The Tomato Thief Recovers

Three more days now… and Kory should be fairly well healed up from his neutering. He’s been on restricted duty… pretty much spending his days either in a crate or in the roomier x-pen. He’s been antsy to be busy and probably doesn’t understand why he’s been cooped up. But he’ll get over it.

I’ve been playing a fun little distance game with him, sending him to the x-pen with a “get in” command. And then asking him to lay down. He was pretty slow about the laying down part for awhile which reminded me that his context for “lie down” has pretty much been with me hovering over him. But he’s getting much quicker.

Oh, I’ll release him from the x-pen with an “okay!” and have a gentle game of tug with his leash. He likes the game.

I’ve transferred the send and “get in!” to his crate as well. This took a bit longer because he’s got a natural association now with the crate as his captor and tormentor. I’ll spend awhile more getting him to love his crate again.

I gave him free run of the fenced dog yard this morning so that he could attend to his business. I meanwhile turned my attention to the garden, weeding in a stand of tomatoes; [the rescued “upside down” planter tomatoes, they’re doing famously now.] Anyhow I got looking around for Kory and didn’t see him in the yard. He’d gone up on the porch, made his way to the front of the house and jumped over the 3′ gate. And of course he trotted right down to Marsha’s two tomato planters and helped himself to all of the ripe tomatoes. So I hauled him back into the house and confined him to his crate for awhile.

That boy can jump. I’m contemplating replacing the dog gates that give access to the front porch with a couple of prefab 4′ man-gates that I have stored out in the tractor barn. That’ll be a good project for tomorrow. Lord knows I need another project.

In the tractor barn, by the way, is an old climbing ladder hanging on the wall. It’s one of those old antique things with round dowel steps. I’m going to do some ladder work with Kory and reckon that I’ll use this old ladder.

The purpose of ladder work is really to get a dog to become aware of the placement of his back feet. I’ve ever been skeptical of the protocol for this teaching. Mostly in public classes dogs are hauled over ladders without any real method or guidelines for measurement.

So what I’m determined to do is combine my “back up” training with work on the ladder. That’s right… I intend to teach my boy to back up the length of the ladder. Now the way I figure it, he’ll get a very good understanding of his back feet if he’s backing through the ladder. This sounds like a good subject for a You Tube showoff video. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m still fairly determined that I won’t do any weaving or real jumping with Kory until he’s a year old. Right now he’s kind of a gangly teenager, all elbows and knees you know. While he’s an athletic jumper (though for delinquent pursuits) there is no good reason to stress his growing bones and muscles while he’s still a pup. However, I see no real problem with introducing him to the jump standard with a very low step-over bar. I do have a lot of training objectives associated with simple over hurdles.

I’m especially fascinated, by the way, with the NADAC game of Hoopers. The Hoop is a rather simple obstacle that has little or no physical demands on a dog performance-wise. The dog must simply run through the hoop. So what Hoopers really represents is a pure for handling kind of activity with a dog. As far as that goes I can bring out my old boys Birdie and Bogie and give them a nice romp out in the grass… and they won’t come up lame for running through hoops.

The rules for Hoopers seem a bit obscure to me. I’ll be seeking clarification from some of the hard core NADAC fans out there.

Puzzler

This sequence represents an escalation of an exercise I was doing with a couple of my students in an ongoing series of private lessons. To tell you the truth the puzzle that I was trying to get them to address was the 270° turn in the transition from jump #9 to #10. The downfield consideration is actually jump #12. Ideally the handler will want the dog on left for jump #11 in order to influence the curl back to jump #12. If the handler stays inside the crook of the turn then getting out to #12 is something of a problem.

Okay… what I didn’t see coming, neither of my students could execute the Front Cross from jump #8 to #9 with their dogs. So the whole downfield lesson was lost on a minor prerequisite.

Of course, wanting to feel their pain, I ran both of their dogs through the opening of the sequence, and had no problem with the turn with either dog.

So here’s what I’ll be chewing on for a few days. Certainly the turn from jump #8 to #9 is technical. What is it that I know about a Front Cross that my students don’t precisely understand? What occurs to me is this thing that I’ll tell a student from time to time… “don’t do the turn; do your job!” My job is to conduct the dog through the turn and then make a presentation of the jump.

I slept on it last night. There’s a thing that I can demonstrate with nearly any dog. The Front Cross is largely in the knees. The agility handler too often thinks it’s about the shoulders and the antics of the arms; and so the knees become locked and don’t do the right thing at all. With one of my students dogs last night… I told the handler “watch what I do with my arms”; and I tucked my thumbs into my back pockets and drew the dog neatly into the cross and made a presentation of the jump. Yes… with no arms.

Quoth

“The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” – French novelist Marcel Proust

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Questions comments & impassioned speeches to Bud Houston: BudHouston@hughes.net. And Check out my latest publication the Just For Fun Agility Notebook #30 available at www.dogagility.org/store.