Nicole...

Lomani is my first dog so I have no idea if what I am saying is valid but it worked for us. Being a gundog she is totally bird obsessed and will spend her relaxed time roaming the yard, standing up against the fences to get a better look at birds etc. When we started doing agility birds were a problem as she had to be off lead and if she saw one she would go on a zoomie after it. We would give her a watch/look cue to get her eye contact on us the first second that she or us was aware that there was a bird around, before she was at the ballistic lunging stage. If she wouldn't look then straight in her crate. Same thing if we did fail in seeing it was going to happen and she managed to zoomie, we'd put her straight in her crate. When she came out we'd expect her eye contact to be on us, if not, back in her crate. It was hard work to start with but now she knows that chasing birds isn't on when we are in work mode. We use the same practice to keep her nose off the ground with not quite the same success rate but we are getting there

I'm so sorry to read this chiara. It's such a dreadful condition and to be in so much pain at such a young age is just not fair. Aside from giving my support, I just wanted to say that HD will lead to arthritis down the track so if his X-Rays are bad and he is in that much pain then definitely get the surgery now. The earlier you do it, then less damage is done so you are much better off. Make sure that you go through a specialist surgeon, not just a GP vet too, they will offer you a lot more options and are the pros at the job.

We were warned that the conditions would be bad - but our eyes nearly popped out of our heads when we arrived at the Ekka on Saturday morning. Gees our Royal grounds are beautiful in comparison and we only have alpaccas to worry about. Well done Nicole on your excellent agility run - unfortunately we were still playing obedience so didn't get to see any of the agility. You must be tickled pink considering it was your first run in this class - its one you will remember for a long time. WA took out 1st, 2nd and 3rd in masters jumping. Brooklyn dropped a bar - otherwise he would have made it a quadrella ;) There were some terrific courses and some great runs. Thanks Ptolomy! We sure will remember that one with fondness for some time yet. I was waiting to go on when you came off from your JDM run and was really impressed by it... unfortunately we were not able to live up to your performance of it but it really was great! :D We were back there today to do an interclub team event as an agility demo. This time it was on the main arena and there was even more cow poo, horse poo and massive smells to deal with. Lomani and a couple of other dogs were drawn to one particular pile of it right near the tunnel entrance - a pity as she was having a really nice run up until that point. It was good fun though and she had a great day taking in all the exciting new wonders out there. Unfortunately she now stinks of cow poo....

Ptolomy had some magnificent runs!!!!! We have a brag - Lomani quallied and took out first place in Excellent Agility (in her first run up in excellent too!) :D ;) What a fun day it was. It was sooo lovely having an audience that enjoyed the event so much. So many people said to us that we would do it once and never again but I can't wait until next year's Ekka... the atmosphere was so nice.

Hi Vickie! Great topic I have to say! I was wondering if you could give more information to a newbie about some of the things you are talking about. Bit of background - I have been doing agility for about a year with my cocker (trialling for 3 months now) so am quite new to the sport... We now have a 16 week old BC who we intend to do agility with once he is old enough. We are really fortunate that we have had minimal problems with Lomani knocking bars - and those that we have had were totally due to my poor handling!!!! We have definitely seen a much higher rate of bars being knocked by BC's and want to do anything we can to minimise this with Bond. We were reading some articles recently that suggested some of the problem with knocking bars is training on a low height and then increasing it. It promoted waiting til a dog matures before you start jumping and commence jumping at the correct height which is exactly what you have said. Is the theory behind this that the dog learns to jump flat at the low height and then doesn't change it's technique when you raise the height? But if you start jumping at full height they learn to jump up not just forward? Are you able to explain more what do you mean by "Both were given very basic jump grids where I taught them to collect & extend and we did rear end awareness. I have done no remedial gridwork with them as they have never needed it." I am probably aware of the sort of work you are talking about, but just not the terminology :p

I have the same problem - but you expect these things from a gundog The way that we handle it is to pay attention to her - as soon as her focus switches from us to the birds, then we make sure she is on lead until the last second we do an agility run and goes straight on afterwards. We use that time to get lots of focus going and the more we have worked on it the easier this is. Fortunately she has a short attention span and after a few minutes of focusing she has often forgotten about the birds anyway. When she has kept her focus on us we will release her to chase the birds (or run after the birds with her if it's somewhere she can't go offlead - oh how funny that must look! ). So we have taught her that the focus must be on us, and the birds are only a reward. The one thing we do have to watch is that if she isn't having fun at agility then she will self reward with the birds - she hasn't done this for a while but a couple of months ago she got caught up in the cloth tunnel. So I sent her back through with the intention of rewarding as soon as she came out to make it more positive but she got in the drum, ran out the back and went off chasing the birds instead to make herself feel better.

It's ok - I found out today that the catalogue gets re-written by one of our club members and she goes to all the trials around so would have the heights of most the dogs that compete here in SEQ. As for dogs that don't compete in this area, then I guess they would need to send theirs in still.

So did anyone end up finding out what the story is with our heights? If not I might give them a call on Monday to ask. Also does anyone know what time the event starts?

Yay Thank you sooooooo much Rach!!!!!!!!!

We've been trying to work out how we can do the same and we had the idea of getting one of those ice cube trays that makes the little ice cubes and freezing her barf into it...then she can have little frozen barf treats. Yet to try it but will let you know when we do

If anybody would be able to make me one of those snazzy signatures I'd be really really grateful Lomani Bond Oh, and if you could tell me how to put them on my profile I'll be even more appreciative!!!

Huge Congratulations Border Lover!!!!! Definitely long awaited but even more well deserved!

Congratulations Reddii, Xena and CK!!!! I actually saw your gamblers run yesterday and gave you a huge amount of credit for going back to correct your contact at the time. Didn't realise it was you of course but I am a strong believer in not letting dogs get away with things in trials that you wouldn't let them do in training. Particularly when things like missing contacts could potentially lead to an injury! Good on you! We got a JDX quallie on Saturday but had a hopeless day yesterday... learnt the hard way that Lomani can't tolerate 2 day trials just yet.

Freezing them is the only way I can make Lomani chew them and not just swallow them whole We've never had any dramas doing this.

Let us know when you find out the answer Smisch! I got my stuff back from the other day sounding like all is sorted but I haven't had to notify them of Lomani's height as far as I can remember anyway. :cool: I can't believe how early the entries are due in - will be interesting to see if anybody is still in either agility or jumping categories we have entered by the time it comes around.

We use "give" to ask Lomani to give us the object she is holding. We also use "leave it" to stop her from picking it up in the first place... this is a good one to practice so that you can bark it out for urgent items like canetoads! For "stay" we would put her in a drop or sit and then give her the stay command, take one step away and then come straight back to reward. We gradually took more and more steps away to increase the distance and time she held it for. One important thing I remember being taught is that you have to always go back to the dog to reward - don't call them to you or otherwise you will be rewarding their recall instead of their stay.

Well done Schmich and Levi!!!! I saw both of your runs Schmich and was very impressed! Levi - I also saw your run and my heart sunk when I saw her run around that last jump! They always do what we least expect don't they!!! We had a fairly good night considering that we'd had no training all week with the rain. Our open agility run was more like a reintroduction to agility and started off diabolically but thankfully turned into a good training run. Surprisingly we got another excellent jumping quallie... I can't believe how well Lomani is doing with her jumping - we are now 5 quallies from our 5 novice and excellent jumping runs. I know this has to slow down soon but I'm enjoying getting them while we can! I was fairly happy with Lomani's novice agility run too... she was sopping wet and cold and really didn't want to be there so while she was very slow and sluggish I was happy with her 2 faults in the end. Here's hoping for some good weather over the next 2 weeks so that we can get some good training in before Mt Gravatt!

Congratulations Melody! I could only dream of having a dog that will heel like that! I'm new to the world of agility but this is the first time I've really wanted to have a good brag on here. Lomani competed in her 4th agility trial yesterday. We competed in her first jumping trial a few weeks ago which was a triple and she managed to get all 3 novice quallies in the one trial. I was pretty excited by that but was really keen for her to get an agility quallie which has so far eluded us. Anyway, yesterday we trialled and Lomani got her first novice agility quallie (and second place) and despite my trepidation at being up in excellent jumping already, she got a quallie and first place there too!!!! I'm soooooo happy I can't stop grinning! I can see why this whole trialling thing is so addictive! Edited cos I can't spell!

I have a completely food driven dog and we taught her weaves with this method... I have to say that her weaves are the only thing we get consistent congratulations on so I can definitely say that you can use this method for food driven dogs! We didn't have the DVD but were taught this method at agility training. We started off with 2 poles and just walked in the direction of them and stopped. Initially if she looked at the poles she got a treat. Then when she made a step towards them, then when she walked between them (we also kind of approached from the correct side to make it easy). There were times when we would just stand there staring at them and nothing would happen so after 30 seconds or so, we would turn around, walk away and approach again. In no time at all she started to offer behaviours including walking through from the incorrect side, which we would just ignore, go back and approach again and treat when she did it correctly. Once she had that down pat we added a 3rd pole, then a 4th, then added 2 at a time etc until we got up to 12. Each time she pulled out, missed a pole, entered from the wrong side we just went back and did it again, treated like crazy when she got it and she soon learnt. I want to go back and reteach her contacts using shaping now (if I knew how!) as they are nowhere near as consistent as her weaves This video was taken a couple of months ago and she is much faster now but it shows that it does work anyway

Ok I'm confused. I always thought ticks came out when the weather warmed up and stayed bad through summer. So I've been treating Lomani with advantix fortnightly all through summer. I just ran out so thought I could put her back on advocate over winter and rang the vets today to check if the rate of tick paralysis is slowing down now. They told me that there have been cases all year so far but that tick season doesn't start until June. So now I'm confused, have I had it back to front or is what they told me today wrong? Thanks!

I have been training at International since Lomani was a wee pup. I might be biased but I think you would struggle to come across a greater group of agility instructors and lovely people to work with . I look forward to seeing you there on Saturday Heidii!

I just mailed off my entries for Logan and Brisbane today so I will definitely be there. Planning to do the Queen's bday one too but not sure if we'll do both days... we'll see! I was exhausted enough after the Lockyer triple on Sunday... can't see how I will survive 2 whole days of it! There aren't many gold cockers doing agility so I'm easy to spot. I'll be around the Gold Coasters, who I have to add are a bunch of absolutely lovely and supportive people so definitely pop over and say hi

What time is it on MTD??? I might come up just to say hi... will have to see how the weekend pans out though.

I guess I'm lucky to have a dog that loves to learn by shaping. We learnt most of our agility skills- jumps, weaves, table, tunnels by shaping and those techniques are all solid. We used luring for her contacts and I have to admit that is the one area where she is less consistent, now that I think about it. I'm not sure how to go about retraining that with shaping though... suggestions? We weren't introduced to shaping until we started agility, so most of our basic obedience skills (sit, drop, crawl, stand etc) were all done through luring. The only exclusion to that was spinning, which Lomani would do as part of her pre-dinner happy dance - I just added a word and signal to it and she now does it on cue. I am definitely a shaping fan!

We have a set of 12 plasticy tomato stakes that make excellent weave poles, cheap from bunnings. I also got a tunnel on ebay for $20 - remember to search for childrens tunnels, not just agility ones. The one I have is really heavy duty and durable, the sort they use in kindies and someone was getting rid of it as their kids didn't use it anymore. We made jumps from pvc piping pretty cheap too.