Eric came with to Rally class tonight so I’ve got some photos. We had another advanced course set up and it was a little confusing when I walked through it first by myself. But, when we went through all-together it made much more sense. Midas was wound pretty tight tonight - but for once that actually worked in my favor. Once I did a walk-through, I practiced a couple of things off the course.

His sits are becoming SO much better!

I struggled with the Swing command and kept mistakenly putting him into a sit afterwards instead of moving forward. Totally my fault. The instructor said that some people, instead of having their dogs execute the Swing on a walk, will teach them to jump up and pivot into position. She also thought that Midas would really excel at that because he’s so athletic (and he likes to jump around). So, she demonstrated how to go about teaching him that.

He was really loud and obnoxious when we first got there, so I tied him to the wall and we practiced the Quiet command - with other dogs on the course - he did really, really well!

Since the instructor has started working more often with him one-on-one in class, he really likes her - here he’s having a hard time focusing on me because she’s following behind and might give him a treat.

*eye roll* goober dog.

Advanced Rally classes are supposed to be off-lead - but we’re obviously not ready for that. So, everything is on-lead. He does great over the jump (it’s just like agility).

The figure-8 we do fine on, except a little “leash-steering” on my part, something I really have to work on!

We really tried to nail the Close command on this course:

Which he did very well!

We had a new sign, which worked on a different version of Close than we’ve done before.

Description: “HALT – Side Step Right – HALT. With the dog sitting in heel position, the team moves one step directly to the right and halts. The dog moves with the handler and sits in heel position when the handler halts. The exercise may be performed just past the exercise sign. (Stationary exercise)”

He did this very well considering I wasn’t sure what I was doing. Great fun!

We did the course twice, once on the prong, once on his martingale - the instructor says that we’re not quite there, but so close! How awesome is that!?

Then he had to sit patiently (and quietly) while the other dogs went through the course:

This is a silly photo:

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 9:07 pm and is filed under 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.