Furry family

(L-R) Angel, Murphy, Soda, Riot & Sonic

(L-R) Angel, Sonic, Riot, Soda & Murphy

Fun in the sun

Riot & Sonic down the beach

Yes he sleeps...just not very often

At eight and a half months the fun continues. Sonic is around 51cms at the shoulder now and I'm not expecting him to grow too much more at this stage. There is still nothing of him so it will be interesting to see if he does fill out much as he matures. I've had to increase his meals by 100% as I've not had much luck keeping the weight on him. The fact that he rarely stops obviously doesn't help this much.

He is still loving his training and I find his enthusiasm to work from the second I get him out of the car a total joy. He is becoming more and more focused on me when we're at training and I can even let him off lead to work if the distractions are medium level. However if someone came blasting past chasing a ball I'm sure that he wouldn't think twice about joining them so I'm still very careful to manage his environment so that scenario doesn't happen. I'm pretty impressed by his focus for his age.

Training is still based around lots of nose touches, focus work, proofing sit stays, circle work, perch work and jump bumps. Over the last couple of weeks I have been including flexi tunnels and balance work on the middle part of the puppy dog walk which he is really enjoying. I'm really comfortable with allowing him to be totally balanced and confident with his body before trying to run him over any equipment properly.

He is most definately still the apple of my eye. I spoil him rotten and he gets away with murder but he is such a character I can't help myself. Whenever he does something he's not suppose to (and that is fairly regularly) he just looks at me with a totally innocent expression on his face that I find it rather hard to tell him off. I'm more likely to laugh at him and let him go. He is an absolute larrakin and I'm sure that if he was a person he would most definately be the life of the party. He loves attention and if he's not the centre of what's going on he has learnt exactly what he needs to do to make sure that it happens. It's certainly impossible not to know when he's around!

Water baby

Sonic following "puppy vs hose"...

We're drawing to the eight months of age mark and as the one year mark gets closer the prospect of starting real agility training is a very exciting thought. I can't wait to see if my screaming, overzealous puppy loves agility as much as he loves everything else in life.

Training is still progressing slowly but surely. I've begun work on proofing his stays in different locations with new distractions. I have to be a little careful when I practice them at trials as if he does decide to break then he'll be off in the blink of an eye and I don't want him running through an agility ring. Thankfully he is 99% of the time totally focused on the job at hand. I'm also very pleased that I can take him out off lead by himself and feel pretty certain that he'll come back when he's called. If we had another dog come running past chasing a ball it might be a different story, but we're working on it!

Probably our weakest area that we need to work on right now is our circle work. He's great when I'm walking or jogging, but as soon as I try to run fast he tends to go all over the place. So that exercise will take priority for the next few weeks. If he's as fast as I think he'll be, having great circle work will be very important to his training. We're also still doing the jump bump grids every one or two weeks. We generally do a progressive grid one week and a balance grid the next. I'm not going to do the other grids until he is over 12 months and jumping normal height.

I've added the puppy chute tunnel to his training list and he's really enjoying it along with the flexi tunnel. We try and work on the bang game each week as well as lots of two on two off on a perch. I've been neglecting our target work though so one thing I want to focus on over the next few weeks is building his nose touch to the target.

Sonic is a working dog to the bone. When I take all the dogs out for a run and a puddle of water is in the vicinity you can guarantee that young Sonic will give himself a soak. It's strange as none of my other dogs would dream of lying in a puddle of water (might mess up their coats...) so it's a game he's learnt all by himself. Very clever idea I think!

Built for speed?

Sonic is now just shy of the 7 month of age mark. Thankfully no more massive growth spurts have hit although he looks more and more like a racehorse each week. I've had to increase his meal sizes as he was looking a little too light for my liking a couple of weeks ago. I'm really impressed with all the pups structures from this litter. They have a lovely length of neck, not too straight in the shoulders which seems to be a common working border collie problem and they also have a really nice turn of stifle. Although Sonic is slightly bum high at the moment he is still a lovely balanced dog. It goes without saying that he is incredibly athletic and I have watched him become more and more coordinated as the months go by.

About three weeks ago I took Sonic and Riot down to Capel for a day of working sheep. Riot had quite a few goes on the sheep and slowly improved over the day. He hadn't been on sheep since last September so I wasn't surprised that he was way over the top and blowing the sheep up at every opportunity. Thanks to some great advise from some experience three sheep triallers I managed to nip a couple of his bad habits in the bud. Then Sonic had his first go on sheep and was fantastic. I had Jenny Parson come into the round yard with me both times to stay with me and give me advise as he worked. I'd prefer to avoid me wrecking him already!! I doubt I will put him on sheep again for quite a while but it was great to see how natural he was and gives me faith that I may be able to Sporting Register him a bit later on. Not that having him on the SR will make any difference to his agility career but I like the thought of having him registered as Macs SuperSonic so that he is representing Richard and Sam's dogs.

Sonic is now also less a set of testicles. Kriszty organised for him to go up to her VetWest surgery in Clarkson where one of the experienced vets performed the operation. As one of his testicles hadn't come down we were a bit concerned that it may have been right up in his abdomen. Luckily although it was up a little, Tom had no problem locating it and all up the operation took about 40 minutes. Ten days later he is completely recovered and is having his stitches out tonight. It slowed him down the night that he came home from the surgery but he was pretty much back to his normal nutty self by the next day. I must admit that I'm really glad that it's been done and I don't have to worry about it anymore.

On the training front things have been going well. He is mega keen as always and does everything with much gusto. I used him as my demo dog for my Introduction class at ACWA a couple of weeks ago. I had five students and puppies for the evening and Sonic was the picture of a focused and enthusiastic puppy and a great example for my class to see on what type of results you can get from a positively trained dog. I always get my class to sit down on the grass with their puppies and while I was sitting there with Sonic he lay in front of me totally focused on whatever I wanted him to do. It was way beyond his maturity level but then he just loves to work so I guess I shouldn't be that surprised. I haven't got any particular training plans for the next month or so. I'm still focusing on proofing his sit stays, building his recalls and working on shadow handling. The decel game is also going really well and he is learning to dig in hard when I'm cuing a turn. So I shall keep building on those and maybe start working on the bang game a little more. Maybe I'll just start shaping some more stuff on bits of the puppy gear as he picks that up really quickly. I could probably even do a tunnel or something. A bit of variety never hurt anyone!!

Growth spurts

My bean sprout is taller than Soda!!

Displaying those loooong legs...

My puppy grew! Last week he was still 47cm and then I looked at him the other day and I realised that he'd shot up like a bean stalk. I got the measuring tape out and discovered that Sonic is now 50cms. However I still don't believe he'll go over 53cms no matter how many people at agility tease me with "he's gonna be a 600 dog"! He actually looks increadibly athletic and gazelle like. I would imagine that he will be quite a lean, light dog rather than heavier set like his father. Both Gillian and Kriszty reacon that Billy and Secret are hitting growth spurts of their own so it must just be that time!

This week we haven't done anything particularly exciting or new. The weather has been so hot that it makes it hard to do a lot anyway. He is always great fun to train and is enthusiastic about everything we do. When he spotted the table set up at training this week he dragged me over to it in the hope of jumping all over it! I still spend a lot of time working on his reactivity to things. When it's dark and he sees dogs in the distance he is still prone to alarm barking at them. So I've been incorporating the LAT game to work through it. This generally helps him to get over it.

I've probably spent most of my time working on stays. I set up the progressive grid last Wednesday and only actually did it once. While sitting at the start he resisted the urge to race over to another dog that was going past, which he obviously really wanted to. Rather than complete the grid I went back and rewarded him for controlling himself on the start line. It seemed a far greater achievement than running the grid. Plenty of time for the jump grids in any case.

I'm heading down to Capel next Saturday for a sheep working seminar. Sounds like a few agility people will be going also. I'm sure that Riot will be very excited to be on sheep again so it should be a fun day. We just have to hope that it's not stinking hot...

Sonic's first seminar

It’s hard to believe, but the Greg & Laura Derrett seminars have been and gone. The Advanced handling seminar was fantastic. Greg presented us with a whole array of new things to think about. It was all centred around the Blind Cross Body Line (BCBL) and using your positional cues to always indicate where your dog is going next. Riot was fantastic over the three days in really hot and uncomfortable conditions. Greg thought that he had improved a lot since last year, however there is still loads of work to go yet!! I think the hardest thing to keep up is just making sure you are consistent with the handling method. It is just too easy to run a course and change your handling to suit it, instead of keeping your handling system the same no matter what the course presents. I am determined however to try and push myself to keep the system going with Riot. Then hopefully by the time Sonic is ready to go it will just be natural for me to run him the right way all the time…

Laura’s puppy class that I did with Sonic was heaps of fun. She is such a great instructor keeping things interesting and fun for everyone. Most of the things she showed us I have already started doing with Sonic (although most still need loads more work!!) but it just highlighted to me what is more important and how much stronger I need those behaviours to be. I feel that now I can come up with a more structured plan with slightly altered goals in mind.

Some of the things we went over was the importance of tugging, playing the “it’s your choice” game, nose touches, restrained recalls, perch work, teaching balance, two on two off on a plank while nose touching, weight shift to their rear ends, hind end awareness, wobble board, jump bumps, rear cross body language, shadow handling, bang game with the see saw, restrained recalls for teaching drive forward, deceleration and front crosses and plank work on the middle piece of dog walk. All of it was centred around the puppy learning by high level reinforcement so when it comes time to teach equipment in around six to eight months time the drive to perform the basic behaviours is already there.

My goals with Sonic for the immediate future is to really build up his nose touches. I’m now using 75% of his morning and evening meal to do nose touches and I’ve just introduced circle work. When I’m at training I want to continue working his stays but I also want to do more restrained recalls, teaching him to drive to me as hard and fast as he can whether I’m stationary or running away from him. Then adding in front crosses and decel so he learns to really read my body language and cue his position from it.

I was so pleased with Sonic over the seminar. It was stinking hot both days but no matter what I asked of him he worked for me. He tugged like a trooper to the bitter end even after all the other puppies were well over it (except his brother Billy of course who was a star also :-)). Initially he was a bit overwhelmed as we were working inside a hall and the new environment was a bit much for him. The noise that was generated from eight puppies playing tug was considerable to say the least!! It didn’t take him long to adjust and ignore the distractions which I’m sure was helped by me incorporating some of the methods from Control Unleashed.

I really hope we can get both Greg and Laura back again next year. Last night a group of us took them down the beach for fish and chips to wrap up the weekend. I consider them both friends now after organising the last couple of seminars with them and I know they really enjoy themselves when they come here. It would just be so great to work Sonic under either Greg or Laura in twelve months time when he is old enough to be doing agility sequences. However we may be competing with Hawaii so I’m not sure if Perth will win the race to host them next year!!

Training really begins!

Sonic and I have had a good week this week with our training grounds finally being reopened so we can get some proper training done. Unfortunately the weather has been really hot so that makes it a bit restrictive but it has been better than trying to do everything at home. The other bonus is that his adult teeth are all through now so he is tugging much harder and I don’t have to worry about hurting his mouth anymore.

As usual I have had more training revelations with him as we discover the joys of working together. One thing I have discovered is how much he loves my plastic garden rake! At this stage I would have to rate it as number one on his list of favourite toys. It initially started out where raking the leaves in the back garden became an impossible task as he tried to rugby tackle it at any opportunity. Rather than locking him up when raking I decided to control the behaviour by only allowing him to interact with it on cue. So every time he tried to grab it I simply lifted it out of the way. As soon as he stopped or sat I brought the rake back down and started raking again. As soon as I could get two or three strokes in without the rake being tackled I released him to it. It only took about 10 minutes before I could rake a whole patch of grass without him trying to grab it. Interestingly he reverted to running around in circles “herding” the rake while I was raking while waiting for his release cue.

Last week we spent some time doing some fun stuff with the flexi tunnel in my back yard. He seems to enjoy doing it but I wouldn’t say that he’s crazy for it. To help build his enthusiasm I worked on rewarding him with a game of “kill the rake” to transfer the value from the rake to the tunnel. I actually think the tunnel may be kind of boring to him right now as I’ve only had it bunched up in a straight line. It wouldn’t surprise me if he gets more of a kick out of it when it’s bent up into a different shape.

We have also been forging ahead with our Susan Salo jump work. At training I was able to move up to three jump bumps plus the stride regulator at the front with the “V” poles on the front. I initially was working with 4 foot between the jump bumps but it was getting too tight now that he’s getting bigger so we’ve moved up to 6 foot. Funnily enough he much prefers doing this exercise to running through the tunnel. I spent most of Wednesday evening working on his stay at the front. I found that even after highly rewarding his sit stay as soon as he was actually released forward to his toy he didn’t want to be set up for the sit stay anymore but rather just tried to run back down to get his toy again. Seeing how easily he is managing this exercise as a young dog with a “clean slate” made me realize how great it is to be able to start these things from scratch. Already he will easily visually lock onto the toy at the end of the grid whether I’m standing beside him or beside the toy at the far end. He drives through confidently with a nice even stride to get his toy with no body language required from me. He probably rushes a little but I don’t think that will be a problem. I’m sure he’ll settle into it as he gets more experience. We should have no problem working up to five jump bumps next week.

Other than that we have been working on the relaxation protocol from Control Unleashed and I have focused a lot on the “LAT” (Look At That) behaviour as well. Now that he is getting older he is becoming much more aware of the other exciting dogs at training and can initially be very distracted/lunging towards the source. By incorporating the “LAT” work and keeping my rate of reinforcement very high it doesn’t take long for him to switch off from the distractions and realise that it is more rewarding to just focus on me. The other night he had other dogs doing jump grids fairly close and he although initially very distracted, it didn’t take long for him to ignore them.

So my training goals for next week will be;
- up to five jumps in the jump grid
- sit stays with proofing exercises
- shadow handling

Then lots and lots of questions at the Greg Derrett seminar next weekend before I continue with much else!!