Obedience continued

Bella and I started the second chapter in our obedience training this evening. We began our intermediate obedience class.

When we got there the first order of business was to give our good news, I got to tell the trainer about Bella getting her AKC PAL registration. He was really excited for us. I also told him about the obedience trial that I found in June, and that if all goes well that would be my goal for our first event. He was very pleased with the idea and said "don't worry, we'll get ya into shape for it".

The class is relatively small, aside from Bella and I there are two Bernese Mountain dogs, a smooth collie mix, a GSD, and a Black Russian Terrier and Papillon that were both in our beginners class.

Tonight we worked quite a bit on our heel work. Apparently everyone in the class is in or working towards competing so he really focused on our technique. Apparently I need to learn how to walk. LOL it's not like it sounds though. What I need to do is focus on my cadence, and making consistent left and right turns. I also had to work to not step too far out when doing an about face. He suggested we all find a tennis court or somewhere with painted lines on the ground where we can practice without the dogs that way we can be consistent which will later help the dog keep up with us in the ring. We also learned how to heel in the figure eight pattern. I think for our first time we did pretty good with this. But when he said stop I didn't do the 1, 2 count like you are supposed to; when they say "halt" you are supposed to count two steps and then stop, for some reason I have a really difficult time with this one. The last thing he showed us was how to start to teach the dog to move off of you and side step to position their bodies in the correct place. He showed a few different techniques for this. One is to stand to the side of the dog with a treat in front of them (to prevent them moving forward, but to keep their attention) and just step into their side this gently forces them to side step away from you. The other method was using two plastic rods to guide their bodies in the direction you desire. I'll have to go to Lowe's to get a few of these to see how that works.

Overall it went really well. I really think that I'll get a lot out of this class due to the fact that there are about half the number of dogs as there were in the last one, and because we all have the same goal of competing so we are able to focus more on the details to get things right.

Bella and I just have to be good students and do our homework everyday and I think we have a great chance at our June show!