rest of the class, I just told Deanna that I did not want to do weaves again and we would just walk by them and start again after the weaves. I know we still have more work to do and I did not want to take a chance on having any mistakes after we had done so well.

THE BIG NEWS IS.....I feel pretty safe and happy with Breezie's contacts, of course they will always need to be worked on, but they are looking pretty safe I think. I KNOW when we trained the 4 on the floor Ann Croft had not come out with her modified training plan-which addresses the tendency of dogs to curl back to look at the handler ;-), so Breeze definitely does that...but to tell you the truth it is not affecting how it works, and when we are really running straight on a course, it straightens itself out. I am working on being able to run past, but Breeze is doing pretty good with waiting for her verbal release word. I am not silly enough to think that is strong enough right now to run past her and have her hold her position, but we are working on it, and it is coming along.

Excuse the mess in the yard, I have Crickets jump bumps set up and the kids had dragged a bunch of things in to the yard...time for a little agility yard spring cleaning!