Thursday, February 3, 2011

Class Day Four

It struck me on the way home that class is now half over. We haven’t made nearly the kind of progress I’d like to have seen.

We did a lot of heeling in class. As usual, Parker heels nicely but still pops around to sit perpendicularly to keep an eye on everything else going on around him. Interestingly, when we did heels from one side of the room to the other, half the dogs going north, the other half going south, Parker did fine, without breaking his attention from me as we passed the other dogs. Still sat crooked, though.

We did some sit stays from a larger distance. Although Parker is great at this at home, he wasn’t doing well in class. At home, before we go out the door, I ask for (and get) a sit, tell him to wait and open the door for the other dogs to go out first. He waits nicely until I tell him it’s okay to go out. Of course, in class I was following the teacher’s instructions and telling him to stay. Once I realized this and substituted wait for stay, he was fine.

Duh.

He breaks the stay as I walk around him, something we haven’t worked on at home.

Still won’t do a down, but we have given that two weeks off at home. Time to fire that one up again.

Attention he does well (doggie zen).

Then we did some distance comes. The teacher had me take off Parker’s lead, afraid that if it dragged, he’d get scared. I did wonder about her admonition to never do a come you couldn’t reinforce, but didn’t argue. And he did come to me, possibly because the alternative would have been to stay with the teacher who had hold of his collar. But it wasn’t very fast. Having an Australian Shepherd and a Border Collie in the class kind of put everyone to shame on the come. Then again I mentally felt superior because Parker heels with a loose lead and they both pull and pull. We take our kudos where we can get them.

I was surprised when the teacher told the class at the end how important it was to practice at least five minutes a day. Five minutes! We’d still be trying to sit at that pace.

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