Gris has arrived in Houston, straight from Lake Charles, Louisiana where she was running in a three day AKC trial. Gris is proudly owned by Susan Fraser, who was kind enough to loan me her ace for a few weeks of training. Gris is agile and fast with excellent drive and focus, and recently had a phenomenal litter of puppies.
Gris' first agility session is posted below. She normally jumps 20" but I am going to have a look at her in 26" for a few weeks. This session focused on contrasting handler deceleration and acceleration cues, a la Greg Derrett. Note the sequential improvement of her deceleration. She will drop bars at times in trials, and our goal is to make her responsible for keeping the bars up, however, we will not use any punishment for this. I believe when she has a consistent set of cues, her bar knocking in trials will greatly diminish. During the session, I used praise for good sequences with bar drops, and the high value toy for a great performance. Within the brief session, her bar knocking decreased and then disappeared, even when introducing the series on the opposite side.
