ADAA fundraising comp

Well, Last Saturday nite was another ADAA fundraising comp, this one hosted by ADCQ. Of my three puppies, only Jonty was fit for agility, so off he and I went. On the trip up the car in front of us backfired a few times (sounded like the crack of a gun firing) and he got most upset. He managed to pull backwards out of his seatbelt harness and ended up under my feet. Needless to say I had to pull over; I grabbed some rewards and fed him for lying quietly in the seat, after he relaxed a little I belted him back in and we were on our way again with randomly timed treats for his continued dropped position in the passenger seat. Seemed to help as he was his normal self again once we arrived at the comp and was also good on the way home.

As for the comp we had four runs, open agility, advanced agility, open gamblers and open jumping. We started with a clean run and a win in open agility, but I was annoyed at myself as I didn't stick to my criteria. Jonty has been doing great 2o-2o contacts on his dogwalk, but in that round clean ran off the end; in the split second I had to make a decision, I made the wrong one! I allowed him to keep running. When I am inconsistent like this on acceptable criteria I just make agility all that much harder on both of us. Despite that I was very happy with his run.

Our advanced run started out really well, but there was a simple distance handling challenge built in; a tunnel under the dogwalk with a long jump on the far side of the walk; but Jont ran past the longjump. It reconfirmed for me that I have a hole in his training in working away from me consistently. As he doesn't "fetch" I haven't rewarded distance and independence through placement of the reward by throwing a toy. I've been slowly working on "fetch" as a fun game but it isn't ready to be combined with agility as a reward yet, so instead I'll start out with some jump lane work with a food target at the end and we'll back chain through the jumps to it, till he's happily working through five / six jumps ahead of me. Then I'll vary that to angling the jumps, putting in a spread or long jump, adding a tunnel, then weaves etc. I'll keep reinforcing fetch as a game as well, so that eventually the toy will be able to be thrown to reward his position.

The next run was gamblers, with a distance challenge of course! We got this distance challenge for a quali and a win. The hardest part of the distance challenge was a push out to the furtherest tunnel entrance. I assisted him to get this challenge through the angle we approached the hurdles and tunnel at. So he is now 4/7ths of the way to his GD title.

The final run was open jumping. Lovely course with a "blast-around" section as well as some tight pieces. I ran one of the tight sections as a serpentine sequence and it worked really well for us. But I fell back into "cruise" mode rather than "attack" mode, so whilst it was a tidy clear run for us, it wasn't as quick as it should have been. I need to run every course like it is an advanced course! A really lovely run was put in by Bobby for a win. He also earned his first purple card in advanced earlier in the night so the mini class is starting to heat up again!

There was no presentation ceremony which made for a 9:30pm finish YAY! But perhaps lacked a little collegiality where we usually sit around gas-bagging at the end of the night and then cheer folk on. Hard to get the right balance between time and social elements, though I was sure pleased to be home by 10:30pm.