The seminar

This weekend was the Daisy Peel Seminar.  On Friday I had a private lesson at 9am and then I was signed up for the puppy seminar at 1pm.  I took Miley with us because I want to talk about her table issues. I had video on my computer to show her where at B-matches, she gets on the table, then doesnt at trials.  (Most of my video was lost because I accidentally dropped my video camera chip on the floor and didnt know it. Java chewed it up and it didnt work anymore.  So then I only have what I loaded onto YouTube )   First we talked about Miley.  She watched the video.  When she saw the video with Miley running big circles around the ring, she said "Oh My".  LOL  "She isnt even taking any jumps".  So we watched a few more videos. She said she didnt think Miley was stressed at all. She said once you move on, she is right back on track and she may even be running a little faster.  She thinks Miley is circling me at the table to get me to move. Which works. She circles me three or four times, I get embarrassed or what ever, then I move on and we do the rest of the course. So we took Miley out into the agility field. She had me set Miley up. Walk out about 20 feet and call her to me. She came. But then when we started to walk back up the field, she starts circling me. Which is usual. I try to control it by calling her to me, to stop it. Or putting her on leash. But thats not correcting the behavior, thats just stopping her from doing it which isnt the same thing. The dog needs to choose not to do it.  So thats what we worked on. When I got to where I wanted to be and stopped, I was to stand there and wait for Miley to choose to stop circling. Its me she is trying to get to do something. She doesnt circle anyone else.  And when Im at a trial, when she starts circling  at the table, I am just to stand there until she does anything else but circle , then give her a verbal reward and leave the ring and give her  her treats. This behavior has more to do with me stopping and the dog trying to get me to move. So I can work on this at home because she circles me when we are practicing and I stop, either to start something else or to redo something that went wrong. She said it will probably take a long time to correct. Because you only get once a day to work on the table at a trial, she thinks it will take about 20 trials.  And hopefully I have nice judges who wont whistle me out of the ring. I will have to be really watching for any change in behavior while circling, like even going from a run to a trot. I will need to video tape every run and time how long it takes for her to stop circling and then make sure that time is decreasing. 
On Java she told me I cant have both. I cant work on getting her to"wait" but also work on her drive. I need to forget about getting her to "wait" for now, there will be plenty of time to work on that later. Just work on her drive. And all the things Im doing are  great for that. And its ok to let you dogs chase each other to encourage them to run. I need to work on getting her to come in straight to me on the "call to heels".  You have to expect perfection because they arent doing it at speed right now. If they cant do it right slowly, then will never get it with speed and jumps in the picture. 
Then the lesson was over. I was so excieted about the table stuff for Miley. I hope she is right. I had 3 hours to wait for the puppy seminar. So I drove out to the beach. It was a warm day but cloudy and it rained a few times while out at the beach. There was not one there which was awesome. I wish I had more time but I only had 30 minutes so I didnt get great pictures. I hope to go back sometime.

There were down trees everywhere. My faviorite.

"Who added the soap suds?"

I only had about 30 minutes at the beach before it was time to drive back. Then I couldnt find my car.  I parked right at the beach, how could I not find my car?  I think part of the problem was there were no other cars there, so you couldnt say, "oh ya I remember that car".  All the parking lots looked the same.What the heck?  So then I turned down this road but I just knew that wasnt right. I came back and walked a little further and there was my car. Some trees were blocking me from seeing it. Ugh!! Then I got lost driving back to where the seminar was. You couldnt put her address in your GPS because it wouldnt take you to her house and I forgot  to  mark it in my GPS.  So I was lost. I called her but had to leave a message. She called me back and I was so close and just didnt know it. LOL. But I was late for the start of the seminar. Ugh!!

I hardly took any notes at the puppy seminar. I didnt even realized it until I just looked at them.  We worked mostly on trick type behaviors. Like circling the pole, backing and targeting an object, stacking metal bowels and getting the dog to knock them down.  Java had not problems with any of this stuff because we've done it all. At the end she had several puppies off leash at the same time and they could run and play. Java did run once but then came right to me. The other people had to walk across the field and then hide and then make noise for their dogs to look and go to them.  I think Java just doesnt want to play with other dogs. Plus I think she maybe going into heat. The one puppy just kept his nose up her butt. And Ive noticed she has started marking, licking herself and today Guiness has really been in her rear.

I drove the 2 hours home and probably should have just stayed in town. But I audited Saturday and didnt want the dogs  sitting in the car all day.  Saturday was a long day. I was tired. Im not sure if Ill comment much on Saturday.  This lady next to me had a bad attitude which didnt help. So will see.