Breakthroughs—Cala

Okay, compared to Ginger my month has been really boring. No intact girls, so nobody in season. No 16 dogs in the house, no wallet being stolen (thank goodness!) I have, however, made some nice training progress with both Cala and Zipper. I'll detail Zipper in a different post.

As I described in the blog on fighting fire with fire, Cala can be a very challenging dog to train. I've been following through with the toy game with her, and I'm thrilled that it's having really amazing results. She's listening and following direction. At the Columbia show she was able to handle Rally Excellent well and take the jump twice, both days, without screaming. Her dumb handler (that would be me) blew by a sign on Saturday so no Q there, but she got a 96 and a first place in her Excellent A class on Sunday.

Right now I'm working on refining some skills with Cala. Cala has difficulty with the halt, side-step right, halt. In that exercise the dog is sitting in heel position and the human steps directly to the right one step with their right leg, then brings the left leg over to meet it. The dog should get up and also step directly right (no forward motion). When we started, Cala was coming over to the right with her head and front but mostly leaving her butt where it was, so that she ended up sitting crooked and wide. We have progressed to her coming over with her front end then swinging her back end in to sit mostly straight. That's satisfactory for Rally standards, but I'd really like to see if I can get her to sidepass. What I would like to see is her getting up and moving both her front and rear to the right at the same time in one motion, then sitting down. And recently she's done this a couple of times with a fun leap to the right. So I'm marking that with a click and a reward.

Another problem spot for Cala are straight fronts, especially from heel position. In Rally signs #41 and #42, the dog halts and sits in heel position, then must move to front (sit in front of and facing the handler) without the handler moving. So the dog has to get up, move forward, and swing around to face the handler then sit again. (The other lower-level Rally call-fronts allow the handler to step backwards several steps to help the dog get straight, this one does not.) Cala either gets up then sits right back down or she gets up and sits sort of facing me but really crooked. She loves left (swing) finishes so she tends to sit at about 9:00 or 10:00 when I want her to sit at 12:00. I had been using my left hand, the one nearest her, to signal for the front. Recently I started switching to my right hand. I take the right hand with a treat in it, bring it to just in front of her nose, then tell her to front while simultaneously drawing that hand out in a big clockwise circle then back toward my right side. It's helping tremendously and her fronts are much better. This is a classic luring scenario, but I will be able to drop the lure quickly and just use my hand at a real Rally trial.

In agility, the riot stick game is working beautifully; when we can work. At the end of February Cala jammed a toe when we were training contacts. So she was off of agility for 3 weeks. In her first training session back I did a single jump, the aframe, and she came running back to me with a bloody foot. She'd cut a toe pad on a different toe. Sigh. So it's really just been this week that I've done a bit more agility training in preparation for the ASCA trial this weekend. I'll let you know how we do.