Fun day at the club

Jackson and his training partner, Melody

Today we had fun at the club. I met one of my training partners there, and we took turns doing one or two exercises at a time with each of the dogs. We were very upbeat and kept things moving pretty fast. The dogs seemed to respond to our upbeat attitude and Jackson was really 'up' and attentive today.

We did signals three or four times - a couple times with both dogs in the ring - and he didn't miss once :-) Heeling was good too, with no lagging. We're keeping with the plan to reduce the number of articles and take him to the article if he doesn't get to work immediately. Well, I didn't need to do that today. He went right to work and picked up the correct articles. His glove retrieve and moving stand were both good, and his directed jumping was good also. We got some slow sits on the go-outs, but the jumps were good. I'm keeping them at 24 inches now so he gets used to picking up speed.

Training with a partner is giving him experience with another person in the ring and some distractions, but we still need to see how this transitions over to working with even more distractions. There is another fun match coming up at the club in two weeks. He had lots of trouble focusing at the last match, so I'm interested to see if there is any improvement this time.