At last week’s session at the agility barn I was very impressed by Beanie’s performance, but I was struggling to keep up with her. This is a plan of last week’s course:

This week I put a bit of thought into figuring out how I can cut corners so that Beanie can run faster without leaving me behind. We worked a little on distance commands “Go On” and “In” during the week. I came up with the following course plan that merges bits of last week’s course (which Beanie found easy) with opportunities to practice our new commands:

It was hard going, but we almost managed it. Beanie didn’t have the same enthusiasm as last week – too much thinking involved in this course and not enough fun! So we finnished up with a great fun session with Beanie, Biggles and Paul.

Beanie really seems to be enjoying agility again, so I decided it was time to start trying to move things forwards a bit. When we started working on distance control in classes it put her off agility all together for a while. She just loves us to run the course with her. But sadly we’re just not fast enough to keep up with her.

Inspired by watching Janie training her squad of collies in the barn the other day I decided to try Beanie with “Go On” and “In” commands.

“Go On” basically means “keep going away from me taking every obstacle in your path until I tell you otherwise”. “In” means “come towards me taking every obstacle in your path until I tell you otherwise”. These two simple commands can provide you with lots of opportunities to send a dog away on it’s own to do bits of the course while you take a short cut.

How hard can it be? Surprisingly (given we’re talking about a wayward Beagle) not hard at all! Here’s the video footage:

We took Beanie and Biggles to the agility barn for a practice session today. Biggles is still only 8 months old so we’re keeping the jumps on the floor for him and avoiding anything he could fall off. He loves it and is doing great. As for Beanie….what a little star – her weaving is perfect every time and getting faster!

Here’s the vid (YouTube muted the original soundtrack I’m afraid!):

Notice how mum (the slow part of the team) is running around the OUTSIDE of the circuit and covering a greater distance than speed demon Beanie! I think that bit needs a re-think! In fact, I’m doing just about everything wrong yet Beanie is responding to me a lot better than she was when I was going to classes and trying to do things right! I guess the reason is that I’m now focussing on her and doing what I think is necessary to keep her moving in the right direction. When I was trying to do things the ‘right’ way I was so focussed on what I had to do that I wasn’t really paying attention to her. Hopefully if we keep videoing our training sessions I’ll gradually start to fix the things I’m doing wrong. It’s certainly more fun for us both doing it our ‘special’ way !!