The plan

On my list of New Years resolutions is to be better about record keeping so I figured I would try a blog.

Iggy is a one year old border collie.  This blog will be about our journey towards Iggy becoming an agility dog.  The past year have had some good and a lot of bad but we have definitely turned the page and thanks to Christine seem to be on the right track and moving forward.

Planning is a weak area for me and part of the goal of this blog is to put down a plan with goals on paper.  I am thinking we will have a daily subject we will work on.  I am going to set up lists of skills under each subject and tick them off as I go through them.  I don't want to let a skill go by the way side, so easy to do with stuff I don't love to do :).

One of Christine's suggestions was to put Iggy away for a while, basically follow Ruff Love by Susan Garrett.  Iggy was working for me but it seemed more like he did it because he had to and not because he wanted to, something was missing.  On October 31st, 2010 the crating began.  The first couple of week he came out to go to the bathroom on leash and then back in the crate, the next few weeks slowly we increased work and out time.  Started with one minute twice a day and now we go out a few times a day for 10-15 minutes.  I am constantly assessing his state and increasing or decreasing his activity accordingly.  So far so good he is working great.

Yesterday was jump day we did; wraps, front crosses, reward out in front, serp and find the line.  Throughout the day we would come out and do a max of 6 jumps, never did we repeat any skill more than twice.  He did great, I had the jump up to 26" and down to 16" and he handled the height with no apparent concerns.  I have also in the days before that increased his exercise with a 25 minute off leash walk being the culmination since he was doing so well.

Today he is tired.  It is supposed to be recall day.  We have been having an issue with some squirrels in a tree and him not responding to me so we went on leash and walked in RZ position to the tree and then did 3 recalls off the tree.  The squirrels weren't there but the tree was enough to change his state.  I have to be sure he doesn't have access to these squirrels or this tree until I can call him off of them.  I took him out later in the early afternoon to do restrained recalls but he seemed tired so we did one 150ft restrained recall that was awesome and I put him away.