Jive at the beach and school

Jive has been staying with Katie for a couple of weeks, Katie is taking him to obedience classes at Croydon, mainly for socialisation and meeting lots of new people and meeting lots of doggies and being in a different environment. In class Katie has so much time as Jive knows all of the exercises already so Katie uses that time by doing shadow handling, workng on nose touches, and other foundation exercises while she is waiting her turn.

Katie and her friend Laura took the dogs to the beach the other week, although it has been very wet and cold in Melbourne, we did manage to see the sun for a small amount of time. Jive thought it was so much fun.

Laura's dog Levi turned two the other week and Jive went to his birthday party, he loved the cake but a bit unsure of the noise when every one started singing Happy Birthday.

I have just started taking Jive to foundation agility lessons, Katie brings Jive to classes every Wednesday night, we first of all had an assessment night where the owners needed to be in control of their dogs with a basic sit, recall, no aggression to other dogs or people,  dogs need to know how to play with toys, of course Jive passed this with no problems.

We have also been playing the Susan Garrett games from her e course which we find lots of fun playing.
Jive's favourite game is when Kris goes and hides in the bush and then Jive has to go and find him, he gets so excited.

Foundation agility training has started for Jive

Jive has been home now for 10 days, he has settled in really well, he loves running in the bush every morning with the other dogs. I go with John and the dogs now in the morning as this is when I train Jive on his recall, not that he needed it as he already had a fantastic recall, but just to get him used to coming to me on any occassion. On these bush runs I also teach him to come and sit in a heel position or side position, we also train on our release word and our start line stay, we are also doing nose touches while out in the bush. So by having fun in the bush we also use that to train some basic foundation stuff which is needed for agility. Bush runs are also great for getting dogs fit and getting them used to jumping all sorts of branches, logs or whatever gets in their way while they are chasing each other around the bush.

We have just started putting a few of these skills together in the agility field. I have started Jive on puppy jumping grids with a send to a target and a recall over the bump jumps. I love the sending to a target as this gets the dogs to focus ahead and not worry about the handler. As you can see we have had lots of rain as it is rather muddy everywhere.

Recall over the jump bumps



Send over the jump bumps



We have also worked on the tunnel, at first it was a very rolled up tunnel without bends and now he can fly through any bended tunnel.

Jive's first agility trial in Melbourne

Jive attended his first agility trial in Melbourne last Saturday, he met lots of dogs, puppies and people. He hung out with our dogs under the gazebo and was a perfect little puppy dog.

Jive meeting new friends

Jive hanging out with his new friend Kirra