Bella's Class: Week 3

Class went very well last night. I decided to try Bella on the nylon slip collar rather than the prong collar. She actually did very well on it. I’m hoping that the next step from there will be to move to the flat collar that she normally wears. Once we can work on that we’ll be in great shape!

The first half of class was a bunch of heel patterns. At first I was keeping the leash too tight anticipating that she was not going to do things right but once the trainer guy told me to relax a bit and loosen the leash she did really great on a very loose leash! A few corrections here and there were needed but not too bad. Until now mostly we had done left and right turns, about face, slow and fast. But last night he threw in quite a bit of new stuff like u-turn to the left, circle to the right, circle to the left, moving down and moving stand. We also did this really great exercise where we were paired off with another dog, the dogs were placed back to back, tail to tail, almost touching. The dogs were then put in a sit stay and a down stay. This was meant to teach the dogs to be near another dog and still be able to remain in position. Bella did really well with this one, she was paired off with a huge Bernese Mountain Dog named Levi. She tried to turn and sniff him once but quickly got the idea and then ignored him for the rest of the exercise.

Really the only problem that we ran into is that Bella gets distracted easily on the long stays. On her sit stay she has a really bad tendency to lie down in the middle of the exercise so in training, I cant get too far from her because I have to be ready to correct her when she does this. On her down stay’s she sniffs the ground a lot which can lead to her breaking her position so I’ve been working with her on this one to teach her “no sniff”. She broke position once but at least she stayed in place for the rest of the exercises.

There was a new girl there too with a little black lab, she seemed very nice. She must be a club member/former student of the trainer’s or something. But she kept complementing on how pretty and how sweet Bella was. I love getting complements on my little girl like that!

This Sunday there is another “Show n’ Go Fun Match” that is at the park where I normally walk the dogs. It is only for fun, not points, but I can do all of the ring exercises on leash. It’s great practice for both of us! I’m really excited to be able to participate with Bella again. To prepare, this week I’m going to drill her on her stay as much as possible. That’s where we had trouble last time out so that’s what we’ll work on! I want a better score than last time if we can at least do that I’ll be really happy!

Oh and Bella went right up to the trainer guy and greeted and played with him a bit! I was very surprised because here I was trying to explain to everyone the problems we’d been having with her and her shyness. He laughed and said “what are you talking about she’s great”. I was really pleased; it gave me a glimpse of what she should be like, what she will be like with more practice/socialization.