(Moab, UT) I had been looking forward to this agility seminar for quite some time. And even though I wasn’t nearly as able bodied as I would have liked to have been, I was determined to attend the seminar with Boogie.
The format of the seminar turned out to be great for me as I could lie down on my cot and hear and see everything. And I truly don’t think there is anyone better in the world to teach agility than Sharon Nelson. She is a very special person when it comes to animals. Somehow she can communicate with them in a way that they totally understand. You really have to see it to believe it but she is definitely on an entirely different level with animals than 99% of the population.
When you attend a seminar with Sharon you get a seminar! It was a two day seminar and each day it went 12 hours! I must admit I was unable to stay that entire time. The arena was beautiful but cold. Lying still for that long in a cold place was really hard on me. So I had to bail out around 7:30pm each day. The seminar started at 9:00 each morning and went until after 9:00pm with an hour lunch break. I must say that Sharon really gives her all at these seminars.
I was so proud of Boogie in many respects. First of all, that is a long time for a puppy to wait quietly in a crate. He tried really hard - only once in a while doing soft little cries. Each dog got to work probably twice each day but each turn was anywhere from 10 – 20 minutes depending on what the dog needed. I learned so much from each team out there.
Sharon used Boogie as the demo dog two different times. One time was when she was teaching us how to evaluate the structure of our dog so that we can monitor them throughout their life. When she was demonstrating with Boogie, she was quite amazed and said that when people were doing this with their dogs not to expect the dog to be able to get in these positions. She said Boogie was a truly exceptional dog – structure wise. She said he has the perfect structure for an athletic dog. She continued saying “that doesn’t make him better than other dogs….well yes it does, this dog is really good.” Cool.
The course that was set up for the working part of the day was an Elite level course. I’d say there were about 20 dogs in attendance. Two of the dogs were Novice while the rest were Elite level. The only thing they did though was replace the weave poles with a tunnel as the seminar really was on handling, not necessarily obstacle performance.
Sharon, and everyone else in attendance, was very impressed with Boogie. I must say, so was I. He was amazing! He was doing great distance – 20 feet, he got every directional, he hit all his contacts, and he was fast! He sure didn’t look like a Novice dog out there. As we did it over a few times, we had trouble with our distance to the dark tightly curved tunnel in the far corner…but all dogs seemed to have the same problem.
We did some directional work with moving hoops. Don’t’ ask. Boogie was funny. The hoops were fairly close together and at his height I think he sees the entire hoop. So from ground level it all looks the same to him. He did the patterns beautifully – but he did them between the hoops instead of through the hoops. But when he did a small hoop course he was perfect.
The next course work was done on another Elite course. In addition the regular course being set, the put lots of hoops all around the course. They weren’t part of the course, they were just put there to distract us and our dogs – of course it added a whole bunch of off course opportunities. The main thing you needed on this course to do it correctly was distance. While Boogie really has great distance for such a novice dog, we didn’t have enough distance to do this course correctly. And since I can’t run very fast or coordinated right now it was particularly difficult. We did the whole thing super well (way to go little Boogie man!) but we never could get the correct end of one tunnel. Everyone was having trouble getting it. This was set up to teach us that sometimes three jumps in a row can be a serpentine but sometimes they are two 180’s. In this case if you ran it as a serpentine you got the wrong end of the tunnel. You could only be successful if you ran it as two 180’s. I just couldn’t be deep enough with Boogie to do it that way – so we sliced the third jump every time which gave us the wrong end of the tunnel. But Sharon wasn’t concerned about this with Boogie. She said this is a very difficult Elite level maneuver so she didn’t care one bit that he was taking the wrong end. He did the rest of the course beautifully. Imagine how good Boogie could be if he got to take lessons and had a handler that could move! He’s showing so much potential.
The last lesson we did was interesting. At each end of the dogwalk there was a pinwheel of hoops. I guess I didn’t listen very well as I’m not sure what the purpose of this exercise was for the other dogs. All I knew was I was not going to be able to run back and forth the length of the dogwalk a bunch of times – shoot even the healthy people were having trouble!
So I asked Sharon if I could work on a specific task on this exercise. She was so very kind and immediately agreed. So I stood at one end, had Boogie do the hoop pinwheel from a distance and then sent him to do the dogwalk. The goal was to get Boogie to do the dogwalk way out in front of me – independently from me. Sharon was standing at the other end with treats. Interesting enough, Boogie did the hoop pinwheel perfectly for me but wouldn’t do them for Sharon at all. And when she tried to send him on the dogwalk toward me – he wouldn’t come (I didn’t have treats!). We probably did this for 15 minutes. Same performance, every time. Interesting.
This was such a valuable seminar and I learned so much. I know I’ve already forgotten some of it – but I hope I can remember a lot of it over time.
While I was attending the seminar, Mike took the big dogs on hikes. Mike came back raving about the area, its beauty and abundance of off leash hiking areas.
Debbie
4/23-24/08
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