Well, my baby-gating idea turned out to be awesome!
Certainly I can't be the first person to think of this, but I'm so thrilled that while typing my blog entry this morning I got the idea to try it. I think it's going to help Teagan's run-around-the-jump issues.
I set up the high jump for Teagan a little while ago with a single piece of 4-foot baby gating on each side. I set the jump at about 5" and practiced some retrieves, even wide ones...what an improvement! She did fantastic! I think she only had two attempts to go around the baby gating, but they were extremely wide throws (purposely so), and I wanted to see what I could get by using the gates. After about 8-9 retrieves, I shortened each gate by a foot. She still did great...several times, she turned around after the pickup and headed straight back in the direction she came at the dumbbell, which would have led her into the gating. As soon as she saw the gating, she redirected back in toward the jump. Brilliant!
I also did some stays with her. She's up to a 3.5 minute sit-stay with reinforcement at 45-second intervals, and she's up to a 4.25 minute down-stay with reinforcement at 45-second intervals.
Just for fun, for some reinforcement for me, I think I'm going to peek at some of the shows coming up this summer and see if we can't aim for a trial. Her heeling is spot on, her drop is just about perfect (still need to work out some anticipation issues), we need to finish building up time on stays and that's about it, other than generalizing and distractions which are like the icing on the cake. She only finished her CD in January so I'm quite pleased with her progress. It's lovely to have a dog who heels so well that it's a non-issue for higher classes. Yay! I'm getting excited!!
