September DragonDogs Update

Wow a month since my last post.  I guess I was on dog training overload.  Andrea and I with the three dogs drove to Michigan for a disc dog camp with Ron Watson and then to Ancaster, Ontario for an agility skills camp with Susan Garrett.   Since we got back we have been paying extra attention to our marketing clients after 14 days of limited communication.

Now that things are settling back down I want to take a few posts to look back over the experience.  It’s good for us to debrief, or decompress as Ron calls it.  And I hope that the information might benefit someone else interested in dog handling or dog sports or traveling 3000 miles in a van.

I’ll review the disc dog camp with Ron and Apryl, the skills camp with Susan, the trip itself, and what was the impetus and impact of the adventure.   That’s too much for one post so I will break it into sections over a few days.

Right now I want to talk about our current state of DragonDog affairs:

All 3 dogs are in crates in the living room. We have increased their crate time for all 3 dogs including Lilli.  So far this has yielded more energetic play and training sessions.

We have shaved back their meals just a hair.  We look for more opportunities to reinforce wanted behaviors with kibble.  previously the dogs were a little less interested in the kibble.  We were informed by several people that maybe we spoil our dogs a bit

We will be participating in our first freestyle event this weekend with Central Florida Disc Dog Club Canis Major Series.  We are entering Lilli as novice in freestyle and Toss and Fetch.  Originally Andrea was going to handle Lilli for the series but she insisted I do it after watching Lilli and I play together.  I’ll let her say more about that if she wants to.  All I will say is Andrea is the better trainer and certainly capable of doing great routines with Lilli.  We both look forward to Kai and Leila coming of age to play freestyle.

Speaking of the monkeys, Kai is a beautiful spunk maniac.  She is a beautiful bouncing ball of energy and enthusiasm.  She quit drooling in the car which is awesome. She shows a lot more drive and has been catching a few discs every session now.  We need to work on her retrieve. Her crate games have really improved. She will sit and wait with the door open while I go outside.   Her recalls are shaky but have improved. Great speed and enthusiasm.  She still feels a little bit like someone else’s dog but I love her to pieces and know in a short time she will have settled in.  Her tug is strong now.

Leila is awesome.   Leila  retrieves like a pro and  her crate games are flawless.  She catches 1 or 2 discs each session with enthusiastic growls.  She is fearless to a fault.  She will be a strong agility dog and certainly a fun frisbee dog.  We need to engage leila a bit more with some mental games.  She has a lot of potential.

Lilli seems leaner and stronger than ever.  She is geared up and ready for the next level of freestyle.  The last few sessions with her have just been so fast!  And I think she would be a very very fast agility dog with some skills training. We need to go back to some basics to clarify some concepts. She was our first dog so she has a lot of reinforced behaviors still like holding on to the disc (which has improved) and barking when she is excited.  She gets more crate time now and in a short time I can see the benefits of raising the criteria for her.

We have made a lot of progress with the dogs since we have arrived home.  Next post will be about the disc camp we attended at Pawsityve Vybe.