Good Night!

Tuesday night training at Cowley was fun, fun, fun.We started with barrel racing and showcased the little dogs. Kipper is a demon. He is so fast that he looks as though he is the" bunny" used in lure coursing. MoJo proved that he knows the first two barrels by heart.... his biggest motivation is the crowd cheering him on.
Kris was hysterically funny. She found out early that the treats were on the plate behind the third barrel as a go back and she couldn't do the first two barrels. She would line up at the start and fly straight to the plate.
Took some convincing to get her to work first.
The two big dogs that 'played' were Zeus and Ryder and both did a great job. Zeus is just learning the game but is happy to learn. Ryder is an old hat at Barrels and was simply super!!!
We moved on to scent hurdle and started with the young dogs doing jumps up and back. They are all happy to perform. Next, we put the loaded plate in front of the box and sent the dogs. We started working the more advanced dogs to go around the box and back to the start before being rewarded and it worked too! Last of all we worked Kipper and Token and both zoomed out to the box and back with a dumbbell.
Drill was too funny. Deb is a task master as Russell, Barb, Shirley and Sharlet soon found out. 270's left, call front's and forwards, circles left and right were hard to execute in precision, but improvements came with practice and things didn't deteriorate too badly. Richard and I were happy to sit on the sidelines and heckle.
In the obedience, it was a red letter night for Swayze and me. For the first time, without too much distraction mind you, Swayze heeled in perfect precision the entire perimeter of the hall. I was so excited. His recall was straight and true.
Token did a broad jump to die for. Her heeling was very good. Everyone did the straight figure 8 so we could practice matching our footwork with that of our dogs' so that we would not be adapting pace and losing marks. Everyone did very well, with nobody dropping back his shoulder. It was nice to see.
Shaggy came in for conformation practice and I was actually able to run easily with her a bit ahead of me at a decent pace without tearing around the ring. She needs more practice with setting up her free stack when coming off the pace, but she is lovely to see when she is stacked!

Sunday, January 31st, we have rented the hall for the following club activities:

9:30 Draft Dog work: Bring your dog and cart and practice indoors, out of the wind.

10:30 Scent Hurdle work: All dogs ......... Teams work first. Younger, less advanced dogs work last.

noon: Obedience work: All levels

NO RALLY PRACTICE THIS SUNDAY.

Good luck to those of you travelling to the AKC show in February. See you there!!

The 'Prez"