Midas

Thus far, Midas has been jumping beautifully on his own without any training from me. Both events we were at, the announcers commented on the nice POP he gets from the end of the dock, which is exactly what I want him to do. He does not follow the bumper though and I would love to be able to compete in Catch It and Extreme or Ultimate Vertical. So, I’ve purchased a golf ball retriever, which I can jam the bumper into and practice EV/UV and many have advised to practice with a hurdle. I have printed plans for a hurdle made of PVC pipe that we can do ourselves. Unfortunately, the water at the dock we use is so low we haven’t been able to practice off of it at all lately. Therefore, we revert to land training. I put two chairs and a 2×4 out in the yard. The 2×4 was just sitting on the ground between the two chairs. This is to get Midas used to jumping over it and between the two chairs (for now). He did alright. He would only jump it if I directly asked him to though. Next I moved it up to the chair rungs, approximately 7 inches off the ground. He did alright with this as well. Then I tried tossing his toy for him while he jumps the hurdle. He did that. Then he apparently got bored because he laid down with a stick instead of coming back for more. Fine.

Mason

With Mason I’ve basically just been building up his drive for the object. It’s working great. As soon as I take any toy out of the “special” bag he goes nuts. He jumps, he drools, he spins, he snorts…and he inevitably trips and does a nose dive into the dirt . He’s so darn cute. So, I play with him with the new bumper and start The Chase technique, he’s definitely lunging after it now. He even occasionally catches it, but his eye mouth coordination isn’t quite that fast yet. Then I tried the hop over the board on the ground, oh sure, no problem. Then I moved it up to the 7 in mark and he sailed right over it before I was done getting it ready. I praised him heavily. He does great lunging at the bumper going over the hurdle. He even goes over the hurdle by himself without any direction (I think because I praised him so much for it). I have got one eager pup here whose training I think is going to be a breeze.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 10:51 am and is filed under Dock Jumping, Training Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.