Tonight was Midas’s last Rally class, although we have signed up for the next round as well. We had a lot of fun tonight. We worked on staying close and pivoting on his feet during left turns and then we each had a chance to walk through the course and be graded.

We had a hard time with the moving lay down and the sit was also in the wrong position so we practiced that many times tonight. Towards the end he finally started to “get” it.

We did well on the serpentine tonight - I was very careful of watching the leash and only used vocal cues to get him back where he was supposed to be:

For some reason, tonight he was pretty awful about not putting his nose to the ground, not sure what his problem was and I definitely got points off for it, but he needed to respond.

He caught onto the Front command the first day and that stayed strong tonight. I switched to carrying my treat back behind me and it’s working wonders for keeping him in a better position (instead of trying to dance in front of me in anticipation of a treat):

A couple of times when I said the Wait command, he would sit and then walk, scooch, sit. We need to work on that because it looks awkward.

We ended up with a score of 69 - one point too low to pass, if this were a real Rally trial. I was thrilled! This after only 4 weeks of training . Plus, we came in second only to a dog that is also being trained in Obedience.

The things we need to work on: bumping (this only rarely happens and I’m therefore considering it a fluke ), moving sideways (on purpose, he’s not staying close enough to me), crooked sits, tight leash, moving down and of course the nose on the floor was the highest marks against us.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Rally, 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.