Obedience training with Pixie

We have had our traditional autumn obedience boost. I have had a goal to make Pixie have more drive in her obedience work. We have done super short training and we have done only small parts of the tasks. After this small work we have done whole chains in different places.

Pixie heal work has been improving the whole time. She has got more drive and we got very good tip from Tarja Melakari. We have had a problem of loosing a contact. I have usually just stopped and started again. Tarja suggested that every time Pixie lost contact or walk too hard on the leg, we turn to a left and stop. After she corrects she gets reward. This is like a active way to correct the heal work and dog gets a reward from right work. This really started to pay of. Pixie contact just went better and better and also her position in the side got better. Pixie is a sensitive dog and this was a first good advice that made her drive rise. Thanks a lot Tarja!!!!!!

Second tip from Tarja was to change retrieve return and coming to my side so that Pixie goes from behind me. This really worked like a charm. Her drive went high and her coming to heal position became faster and better. Also this helped her retrieve returns. Although this has been hard to change when we have done competition training. Pixie still need a hand signal to change the way she return with a dumbbell. I hope to make this work because she works much much better this way.

In recall we have had problem with stop that Pixie won't stop in full force. This was solved with little help by rewarding her from behind. This was done with an assistant that had a ball. After I said stop she tossed the ball and I released her to the reward. Only few repeat with this and she had super stop. This work was rewarded us our best score in recall in competition last weekend.

All this work has really improved Pixies attitude and drive. So we had a competition last weekend. She started really nicely but as soon as she went to ring drive went down. She was sloppy and went down while sitting in place. She also missed down position in Z-walk. Pixie wasn't the best she could be at the competition. Only thing that come from our work was super recall stop. Other wise she did everything lower from her usually self. Sometimes it hard to work with a dog that has very small high drive working mode. Pixie does almost everything with canter and so but there is no spirit in her work. I just hope that she will do a bit better in a competition in few weeks.

That's for now... Next we will have some agility news :D :D :D