It's all about Freya

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

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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