Today Perrin and I did a lot of Rally practice. I got a cyber rally course set up in the back yard, and we ran through it a few times. Turns out that setting up a course is about as hard as running it! I never did get the set up quite right. For cyber rally, you can set up your spacing as it works for your size of dog, and it took quite a lot of trial and error to figure out what worked best for Perrin so that we had enough room between stations to set up properly for the next one, without being too far apart and still fitting into the space that we have. The weather wasn’t cooperating either; I had to pull all my spice jars out of the kitchen to weigh down the signs, but they still sometimes blew around and ruined our run. We did get one run that is probably a Q, but it isn’t quite what I want.
- Our 360 degree right would have not been good in CARO, because I did not stay on the spot, but it appears to pass the Cyber Rally rules
- I don’t think our ‘slow’ is clearly different than our ‘normal’ pace, and this is partly a spacing issue with how I set up the signs in this section of the course. They need to be a bit farther apart to have clearer transitions.
So we will keep practicing until I get one that I am happy with.
I was perusing through my Fenzi library today, and found an old course I hadn’t thought of in a long time: Brain Games for Canines. It is part ‘getting to know how your dog thinks’, and part ‘brain games to play inside’. It is the former that I am very interested in. There are 16 different games that evaluate different things about how the dog thinks/responds to stimuli/approaches problems, as well as a few different lectures to go through. I think this will be really fun to work though with Sei now when he is 6 months old, then maybe again when he is older and see how/what/if he changes.
Adventures in Dog Training 