The Dogs Are Really In Charge

Well it's official, Zumi has lost her mind. With the less training and general mental stimulation she's going insane when out "in public." Flailing, whining, and more flailing at people when at the obedience club and at work. Doesn't matter if she knows them or not.

When we come home from work she immediately grabs a toy as soon as we exit the garage and hit the yard. And then she does at least 6 full laps of the yard and about a dozen more half laps. All on her own. I think the fenced portion of our yard is about 100x100ft.

Sorry Zumi.
Luckily she's still being very good at home. Super excited to go out and do something if I flinch, but otherwise waiting as patiently as she can.

I've been a little quiet lately as not much has been happening on the dog training front. I had a bit of a scare a few weeks ago with my pregnancy and was put on restriction. Restriction sucks. But since then I've had a chance to talk to my doctor and we lifted some of the restrictions, mainly I can walk as much as I want to now :)

But dog training is still a bit limited due to the whole no dog's punching me thing. I've resumed more obedience training with the dogs. Since Vito's entire personal play repertoire is pretty much jump on mommy, he's doing a great job with all the turning I'm doing now to get him to jump at my back.

Agility training has been more stalled. No sequence work at all. But since so far fall in Minnesota is being extremely good to us(!) I still have my agility equipment in the yard and have recently started working on single obstacle work. Goal is to work more on independent weave poles, dogwalks, and maybe a bit more understanding of verbal cues on one jump until I'm forced to put the equipment away for winter.

I tried taking some dogwalk pictures today since we're just not sequencing it anyways! Plus the dogs think a pre-placed toy to target is way more fun and easy than actually listening to handling.

One one jump work I'm not really working towards verbal only performance of the various ways to take the jump, but just trying to get a tad more clued into the fact that I have verbal cues and needing less help motion from me to do them. Zumi is actually pretty darn good with limited speed. Since she loves her dogwalk there and almost always brings her toy to the top of it after doing a victory lap, I decided to appease her this week and work on adding more speed to her 1 jump work. A lot more errors!

With Vito we're just at 1 jump with limited speed. He needs more physical support from me to do the cue and also in general we're still working on keeping bar up. Vito gets VERY excited with a ball in my hand and this brings out bar knocking regardless of whether the jump is at 12in or 22in and whether I'm running or not. I must say that Vito has improved with this though!