Freya’s training
Agility
Freya has finally reached a competition age. Freya has super to train with. Her hardest parts have been jumping. She has done super going around the wing but her jumping cross along the bar has been a challenge. We have done a lot of jumping work to make her take off by the wing and not from the last third of bar. I don’t know how to say this problem clearly in English. But here are some pics from our jumping work and problems.
Running contacts
has been our biggest job. This has been a first time I have done dog that has
running A-frame and dogwalk. This project has gone pretty well. I have done our
work with shaping and using a toy target.
Freya has responded to my training very well. My goal was also to do
working verbal cue to turning after contact zone. This process is a still going
on but she has done pretty hard stuff already. I think this will be whole life
project but I like our work so far. We have done most of our work in contact
obstacles so we will see how we will do on whole course.
In overall
Freya is very easy to handle and she gets new stuff in just few tries. Slalom
entries were done in few sessions. Her ability change her behavior after
mistake is phenomenal. If she doesn’t get rewarded she stops and thinks.
Usually on the next try she does it perfectly. Our lack off course work shows
in our work but I think she will catch up my handling in no time. She improves every single time. I just need
to remember to reward her every time she responses exceptionally good to my
handling. My bad habit is to keep running when she is doing super work. Our
rhythm on course is getting better and better even though sometimes we have
different routes. :D One thing is that
Freya has a very strong jump and this makes it sometimes hard predict where she
will land. Good thing from this is that Freya has no problems with bars!
Obedience
What can I
say? Freya is a super learner which makes obedience training super easy. She
has nice high drive while we work but still she can keep mind working all the
time. We have started all ob tasks that will be ahead of us. It’s been really
exciting to train because our ob rules change in August. I have had even more
motivation because I have had to done lots of work to new create training
routines to the new tasks. I have usually tested my training plans with Pixie
and then use them with Freya. I hope to built Freya as good as possible and
even achieve National Champion level.
Scent
discrimination training as advanced really well after I started pine cone
training. This has given me change to make more repeats and improve her skills
in more difficult situations. Pine cone training has also stopped her from
lifting the wrong ones and improved her scent work even more. I have been so
thrilled how she works with her nose. I think our Nosework work has also given
her more confident in her scent work. Soon we will start to put this all
together as a competition task
.
Freya’s
heel work and sit-down-stand in heel work has been really good. I actually could
do heel work with her all the time. Freya has really good energy and very nice
contact. Her position work in heeling has becoming better and better. I do lots
work sit-down-stand outside to healing to improve her cue discrimination. As I
wrote before our next goal is to make her stand without turning her head. I
have used a treat target at this point. My plan is to start training her with
Z-walk with mark cones. I will test what she likes if I have sometimes a toy
behind the mark cone so she would have front target. This will probably keep
her from turning around when go behind her. At first this might lower her speed
and accuracy when I built the reward but hope it will improve the total
outcome.
That’s a
little bit about Freya. She has been just a perfect girls scout in training
(saying in Finnish). I couldn’t ask for a better training partner! Thank you
Jane!
MLPF
