Problem Solving Class
I was lucky to win a contest Denise Fenzi was hosting for her new Fenzi Dog Sport Academy online classes. We got a "working" spot in her Problem Solving Class, co taught with local MN trainer Nancy Little! I love reading about all the different ways to train things and then to fix them. If you have any interest in competitive obedience at all, or just want to be a better trainer in general, you seriously need to head on over to her site and at least audit one of them!
Lance is working on his "trial only" issues that have been cropping up recently. Mainly his failure to lie down on the signal exercise. This is one that I really haven't been able to replicate in practice. Nancy had some wonderful ideas for proofing and little Lance aced every one. Rolling a piece of food on the floor right before I gave the signal fool him once as he simply watched it roll instead of looking at me.
So I've committed myself to driving across the cities every Friday nights for run throughs. I suppose I'm lucky that Lance does commit all his trial errors if I do formal run throughs at different clubs. And last week was a disaster! I went in with the plan of only doing the signal exercise, followed by gloves (to work on maintaining eye contact after the pivot instead of auto-marking, another trial-only issue). Lance could not lie down. Unfortunately I got frustrated and he knew it. Lance couldn't even do a half distance down signal in the ring. Every single time he sat.
New ideas came with me for visit #2 today. Trying to de-stress the Corgi and take all the pressure off of him for doing the down signal. But it turns out Lance was amazing and I didn't even get to try! We started with signals and Lance immediately dropped on the down cue. I praised him like crazy and ended the exercise with that. Gloves he made his mistake of auto marking again so I re-pivoted. Second attempt of articles also had a successful down and I once again broke off the exercise. Second attempt of gloves was great as well.
