Monday, May 3, 2010

Monday Class

After having last Monday off, we went back to agility class today! The theme for the day was lateral sends. The point is to cue your dog to a turn by moving laterally while supporting forward motion to the jump with an inside arm, shoulders forward and a verbal jump command. You can practice this with one jump - set the dog up on a stay about 8 feet from the jump. The handler starts very close to the jump, gives the ok, and as the dog comes towards the jump, takes one step to the side still cueing the dog to jump. Then as you get better at the skill, the handler moves farther to the side and adds motion etc. There are three main ways to cue a turn for the dog - deceleration (like we did with forward sends), lateral motion (as in lateral sends) and no motion. Jenn pointed out that we use lateral motion with a 180 all the time - with a front cross or without. But she said you need to be careful to train your dog to do the 180 with lateral motion because if the handler just uses deceleration and than turns around and runs in the opposite direction without the lateral motion, the dog may learn to do 180s that way and then if the handler needs to pull the dog through the two jumps, the dog will not read it that way and will automatically do the 180. Make sense? I am terrible at writing this stuff down!

We also worked a little bit on independent obstacles and lateral motion away from the weaves, a-frame and dogwalk. Every one did quite well except for the dogwalk. We all wanted to jump the contact and mom already knew I would do exactly that! But I did a fast DW and that is important right now!

The photographer from our last trial recently put all his photos up on his website - there are some pretty funny ones of me on the table. Here is the link in case you want to check them out -
http://www.mlifer.com/mlp/album/index.html - we couldn't link directly to my photos. So find
"dog names starting with R" on the left side of the page and then scroll down until you find Ricky and Christina Saetti (mom's name) and click on that and you should be able to see me!

Gotta zoom!

Ricky

10 comments:

Sara said...

Those photos were great! They really showed your personality. I liked the jumping photos the best, but they're always my favorite.

Hope you got extra treats for doing a fast DW today! That's awesome.

Diana said...

The pictures are great! I love some of the expression Ricky gave you on the table. LoL Im so jealous of your lessons. They sound great! Diana

Amy / Layla the Malamute said...

What cool pictures! That's one thing I'm looking forward to the most about trials, the awesome pictures.

What you were describing about the lesson does make sense. I'm having a very hard time teaching Layla to come in between two jumps (I think it's called a treadle). Just one more thing to work on :)

Morganne said...

Sounds like you had a great class! I liked your description of why you should add the lateral motion component to cue a 180.

Now to go check out those pictures.

Sagira said...

We know Mike. My daddy is very jealous of his camera and wants one just like it now. haha.

I am off to agility class in a few myself.

<3 Sagira

NAK and The Residents of The Khottage Now With KhattleDog! said...

Didn't woo see if the deer wanted to go along?

Hugz&Khysses,
Khyra
PeeEssWoo: Off to look at the pikhs now!

Kathy Mocharnuk said...

I LOVED the second photo of Ricky jumping, and there was one on the table that looked like he was smiling. Gosh one of those pictures on the table made Ricky look so small, very cool how many photos there were of Ricky=guess he is just photogenic. Sounds like a terrific class.

Kathy Mocharnuk said...

PS, great info on the 180's from class.

Natasha said...

Great explanation of the 180 exercises. I understood what you were saying clearly :)

The photos on the table are SO darn cute!! Love the jumping ones too. Are you going to buy any? It'd be hard to choose, that's for sure!

Dawn said...

Wonderful photos! How many did your Mom buy? LOL!