Weave Poles & obstacle discrimination question

[rtropeano]

Daisy is doing very nicely in agility - she's now up to do doing a short sequence with the poles (jump-weave-jump)...I'm very proud of her, she's the only one in her class that can do a full set of poles - the others including an Aussie and a Sheltie and the rest of the class have not even closed the poles yet......

Who says a Brittany can't do agility..... LOL....now if I could just get her over teeter fear, we'd be good.

Question on obstacle discrimination, we were running a sequence and I called the wrong obstacle name but Daisy still took the correct obstacle, my instructor
said, don't worry about that, because they really don't know the obstacle name anyway?

If they don't know the names, then how do they know which obstacle to take on a course when there are many obstacles out there? Is it just by hand signals and body position?

I'm curious how your dogs do it?

Rose

[Lisa]

Most of the time, the dogs pay way more attention to your body language than to what you say. When all of your body language says to take a particular obstacle, it doesn't matter what you call it, they'll take the obstacle. When it comes down to obstacle discrimination, it does help to make sure your dog knows the names of the obstacles. You can usually get away with body language, but sometimes it really helps to have verbals as well. It's especially helpful when handling at a distance.

[rtropeano]

Thanks Lisa! She's handling well at a distance so far...thankfully, because honestly, I'm not a runner. So when I'm out of breath...LOL.....I send her ahead and tell her "go" whatever....so far...not bad, but we are in practice our sequences are not that difficult just yet.....tehee... We'll need to work on the obstacle discrimination a bit more.

Rose

[Lisa]

Meant to post more last night, but I got tired of typing on my phone!

Anyway - teeter fear...yeah, struggled with that for a long time with Buster. What finally worked for him was to give a really yummy reward every single time he did the teeter. I STILL stop in the middle of a course in class to reward the teeter. I use a small tupperware container filled with canned dog food. He gets to lick the food out of the container when he does the teeter.

As far as discriminations, usually, the big ones you'll see are A-frame/tunnel and dogwalk/tunnel. So, if your dog just really knows, verbally, what those obstacles are, you're probably fine. Buster isn't fond of tunnels, but will take them over the contact obstacles, so even though he KNOWS what the obstacles are called, he will often choose to take the tunnel anyway. Then it comes down to the best way to handle it to pretty much make the dog take the right obstacle...I'm still figuring that out with Buster and dogwalk/tunnel discriminations. He would just rather take the tunnel, and no amount of handling seems to make a difference.

[rtropeano]

WE just started doing that more in class, these last few times....the first time Daisy saw the tunnel under the dogwalk - I called Tunnel and she ran up to it and kinda looked around like, "what the heck is this" - but after one or to times, right through...Daisy likes tunnels....

Thanks for the help on the teeter - to be quite frank - DH screwed her up with the teeter and that's why she regressed. When we were at camp, I told him to hold the end and slowly lower it down, like we've been doing in class for the last 500 weeks - but when we did it there, he just let it slam and of course she was scared to death....ARGH!!!

Rose