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Honouring and the
Stay
Lottie has been
honouring
in a group of three dogs for a while now.
She sits and waits calmly whilst the other
dogs go out and retrieve simple marks. We have yet to
include other dogs crossing her/running down the
line. But she is coping very well (and
silently) with these steadiness exercises.
The stay has come on
well, Lottie will now sit still whilst I walk a good
50 + yards away, and whilst I carry out simple
exercises with other dogs.
Loss of 'performance'
Over the last few
weeks I have on occasion had a feeling that there may be a slight
falling off in speed and
enthusiasm in Lottie's retrieving. Both on the way out to each (blind)
retrieve, and on the way back. This drop in
speed has become more apparent recently.
There could be lots of
reasons for this.
She might be about to come on heat (she hasn't had
her first season yet). She might even be
feeling unwell. My concern however, is that
something I am doing might be causing a loss of
drive. In fact, I suspect that the main reason is
that the training sessions may have become a
little dull for her. My labs and
even spaniels have all really enjoyed the pattern
blinds we are doing at the moment, flying up
and down the field to each learned location with
great enthusiasm. But maybe the slightly repetitive
nature of this kind of work is not quite right for
Lottie?
New location
Over the previous
weekend I spent some time with Lottie out on our
shoot grounds. I also took her out with
my husband as I was interested to have his
opinion of her. We took her for some long
walks and had her sit and wait whilst we built some
tunnel traps and made some pen repairs. I also
took her in the rabbit pen on the lead for the first
time. She took all these new experiences in
her stride, and thoroughly enjoyed a trip to the
village pub at the end of the day where she was
admired and made much of.
Lottie certainly needs
some more experience clambering about up and down
steep slopes and I rather over-faced her with a
retrieve across a shallow stream but steep banked
stream. The way in was nicely shelving and she
made it up the bank on the other side without any trouble
and picked the dummy,
but she panicked at the prospect of coming back down
again and needed a lot of encouragement to negotiate
the return, which was entirely my fault.
I need to practice some easier obstacles with her
before trying this again.
Overall Lottie's
behaviour during these outings was excellent,
but her recent pace and slightly 'stiff' looking
gait during training was still worrying me a little.
Taking her into the big
meadow and encouraging her to run around on her own
terms for a bit, it quickly became clear that Lottie
is quite 'sound' and can still turn on the speed
when she wants to. The problem lies somehow
with our training sessions.
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