life with fur: training and vacationing

During the summer, I spent most of my dog training time at home. I was all over the place with my research - literally from Ottawa to Bracebridge to Niagara - as well as trying to pick up hours at work, so decided against any classes.

However, Piper and I are back in the saddle! We are currently enrolled in the Jumpworks class at Companion Dog Training, which teaches us common jump combinations and exposes us to different manuvers such as front and rear crosses. Piper just adores it, I think if she could jump all day long, she would!

We also enrolled in a 3 hour workshop at Companion called Games for Obedience that took place last Saturday. We learned a few tricks, and fun things to do while training to keep it fun. Most of it seemed to be to throw in variations when you're teaching things like heeling and jumping, so they don't know what to expect and to teach them to recover if they don't do it quite right the first time. Piper had cut her foot at the cottage a few days before, but seemed to be ok so I took her anyways. She is not quite healed enough to run around off-leash, but I am leash walking her still. Anyways, we very much enjoyed the workshop, and look forward to continue to practice our heeling. I also want to bring out the dumbbell again, and our scent recognition tubes, as we haven't worked with those in a long time.

The next class I would like to take is Attention One, however I am running out of money, so will probably have to wait until I get a full-time job. The jumpworks class was a birthday gift from my parents.

There are however a few meets coming up, including the Monster Match (also at Companion) about a month from now. The run obedience, rally, and agility fun matches - I will probably take both Ace and Piper. My friends have asked me to help them teach their yellow lab some Rally, so maybe I will enter Rogue as well!

As mentioned, we spent a few days at the cottage last week with my sister Rebecca, who flew out to Thailand on Friday afternoon to spend about 6 months teaching English. We had a relaxing few days, and were quite entertained by Ace, Piper, Archie, Morgan, and my parent's dog Toby.