Day 289

Saturday and Sanity found herself upstaged by Tyler. This is most definitely not the best way to start a day. Towards the end of the lesson when I needed a dog to demo the longer distance place command, her response was to go 6' and stop.

Never one to be willing to let a dog down, I told the student to be prepared for some yelling since there was no way I would allow something like that to slide. Sure enough, when I sent her again she was planning to stop at 6' and I very quickly disabused her of that idea. With the ecollar set at the correction level, I calmly escorted her the full 15' to the place board. We then set up to do it again, and did she ever fly. In fact, she was trying to be on her way before I could give the command.

After the lesson was over, I asked Alison to be kind enough to run Sanity over all the jumps for me. I have come to the realization that I am simply not going to be able to do a good enough job myself. Gimping along just doesn't cut it where the jump training is concerned. This was just one more thing to piss Sanity off. The idea of having to actually work beside someone else was not at all acceptable in her mind. I told her she would just have to get over it, cause while I didn't much like it either it was just one of those things that would have to be.

Later, we had an interesting set-up for the advanced dogs to do their scent work. Basically they had to enter a U shaped area. The sides of the U were made up of the other dogs doing down/stays or people sitting in chairs watching. To top it off, we had just finished eating lunch in the same area. All the dogs were having a problem keeping their mind on the task at hand. When it was Sanity's turn, she pretty much insisted that she didn't have a clue as to what I was talking about and didn't the food scraps smell wonderful? No, they didn't and yes you will work was the constant answer she got from me. So back go her ears, on goes the pout face and she went out and proceeded to lay down in the middle of the article pile.

Yes, she still had to do as told which meant I was out there and making a correction via her ear rather than the ecollar. This was one of those times when I wanted to be very "up close and personal" with my statement. She was working 4 metal articles and not well, so I removed 2 of them and backed her up. Still she claimed she didn't have a clue or the air was too full of good food smells or the other dogs were too close or all those humans being so close or who the devil knows what her excuse was, cause I sure didn't. The end result being that I removed another article and took her back to the beginning and just 2 articles, one correct and one taboo. She finally figured out I wasn't kidding and shot out, grabbed the correct article and brought it back. Guess you might say we finished on a good note.