Midas, Agility Round V, Class #1
Tonight we started yet another round of Agility for Mr. Midas. He was a bit loud because one of the intact males that had been missing from the last round was back again tonight. Logan is a lovely black lab and Midas has no reason to be so obnoxious, yet he was. *sigh*
Tonight was a bunch of small stations that were extremely tight and extremely difficult to maneuver to. They were supposed to demonstrate control of our dogs but I just realized that Midas has picked up some nasty new habits. He is starting to anticipate what I want and go to that obstacle before I give a command, especially if I’m a tad too slow. He is also starting to back-jump, or go back over/on an obstacle when we are heading somewhere else - which is a HUGE no-no for agility trials 
. Oh well, keeps me on my toes I suppose.
We were on the dog walk a lot - he is flying over his contacts on the entrance to it, but that’s ok so I’m letting it slide. His Wait command is a little rusty so we worked on that tonight too - it was more like a Pause command.
From the dog walk we went over a variety of jumps. Sometimes we went over one, sometimes two and sometimes there was a very tight turn and sometimes a nice straight run - this maximizes the dogs’ attention on their handlers because they never know where we’re going to go next.
Because of the difficulty of the stations, there was a lot of waiting time while other dogs/handlers struggled to master each one.
We moved on to weaves next. Normally, Midas doesn’t hit the weaves until he’s expended quite a bit of energy on-course. Today, we spent a lot more time in tight quarters, involving more thinking than moving. So, when we moved onto the weaves - he flew through and kept popping out. We had to practice over and over. I know he knows what to do but he was just ready to move on - too bad for him haha.
Last we switched to some tunnel and oddly-angled regular jump and broad jump work. He did terrific on this, so it was a good end to the class 
