Flying Poodles

Training something completely different

WAG (Willamette Agility Group) is having a non-titling brace class in their upcoming USDAA trial. In brace, one handler runs two dogs at once. Of course I couldn’t resist entering the curly girls in that! Which means… I have to train the girls to follow each other.

So today I tried to train that a little. Both girls off leash? Immediate poodle wrestling… but I did get them to settle down and both wait in a nice sit in front of a tunnel. “OK” and they immediately started to wrestle again. It took me three tries to realize that I needed to sit them one in front of the other. And it had to be Elly in front of Dancer by about three feet.

BUT… that let me run them through ONE tunnel in sequence, Elly in front of Dancer and both of them clearly thrilled. I did that twice, then added ONE jump, so I had a tunnel-jump sequence. They did it perfectly, no wrestling, so I gave them each a few treats and went back to individual training.

I have NO idea if I’ll actually try this in competition. But it’s fun to imagine!