Excellent Standard was up first. Gidget ran beautifully up until that damn teeter! We had a couple nice rear crosses and even my hubby (after seeing the video) said that Gidget did the weaves nicer than he's seen her do in trials! When we got to the teeter Gidget ran past it. It seemed to me that she just had to get a view of it from the side, shake off her worries, say, "ok, I can do that," then come back and do the teeter just fine! Silly dog! I didn't mess up my front cross after the pin wheel, but then I forgot to call Gidget to turn towards the correct last obstacle...oops! Loved the way she ran overall! Turns out none of the excellent dogs qualified on this course.
Masters Jumpers was a very short wait later. The course looked like fun, especially the tunnels part, though the end looked tricky. I didn't mess up a single front cross on this course! This has been an issue for us in the past so I was pretty proud of us both on that one. Gidget ran beautifully again, except that one little thing. Apparently there was something smelly (probably horse related) near the entrance of the second tunnel and Gidget had to pause to sniff. Ugh! We continued on and even managed the tricky ending without issue! Again, loved the way she ran overall!
So our lack of Q's, specifically in standard, is certainly frustrating. But with how smoothly our runs went today, I really think we will be getting there. This will be our year!
I'd appreciate any thoughts on our teeter issues. I went back and looked at our standard videos over the last year to see if I could find any patterns:
- Jan 2012 - took teeter (after other contacts)
- Feb 2012 - took teeter (was slow, later took tunnel instead of A-frame)
- Mar 2012 - took teeter (was slow, after other contacts)
- May 2012 - took teeter (took DW afterwards)
- Jun 2012 - took teeter (ran past DW afterwards)
- Jul 2012 - took teeter (ran past DW and A-frame afterwards)
- Aug 2012 - took teeter (was slow, ran past DW afterwards)
- Sept 2012 - took teeter (after other contacts, had issues taking teeter again in T2B)
- Oct 2012 - ran past teeter but came back and took it (took DW and A-frame afterwards)
- Nov 2012 - took teeter (after other obstacles)
- Jan 2013 - ran past teeter but came back and took it (after other contacts)
We've tried a teeter repair class that mostly involved a form of the "bang game." In class I make sure Gidget gets a bit of hot dog almost every time she takes the teeter. Could that be causing a problem? Dawn suggested we try giving Gidget a hand target to follow up the teeter. Allow her to focus on the touch game instead of the tip of the teeter. A good idea for sure, perhaps a good teeter fix game for Gidget? I think I'd have a hard time using it all the time. Setting it up in the middle of a course could be difficult, she's often a little bit ahead of me and racing her so I can get into position rarely works out.
Alright, falling asleep at the desk here. I'll have to continue to think about this another time. Happy agility!
Are you happy with her performance when she does take it? If so, then I might play around with different proofing stuff. I know with my dogs when I add in distractions they have to try harder to do the behavior and thus end up performing way better, whether it's heeling or weave poles. Of course I always introduce things slowly and with emphasis on a game rather than trying to get the dog to fail.
ReplyDeleteIf you're not happy with how she does the teeter right now then I would personally reteach it from scratch. I think it's very hard to fix a problem when you're staying at the last stage, with any behavior, in any sport. And unless I thought I really screwed up the initial teaching method, I would retrain using a different method in order to give my dog a completely new approach. I know there was an article in clean run on teaching the teeter recently and of course there's some dvds out there too.