Flying Poodles

Training Insights

Dancer and Elly and I are slowly making the transition to training with a new trainer here in Portland, after years of training with Cheryl. Debbie’s strengths are many, and her observation skills keen.

Thursday we were working on speed and focus for Dancer, as well as serpentine handling skills for me. She had a three-jump serpentine to a tunnel set up, and the goal was to handle it from both sides to either end of the tunnel, with a two jump leadout.

We rapidly discovered that Dancer wanted to come around the first jump, so we worked on that for a while, until she was learning to focus on that first jump even when I was lateral to it at the second jump. Then we worked on how to indicate which end of the tunnel–from either side of the serpentine sequence. Then we worked on speed through the sequence.

After all that, we worked on a simple high-speed jump-tunnel sequence. Dancer did it once, quite nicely, and then Debbie said “watch her closely after you put her in the sit. When her mouth closes, she’s focused, and that’s when to release her.” I got her toy ready, put her in the sit, watched for that moment, released her, and she FLEW over that jump and through that tunnel to attack that toy.

And I’ve learned: we quit while were ahead. That was it for the day.