Zumi 16 Months

The Duck is 16 months old today!  Growing up!

Obedience training has remained the lowest priority although I've made it a bigger focus this last month and hope to continue on that path.  Mainly working on fronts and finishes at home and at the club once a week I'm working on adding pace changes to our heeling.  Signals and go outs are practiced usually at that time as well.  Last weekend I drove for some group ring time to a place Zumi had never been before.  She impressed me with her ability to focus immediately.  I even got to do some work with other people for leash hand offs and setups and she did x1000 better than I was expecting!  Other people are still hard for her but at least with a toy in my hand she knew what to do!

Agility training is pretty much just her weekly class and then another short session on the club that I use for running dogwalk skills and weave poles.  For the most part her weaving is going nicely on what is now a closed set of 12.  Her biggest challenge is collecting to stay in after making the entrance vs skipping a pole or two.  In the spring I hope to do a lot more with with my position and movement as we don't have too much practice with doing crosses after the poles.

RDW training is mostly maintained but I know she will need quite a bit of review in the spring.  When excited she wants to take out yet another stride to only hit 4 times and can be too high.
Handling afterwards needs quite a bit more work as well.  Recently I've added backside training and this blew her mind.  I don't even know how she managed to effortlessly squeeze her body through a jump facing the wall!


Gun Dog training has slowed down the the freezing cold we had recently but was resumed the last two weekends!  Working on adding distance to her sends, whistle sits before her toy, and using her winged bumper.

Zumi will mostly take her toy after the wing now, but she much prefers her toy thrown for it vs being able to tug on it!  Still, it's progress!  This was the first session I did wing vs dokken on a push/pull exercise for marking.


And here are our attempts at a whistle sit to interrupt her toy fetch.  We have a good stop now, but her sit seems to have disappeared.  I don't know if it's progress or not from our last session having very good sits but having a lot of anticipation on being told to sit out there!  Apparently her impulse control at waiting was also much worse this session!