Slayte's first time in AKC Novice

On July 29, I ran LG in AKC Novice standard and JWW and he got his first two Q's! Hooray for the baby dog! Neither run was perfect but jumpers was clean. All the mistakes were handling induced and lg did his job. It is a little strange for me to go out with my baby dog and actually have him do exactly what I would expect him to do! Enzo was a wreck in standard the first time I ran him. Enzo didn't want to lay down or sit on the table, refused the chute and I completely forgot to expose him to a panel jump. Probably didn't perform his contacts correctly either. This time I made sure to prepare lg for the things that we forget to train properly. Enzo ended up moving into Ex JWW very quickly but it was several months later before we could Q in standard.

Lg's stopped contacts are also way more solid than any other dog I've trained. I did two things differently. First I trained the behavior without a nose target. Our puppy class instructor Geri, had us teach the end position on the teeter first. No props just hop on the end into 2on/off. I did have him lay down on the end at first since he didn't want to shift his weight back before. It was much harder to teach and took longer but I think he understands better. The other thing that I did differently was to fade food rewards early on. I feel like my other dogs would get "ringwise" when they quickly realized they weren't getting a cookie in the ring. So sometimes Slayte gets rewarded with a toy and sometimes he gets to continue. Time will tell but even in these early stages I can see that the behavior is much stronger.

Here is his JWW run. I over pulled him on that first turn because I was worried about the jump to the left. That is a typical Enzo move. Hard to switch gears for me. The closing line was pretty hard. It was a very slight zig zag. I was hoping to run it as a straight line but that didn't quite work out. Not suprised. The rest was great and he nailed the weaves. I just need to remember to not rush ahead at the weaves.


Then Standard. I tried to shape his approach to the dogwalk and over did it a bit but it worked out fine. He did a great stop at the end. I probably released him a little too quick but I got excited and said Yes! as soon as his front feet hit. His aframe contact was borderline. He was doing great on the aframe and then he started one striding so when I marked that he started shortening up a little. That started just a couple weeks ago. Last night in class our instructer told me that maybe I need to stay closer and that seemed to help. He drove really nice to the table, didn't fall off, and stayed when I led out! Awesome! I didn't really handle the next part well. I ran up too far before rear crossing the chute so he didn't see it at all. In hindsight, I led out far enough that a front cross before the chute would have been easy. We still got the Q though since you can have faults in novice! Love that. I really want to get out of novice and open quickly so I don't have to wait all day! The waiting is painful.