Last Contacts Class!

Gracie and I had our last contacts class last night (though I thought we still had one more).  We did everything at full height!  Well, the A-frame was at full height for small dogs not big dogs but we did it without the carpet on the up-side!  It was fun and Gracie had no problem with the dog walk or A-frame and she thought she had no problem with the teeter, though I disagree.  I learned that Gracie stays on the contacts better for 2-on-2-off if I try to get in front of her so that I'm rewarding her from straight on instead of from the side where my bending over may push her off the contact.  Gracie's definitely much better at "bottom" on the dog walk than the A-frame.  I think this is because the A-frame is steeper and at home we practice with a dog walk width board.  We started the teeter with a small stool under the starting end and a cushion on the end that the board slams down on.  Then we took these away and instead caught the board as it tipped then letting it slam from only a few inches above the ground.  Gracie was doing great with this, so the last couple times I thought I'd try it without anyone catching the board.  She had been stopping on the teeter near the end when I said "stop" but without anyone there to slow her down she kinda just kept going.  It wasn't quite a fly off, but it was close.  So definitely need to work on learning "stop."  We did a little course with the three contacts and a tunnel at the end which was a lot of fun, but I was out of breath by the end, Gracie's fast!

With the weather getting to be so much nicer (finally!) we're starting to run into more dogs on our walks.  Strangely we haven't seen many more squirrels.  There has been news of coyotes showing up more in town, trying to get away from the flood waters, so they may be eating all the squirrels.  Anyways we saw 5 dogs on our walk today.  The first one was hanging out off to the side of the path with it's owner and we had to walk past it.  This didn't go so well, Gracie was lunging and barking and Gidget wanted to play, but we made it past.  The rest of the dogs were walking on the path and I saw them first every time and was able to leave the path by 10ft. or so and get both girls in a sit.  I rewarded them both for paying attention to me (I've recently learned that this is called the Premack Principle) and we didn't have a single issue when other dogs had to pass us.  Gracie's improved by leaps and bounds with her reactive issues (and so have I!).  At class last night, a classmate noted how well she did in class when I had said she's my problem dog.  That made me feel good, because I know she hadn't always been that good and in other situations still isn't, but we're improving and I think we will one day manage to walk into an agility trial without issue!