Day 80 - Agility Class (Graduation!)

Jedi has decided that sleep is for losers. Four and a half month old puppies don't need sleep. Why would he want to lose precious moments of living life to its fullest by closing his eyes? Last night he didn't settle on the couch until after 10:00, and he was up before anyone else again (by the way, I need to move the stash of paper bags or I soon won't have any to worry about...). Today I got home from work at 1:00 and Jedi did not stop for one moment until we left for class at 4:15, where he was pretty much finally forced to sleep. It's after 10:00 now and he's still running around outside after we got home from class. So yes, who needs sleep? Not my puppy, apparently.

Jedi worked on cik/cap around the cone for both breakfast and lunch. He's got that left turn down pat now. By lunch I was holding out for multiple turns in that direction, and he's even starting to speed up to get them done faster (imagine that). My guess is that Silvia would tell me that it's ready to be named, so I should probably settle on what I'm going to call these. When Ann Braue demonstrated these turns she used "nananana" and "check, check, check." I don't think which one is which matters so long as you are able to keep them straight for yourself (ha, good luck self). I think Susan Garrett uses "lalalalala" for one of them. I think the "la" rolls off the tongue a little easier than "na," so maybe I'll go with that. At any rate, Jedi's aptitude at turning to the left is making it harder to get him to offer much to the right. When he does it he continues to go just a bit further past me, but as soon as he gets his reward he reverses and goes back in the favored direction. I really need to video something for the online class...

I didn't bother with any play time for Jedi today aside from the tugging that he gets to do with his meals. When I'm teaching I prefer him to be more subdued (ha....), but I figure when I'm able to give him my full attention at agility class then I'd like him fired up and on his toes. That said, Jedi must have crashed super hard on the ride to Middleton today. He was pretty bleary-eyed and blinky when I got him out of the van and it took him a moment to really wake up and figure out where we were. I got there fifteen minutes before class started, though, so we had plenty of time to walk around to get him to empty himself and wake up before we began.

Tonight was graduation night from Agility Foundations 1! There was no pomp and circumstance, no big hurrah -- Actually, not even a certificate. Really, I think it's kind of a good marketing ploy. Graduation and certificates often signify the end, and these classes are more or less structured to just run from one to the next. They started talking about the next session a couple of weeks ago with the expectation that everyone would sign up and continue on. It will be interesting to see how many people from the group return, as there were obviously varying levels of success among participants. Jedi is all signed up and ready to go. We'll have next week off and start up the following week. That class starts at 7:30, so it will be a late night for us, not getting home until 10:30 p.m.

We started the night split up again. Jedi and I were on the "not the tunnel" side, where we were pretty much given the option to do whatever we wanted on the various target stuff strewn about. Emphasis was placed on working bottoms on the travel plank and table position, so that's pretty much what we did. Bottoms were hard with all of that tunnel fun going on behind the divider, but Jedi did a good job at keeping his focus on me and the task at hand -- well enough that I was able to remove his leash because it kept getting caught on the travel plank. When we switched to the table we worked on offering a down and playing in that position. This is probably the biggest thing I picked up from the puppy seminar -- playing in a down is hard, but it really has upped the value for that position on the table!

Over on the tunnel side we started to chain a jump standard before and after the (straight) tunnel. Jedi ducked around the jump standard after the tunnel the first time because I was behind. I got him to hold his wait longer the next time to better indicate the jump and after that he was fine driving through ahead of me. He did well holding his wait tonight, but he is really twitchy when you stick him in front of obstacles (especially tunnels). I'm going to have to start proofing this one at home, since he's been rock solid when I work on this without the equipment. Heck, he's even holding his position when I throw his toys, but I guess that doesn't hold a candle to the tunnel.

We introduced the tire tonight. The PVC tire frame they were using was slightly raised (maybe 6" or so?) and I wasn't a super huge fan of that -- Mostly because Jedi was oblivious to it and kept hitting it, but eventually he seemed to figure it out. Hopefully this lack of caring that he hit a solid PVC bar doesn't foreshadow a bar-knocking future.  ;o)  Jedi has never seen a tire before and started out by going around it the first couple of times. If he ran around it he came back through it on the way back to me, so there is that, I guess. He figured out the point of the obstacle pretty quickly, though, and I was able to send him through at various angles.

During the last half of the night the two groups came together and we just took turn running through various short sequences. They were all straight and long. My preference at this stage is to run Jedi on a curve because, well, he's a lot faster than me and a curve puts me at the advantage. I pushed his stay where needed if I needed to get ahead, or just threw his ball to drive him forward if the situation warranted it. We did jump tunnel, hoop tunnel, hoop chute, jump jump table, and jump table jump. Those last two with the table were the hardest since Jedi doesn't have any drive to the table yet. I needed a head start to keep him driving forward to the object, or else he turned back into me and started hopping in anticipation of receiving his toy. He attacked the jump table jump combo with gusto, sliding completely off the table the second time -- but hey, at least he appeared to attempt to stop.

At the end of class one of the dogs absolutely lost her mind over a dog coming in for the next class. This was totally out of character for this dog, so who knows what was going on -- but it happened right in front of Jedi. I'll be honest, after his reaction to the reactive dog last night I was a little concerned that he would join in, but he stayed totally relaxed and was pretty much "not my monkeys, not my circus" about the whole thing, even when another dog from our class (one who is often reactive, so no surprise) joined in. Good boy, Jedi. He's just so chill about the other dogs at agility class, even when they run right up his butt after getting away from their owners.

We had a nice quiet drive home compared to last week when we had to make that emergency stop. Jedi didn't get much of his food during class tonight since the majority of the time was spent running through things (which equals toys), so he actually got to eat dinner with the rest of the dogs when we got home. I still have to watch him like a hawk to keep him from going into the other dogs' dishes -- he does great for a while then slips, gets corrected, does great for a while, etc. I wish the dogs would correct him, but he's a smart boy and only goes after Luke and Kizzy's dishes. The other two would put a stop to it for sure. Oh well, I just need to be more on top of him I guess.