So sorry we have been a bit quite of the blogging front of late. There has been a lot going on in the world of 1st World Dog plus mum has also been busy with that work stuff that she does (or whatever it is when she leaves the house without me). The good news is we have been going to lots of agility trials over the last few weekends… we just haven’t had a chance to write up blog posts about them… so here we go with a summary….
Somewhere between mum’s preoccupation with my bar dropping and the time mum has spent at Pilates and the Physio dealing with her own back issues she has come to the decision that I need to do more Core Strength Work.
So if you are a regular reader of my little blog here you probably know mum has had a couple of pre-occupations lately… getting my bum over bars and more recently start line stays. So after taking in lots of advice we put it into practice at the weekend trial and couldn’t be happier with the result… so here is a summary of what we learnt.
When we started out in agility I had a pretty decent start line stay. Then late last year I decided I didn’t like the idea of waiting and so starts became chaos. Mum would hold my collar as she removed my lead and handed it to the steward. Then mum would say ‘stay’ but the moment she let go of my collar I would bolt.
We have written about before in the blog that we don’t know what we don’t know. There were also things that we were exposed to in our earlier days of training that we didn’t really understand the why? behind them and the importance of them. This is especially the case in agility. One such thing we have learnt more about is contacts.
Have to love it that mum moved Mother’s Day in our family yesterday so we could go to an agility trial at the Hawkesbury Agriculture Show.
The start of this year there have been lots of a-ha moments of mum discovering so much foundation work that can and should be done for agility. As the 1st dog that mum has been doing agility with this whole thing is a big learning curve for both of us. We are loving having this blog as our learning journal to capture and we have just had a wonderful thing messaged from Zsofi Biro over in Hungry…. Chatting about doing agility foundation work regardless of the dog’s age she said “exploring should take a lifetime! that’s when they (the dog) feel they are important, if you keep their lives exciting!”. What a fantastic way to think about doing any sort of training be it Agility, Obedience, Rally O, Tracking, Dancing and just tricks around the house…. making us dogs feel important. Is that not a reason to go have some fun learning some new tricks.
Believe it or not Mum doesn’t want it to always be about her. I know…. I’m confused too. One of mum’s key learnings from the recent One Mind Dogs seminar was that I need to increase my level of obstacle focus and understand it is my job to successfully negotiate whatever the obstacle is.
Mum & I went to the Royal Easter Show over the weekend. The Royal is an annual event. It is a big event. It isn’t just dog agility…. There are lots of other animals there looking their best. There is an audience. I must entertain the audience.
Well mum and I went along to do our best (and for me that was entertaining them).
It is a huge week of agility here in 1st World Dog land. Mum has spent the 1st half of the week at the One Mind Dogs agility seminar and we are off to Sydney’s Royal Easter Show this weekend competing in the agility trial there (we did a guest post over on Puppy Tales in the lead up to the Royal about “What is Agility?” if you want to check it out). So there is a lot of agility going on… I’m almost dreaming agility…. Well actually for the sake of this photo challenge I am….
1st World Dog 