Baltic in the Barn

A very cold session in the training centre barn this week. Christina managed to keep us all moving for most of the time though. Thankfully, the class still went ahead, but there was talk of it being cancelled because it really was that cold!

A brief warm up session of sit/down stays and then we were off running around the barn with our dogs to heel. This was interrupted by Christina giving us commands to stop, sit, down whilst we were going.

We had a round of tricks. Every owner had to chose a trick that they knew their own dog could achieve and then the other dogs in the group had to try the same trick. We were going to be a pair of show off's at this point as Christina had already asked us to demonstrate "cop-cop" to her and the group - to Ellies credit, she did it beautifully and she's not used to doing that trick for me, so I was impressed also. That said, we chose to do "spin" as our trick - something which the other dogs were more than capable of doing.

We then did an excellent exercise whereby we had to walk around holding an object and use the object to pass to the other members of the group so that we could practise meeting and greeting people with and without dogs to train our own dogs not to respond in a negative way, i.e. jumping around maniacally. Ellie did quite well at this although I swear if her tail had been a machete, she'd have taken my legs clean off when Christina came over, it was wagging that fast.

Again, in a bid to keep warm, we did an agility course. For some reason this evening, Ellie was having none of it. She sat nicely at the start and made the first couple of jumps ok, but then she was off like a rocket around the barn. I guess she was colder than I thought. :)

Obedience Tests

A video showing the result of various obedience tests performed by Ellie.

She's looking quite miserable because (a) that's just how she tends to look, and (b) she's not used to training sessions being so quiet. However, the tests require that minimal cues are given. This means that in most cases, I can only give one voice command and nothing else.

I think Ellie thinks she's in trouble, because I'm not mu usual bubbly self during training. However, aside from that, I think she did great! Enjoy...

Ellie plays at being goalkeeper

I filmed this video this morning. It's Ellie and I playing football and catch, and sneaking in bits of training.

It's really quite remarkable how she catches that ball, because her mouth, like the rest of her, is really quite small.

You'll see that she's mastered the cop-cop move now, and getting really good at leg weaving too.