Monday, June 9, 2008

Catching Up ... and Ticket

It’s been a while between posts … I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with other things however we’re back on track and refocusing our training.

Over the past few months I’ve been a little distracted (or destructed!) by Ticket’s bar-knocking issues. These things do get you down sometimes, particularly when you go to a double header and 8 out of 8 runs NON-qualified because of ONE bar down in each. Yes, I do acknowledge that out of some 100+ bars only 10 may have come down (that’s nearly 10%) however that’s enough to get you down when you start adding up the entry fees and continual non-Q’s over the months/years.

What do you do with a dog like Ticket? Yes, she has “issues” to deal with when around people and on the surface the untrained eye would not even know how much she has to deal with … however, there’s something about the speed and ability of this little dog that keeps me going and I’m not ready to give up on her yet!




We’re refocusing our training back to basic skills – mainly jumping – and the first step is to get her jumping thru the tyre without kicking off with her back feet! Something she’s been doing and we’ve only just realized which may be partly the cause for bars being knocked too – she doesn’t know that it’s wrong and the hardest thing is working out how to teach her that it’s wrong.

She tries VERY hard for me and I know she doesn’t do it on purpose, nor does she not care … if she didn’t care then she would be knocking ALL the bars down – right?


We did have some positives at yesterdays Northern Suburbs Double Header Agility Trial. Ticket did a couple of lovely runs with minor problems, a couple of times we blew our weave pole entry (another skill we’re going to be working on over the next month) but no bars down … YES! I was happy with that (I know how to fix the weave pole problem) … a couple of runs with a bar down but she worked very nicely and one run clear in Open Jumping for Ticket to take 2nd Place to Gina O’Keefe’s BC “Dom”, one of our fastest dogs here … gotta say, I was pretty happy with that and we finished the day feeling a little more successful than at some of our past trials.

So lot’s of skill training on the menu for the next month … jumping, weaving, jumping, contacts, jumping and more jumping!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Ticket... interesting levitating bar in the pic above ^ ;p