Beanie and Biggles enjoy agility so much that they decided to practice on their own:
I guess in future we need to make sure we pack everything away before letting them out to the garden to pee!
Category: Agility
Agility
Agility Practice and a Cooling Swim in the River
I’ll start out this post with some lovely photos of Beanie tackling the agility long jump in our back garden today – I think I’ll be getting one of these printed and hung on the wall!
Sunday’s fun agility session at the racing put both Beanie and I back in the mood for a practice session. It was too short notice to hire the agility barn, but as today’s course plan shows, you can actually fit quite a good course into our tiny, postage stamp garden!
It was a tricky course in places are there were two points where there were different possible routes. I had to make it clear to Beanie with my body language what way I wanted her to go (something I’ve not had much success with so far), and she had to pay attention.
- After the first time over the long jump she had to go through the tunnel (4), but the second time she was to go over the jump (10)
- After the first time through the tunnel she was to go through the weaves (5), but the second time over the jump (11)
Anyway, enough rambling. Here’s the video of Beanie in action and as you will see we didn’t do too badly :
We’re still not doing much jumping with Biggles. We’ll hold off on that until he’s a year old. However, we do give him the occasional little go, and we do quite a bit of work on commands and directional controls. Until recently it was hard work – he got so excited he simply couldn’t pay attention. But he’s doing really well now – in many ways he’s easier to work with than Beanie as he doesn’t have her strong independent streak. When he does start agility properly he’ll make fast progress!
It wasn’t just in agility that we made progress. After a very energetic walk in the park we decided to go down to the river to cool down. Louise (Tess, Clara and Tara’s owner) had suggested that we try throwing Beanie and Biggles favorite dried fish snacks into the river to encourage them in for a swim (although Beanie is an excellent swimmer she likes the pool heated to at least 29 degrees and tends to avoid rivers). As you can see it was a big success (Thanks for the tip Louise – now we can wash the mud off BEFORE we go home !):
This might look like a kiss at first glance, but in actual fact Biggles has found a leaf and Beanie wants it!
We came across this in the middle of the park:
There didn’t seem to be anyone around so I’ve no idea what it was all about. But I thought it was quite funny.
More Agility – Making it Fun
Last week’s agility session was a little ambitious and whilst we managed it I think it lessened Beanie’s enthusiasm for the sport a bit. So today we’re going to try and make it more fun for her whilst still working a little on distance control. Here’s the course plan for today:
Four easy straight lines of equipment that she can run over full pelt. The only difficulty is for her to follow an ‘In’ command after she completes the last piece. I’ll initially aim to send her away over just one piece of equipment before calling her back in, but if she’s managing fine we’ll start sending her further and further away. The other important things in this course is that :
- a) she’s slowed down by the contact on the A frame before approaching the weaves (she still needs this or she gets too excited about the weaves and misses some).
- b) she’s slowed down by the weaves prior to the ramp – she tends to miss out the ramp if she’s too excited.
- c) she’s never slowed down prior to a send away. This is important as she won’t go if she’s not in full flight! I guess this is a problem we need to tackle sometime, but one thing at a time!
I’ll post up the results when we get back.
Results
Well, it didn’t go too bad.
Our contrary little Beanie has moved the goal posts again and decided that she gets fed up of waiting for her treat if we make the course too long. A few weeks ago she was only happy if we let her open up on a big course – now after half a dozen bits of apparatus she starts hanging from my leg pleading for a treat!
So, we broke it down into chunks and she got quite enthusiastic about it. We did manage to go round the full course, but not very well. Anyone with eagle eyes will spot a couple of edit points in the video (not least me magically switching from left to right side while Beanie is half-way through the chute tunnel). The key with Beanie is to keep it FUN – and never to let her fail. One mistake and she’s off sniffing the floor – deaf and blind to your attempts to engage her in the game again.
Biggles is turning out to be the little agility star. We don’t do much with him, but we take him along and let him have a play in the tunnels. It’s good practice because he’s learning to follow instructions and pay attention to us. Today we made up a special little course for him and he did very well – first time too! Don’t tell anyone, but it took about 5 takes for his big sister to get the same course right (she kept missing the tyre jump)!!