Skye's Fail Blog

As a quick sidetrack, for the funniest pictures and videos, visit the Fail Blog website - its a riot. Skye was doing his own version of a Fail Blog this past weekend at the USDAA trial in South Jordan, Utah. At the same time, my wife finally finished her ADCH with Baby Dog.

It was a miserable weekend weather wise - cold, cloudy, usually rainy, and as we were leaving on Sunday, even snow was mixing in. The trial was on a beautiful horse facility on lush grass (slippery when wet). There was tons of space for off leash frisbee or ball throwing - on a nice sunny weekend the location would have been perfect, but....

We ran 5 runs on Saturday and 2 on Sunday and got Zero Q's. This is the first time I have done a trial and never Q'd.
Half our problems were dogwalk contacts, just like the past couple trials. I dont think Skye hit a single DW contact all weekend, including getting called for an UP contact. I am going to go back to our early release/touch & hold training, as my running experiment with him as been seriously deteriorating week after week. Instead of getting better and more solid, its getting worse. His running Aframe is good though, as is his teeter, so just the dogwalk is going back to the old way.

Our other issues this weekend were a weave popout in Std, a refusal in Jumpers, two dropped bars in pairs, a mishandled offcourse jump in Steeplechase, and an offcourse in Snooker.

On the plus side, he was running fast.

Here's the Agility Fail on video:

Rip at it again, self entertainment in a snowstorm

Not much to add to this video, just watch and laugh at Rip's craziness.

Skye contacts training

It seems that Contacts is the subject of interest lately, and why not, as they are often an area of contention for many.
At Skye's last 2 trials, he's missed quite a number of contacts. I decided to film him to evaluate his performance and see if I can make some adjustments to our training to make his contacts more successful. As you will see in the video, his dogwalk contact was looking great with the stride regulator in place. This is the first time I have tried this "crutch" with him, but since he is responding very well to it, I will continue to try and build some "muscle memory". His Aframe is OK, and typically we are not called for an Aframe contact unless I frontcross in front of the frame. It does seem that he is only using the top 6 or 8 inches of the AF contact zone, which is fine for AKC, but in USDAA it makes for a very close call. I may try adding a stride regulator here too and see if it causes him to adjust his steps.


Note that today I did do more contact training and he again hit all his dogwalk contacts with the stride regulator in place. I did not add one to the AFrame though, and his performance was consistent with what we have had in the past.