Green Dogs :)

HopeShelties said:
Roxas does more ground churning and looks like he's doing more, but Ember is actually the faster dog. She is deceptive. Her stride is pretty big for 16", and doesn't have the ground churning stride he has, but covers a lot of ground when she moves. Running him is never as hard as running her. She's run 6.38yps in jumpers with weaves. He'll be close, but not as fast as her.
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Nice job with the youngsters.

Diva and Birch were like that . Diva looked like she was really running and Birch doesn't look like he moves that fast. But Birch has big huge strides when he actually gets to move out from his slow handler. He is a lot faster than Diva was without even trying.

I wish I could get his full speed out of him, he would be amazing. I see him running in the yard with the other dogs. They always chase him and he runs just fast enough to stay a head of them. If they try and catch him he hits another gear.
 
That is what Ember does around the yard :) None of them when they all run together can touch her.
This video was the last big trial to prep for AKC agility nationals in my area, so should give you an idea of what caliber was there to be the fastest in 16" that day.
 
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Lark is taking a break. She had an incident happen back a few months ago and shut down. It was her first trial and they had a huge kids birthday party over the top of the novice standard ring and they allowed the kids to hang over the rail and beat on walls and scream down at the dogs. She fell off the dogwalk and now is terrified of running at trials, of people in the ring, and noise around it. She was fine the day before it happened and was running fast and happy. Afterward she continued to get worse regardless of what was done to fix it. So decided to take a step back away from agility for a while and work on other things. Take the stress off of it for a while. Sometimes it helps to take a break. So we are working on shaping and learning to fail and acceptance of working around people outside of agility. I decided to give her six months away and to just have fun and train other things.
Breeze is Larks daughter
 
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HopeShelties said:
Lark is taking a break. She had an incident happen back a few months ago and shut down. It was her first trial and they had a huge kids birthday party over the top of the novice standard ring and they allowed the kids to hang over the rail and beat on walls and scream down at the dogs. She fell off the dogwalk and now is terrified of running at trials, of people in the ring, and noise around it. She was fine the day before it happened and was running fast and happy. Afterward she continued to get worse regardless of what was done to fix it. So decided to take a step back away from agility for a while and work on other things. Take the stress off of it for a while. Sometimes it helps to take a break. So we are working on shaping and learning to fail and acceptance of working around people outside of agility. I decided to give her six months away and to just have fun and train other things.
Breeze is Larks daughter
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Lark's daughter- that explains it:winkgrin:

sorry to hear that the trial people allowed those kids to be so out of control- that is just wrong.....
good idea to take a break and do other things.....
hope that she comes back strong- she's one of my favorites:yes:
 
I should mention it wasn't actually people from the trial who's kids were the trouble makers. It was the soccer complex that chose to hold a kids party there at the same time as an agility trial. I will not enter a green dog there again. She was not the only one who had trouble because of the kids party.
Lark is a dog who doesn't handle failure. When something goes wrong, her default behavior is to quit, or shut down. At the time she was a puppy, I did not know to teach her the things I now teach my puppies. They learn to fail early on, and to keep trying and fight for what they want. I apparently have a hole that I need to go back and fix.
This might help to describe learning to fail: http://susangarrettdogagility.com/2010/07/planning-to-fail/
Shaping... I am working on getting her to offer behaviors. I am using it and a clicker to help build the responses I want from her. It'll also help her learn to fail.
I have a plan. I am shaping away from agility right now.. fun, easy things to start with, and will progress to more difficult things. I want to isolate what the problems are, and shape a better response. Teach her to deal with what bothers her in small pieces she can handle. So problems (besides failure) are noise, people, and trials. We'll work on noise and people away from agility. Build up a better response. Then take it on the road. Go to trials, work on shaping the better response there, far away from the ring. Build up to where we can work behaviors around the ring. Build up to where we do the practice jump with a happy, unworried attitude. Shape a good response at the jump with people near it, then in the practice ring. Re-enter a class. Then build back up to doing low key fun matches. Then hopefully come back to agility trials.
Just to eliminate the possibility, I'm going to have her thyroid retested. I tested it at 18 months, but she is now 4, and would like to be sure that it isn't where some of the strange attitude has come from.
 
so bad on the facility to schedule multiple events.....

we don't have any facilities like that around here though it would be nice to have some actual indoor venues so that weather wouldn't be the factor that it is for us.
closest we have come to multiple events was horse jumping at the outside paddocks with dog agility under the covered arena.
I didn't take the dogs near the horse area though we have seen horses at other times and arenas....
 
HopeShelties said:
Roxas does more ground churning and looks like he's doing more, but Ember is actually the faster dog. She is deceptive. Her stride is pretty big for 16", and doesn't have the ground churning stride he has, but covers a lot of ground when she moves. Running him is never as hard as running her. She's run 6.38yps in jumpers with weaves. He'll be close, but not as fast as her.
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Nice That is very quick, no wonder she seems to just flow around the course.
 
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