Practice, practice, practice!

We got quite a bit of practice in this weekend. All 3 dogs got to work some. Saturday, we did a one day clinic as a Regionals prep. It was run similar to regionals to get everyone used to the format since there were a few handlers who have never been to regionals.

We did Jumpers as our first run. I decided to use Bizzie for this one. She had an off course (due to my bad handling) but ran the rest quite well. We repeated the course again & she was clean! I have to remember not to turn my back on her, she cut behind me both times in the same place... and I never do blind crosses with her!

The second run was Standard & I ran Blast. He seems to be developing an aversion to tunnels, he goes in the entry & comes back out... not sure why... anyhow, this happened the first run & we screwed up a tricky jump pattern, but he did the last half quite well. The second run, he seemed to be really distracted & nervous, which I thought we were getting over. I picked him up after the 5th obstacle since he was sniffing & avoiding.. sigh... We did run it again at the end & he did quite well.

The last run we did was Gamblers, so I saved this one for Boo. He got the mini, which included a teeter - he hates teeters - not sure how many points we got, but we missed the final gamble when he took the wrong entry to the tunnel.
Second time around he missed the mini but got the final gamble. He'll often do the teeter once, but then avoids it the next time. He does it just fine in practice, but then there's cookies involved!

Today we had a CAA practice, which is at a different location. We set up a few stations to work different skills & then ran a course at the end. The inevitable finally happened... Bizzie beat Boo! She was clean & he wasn't! Blast was quite distracted again, so we just did some short drills & called it a day for him. He's such a complex little guy, hard to figure out what upsets him.