Advanced Beginner's Agility, week 2

(Better late than never...it was last Monday.)

I should have known Chandler would be in rare form for class the minute we walked into the training room.
We were about 5 minutes early, and he started to whine and cry. "Whiny boy" was a tad bit impatient to get out on the obstacles. So I dragged him into the bathroom, where he couldn't see the action. He cried, and cried, and cried.

We finally did get to our first practice set of three obstacles. One jump, the pause table, the A frame, and then two more jumps. Chan bounced over the jump, sprang onto the pause table, and immediately bounded off-something he had never done, since he is used to jumping up on Kit's photography table and staying there to pose. It took a couple tries to get "excited boy" to actually lie down on the table, and then we heeled to the A-frame. Up and over...no problem...except there was a plastic lid target at the base of the other side. Chan thinks targets are great...as long as you're not using them to target, that would be BORING. Yep, one second and he'd snatched that target up and was proudly prancing around putting tooth-holes in it. I did get him over the finals jumps, but he had to take a break to sniff around and investigate that portion of the training room...after all, those bags on the bench might have treats in them!

Have I mentioned that my dog is sometimes a silly juvenile delinquent?

Next on the schedule was an introduction to the baby teeter. Its end was set up to land on the pause table, so there really wasn't a big drop, and the instructor was also slowing the drop. We did a few repetitions, systematically adding a tunnel, a jump, and another tunnel to the beginning of the run. Chan seemed to settle down a bit, and I'm very pleased the teeter didn't seem to freak him out, although he did jump off and have to restart once or twice. Yes...he did successfully steal and attempt to take off with the target the instructor had placed at the end of the teeter. I think I'm going to have to quit using them with him, or make them too boring to play with.

Hopefully he'll be a little less wild next class. I think I'd better take him out for an afternoon run or something.