Proofing for the NOC

Proofing!!!

Lance has been taking over the Ring Confidence class we organized at the obedience club to help work on happy ring entrances for Vito.  Sorry Vito for stealing your people.  It's been great though as I've discovered that Lance thinks it's perfectly ok to look away when I leave him, like for signals.  Does fine in heeling and is trying really hard to ignore obnoxious people distractions when set up in heel for pivots and stuff.  But leave him on that stand stay and it's fair game!  Pretty much as soon as I take one step away he allows himself to look at the crinkling food.  We failed, a lot!
Oh well, I'm very grateful that I can replicate this problem in practice and I know he will get the rules soon.  I also had an epiphany that this problem got worse after I started having "judges" feed him on the group stays.  Oops!  But I certainly don't regret that decision as I think it has been helping his confidence when left in a line up.

Other proofing work we have been doing have mainly involved our go outs.  Currently I see Lance's go outs as his weakest exercise.  It wasn't until maybe 2 months ago when the club got our very first traditional ring gates and stanchions where I started to train Lance to target the stanchion itself.  Prior to that, and most of our training still, involved looking straight ahead and run until you hit a barrier.  Thus Lance's best go outs are to walls and solid barriers!  We have some issues when there's a busy background of stuff or when we're close to a corner and the side walls look appealing.  But the new stanchions are so much easier as a very obvious target.  Lance is doing pretty well but he's not completely sold on the STANCHION training and will often touch the gating 6-12in next to it.
So back to proofing- I've discovered that throwing a jacket/blanket over the gating is like a magnet.  I've been warned that there will be banners on the gates at the NOC so I'm trying to work on it every time I'm at the club.  This week's session went MUCH better.  Maybe he's finally getting that Yes I want him to go to the obvious stanchion, No I don't want him to go to an obvious other distraction.

At home we're just doing fronts, fronts, and more fronts for dinner.  He's alright with that since drilling equals food!

And Lance and I are eternally grateful to everybody who came to a little game night fundraiser to help support our trip the the NOC.  Lots of people came out and I think we now have enough donations to cover half the cost!  And the cutest corgi shirt ever!