Not Giving Up

I don't really want to talk about the trial this weekend.  We were out of sync and she didn't get any Qs in regular GAH.  The video on youtube explains more. 

I hate to keep driving 5 and a half hours to get to Davenport IA for trials, but if we continued with the planned trials Ce would have only 12 more chances to get 9 Qs in regular. SO, to Chrissy's delight (and somewhat mine I guess haha) I will be going to the Daveport trial July 2-3.

Since CeCe had difficulties with hitting the contact on the dog walk this weekend, I am officially training a contact for her!  I googled methods saturday night actually hoping I would find a quick fix for sunday and then go more into training after the trial but no such luck.  I then googled training methods because I still wasnt sure if I should stick to running or not (Chrissy, being biased, thought I should try 2o2o) :P  I dont have a full size dog walk so I thought Sylvia's method wouldn't be the answer.  I happily stumbled upon a sort of target training.  The ultimate goal is to keep the running contact while having her dip her head down in the contact zone.  Im excited to try this out since I have never trained a contact performance before (no Im not lazy I just never saw a need for one) and I don't know what the end result will look like especially since we only have a few months to train it with a few trials thrown in to probably set back the training. :/ 

I started the target training at the trial on sunday first with just the target and then with a square board propped up with the target on the end.  Today we started with just the target again and then with a longer more dog walk type board with the target at the end.  She's definitely catching on and Im begin to see what her dog walk could potentially look like in the end!

Im holding off moving to target to the dog walk this week because of a trial this weekend.  I dont want her to associate the target with the dog walk just yet so she doesn't learn to offer me the behavior only when we are at home.  Im having fun!  We're learning together!