The good news is that Scoop was in his second full AKC trial this past weekend and finished his novice standard title and is now in both Open JWW and Standard. The bad news is that we have not trained all the skills that he is going to encounter in open and excellent. The big ones we are missing are discrimination with contacts/tunnels and different side changes at the A-frame, as well as a bit more independence on the weave exits.

Scoop got his first open jumpers leg, here is the video.  You will see a bit of a bobble when I momentarily lost my way, and almost skipped an obstacle. Scoop did not seem to care, I resent him to the jump and he scooted off nicely and I got back on track. duh:) And we did most of the open standard before the wheels fell off. We got through  obstacle 12 smoothly which included a tunnel to DW challenge (by sheer luck since I have never asked him to turn out of a tunnel and go back up a contact). He had a nice DW and good weave entry, lovely table and THEN we had a really most spectacular teeter flyoff. One of those catch your breath in your throat and hope the dog comes down out of the air at some point without any broken bones.

And a skill I really discovered I was missing was what to do on course after an error without a toy to toss or play tug with. Scoop got a bit overstimulated when I had to reset him after a bobble and he considered using me as a tug toy. He stayed at my side when we went to re-enter a set of weaves he had popped at pole 10 when I tried to fade laterally, the problem was how close he was at my side. He was close enough for me to feel his breath on my leg but luckily a word of warning kept him from stepping over the edge.

This week we have discrimination on our list of training goals, along with practicing heelwork in the middle of a course without any toy reinforcer in my hand, and continuing Scoop’s frame training with more side changes before and after. And of course, Letter K and hopefully one or two more letters if there is time.

I hope you have a long list of training goals this week with your novice dog too. Life would be so boring if everything was perfect and we didn’t have a training goal for the week/month & year.

NJG