Kavik

As others have said, you can still use a marker when training with toys. I have found shaping with toys a bit more complicated than shaping with food, but certainly doable. You can either use tugging or throw the reward, depends on the exercise you are training. I train mostly agility stuff, so I use tugging for when I want to reward near me, and throw the reward (and retrieve for tugging when they return) when I want to reward the dog for being away from me. Here is a short clip I just found which shows one example of how to use toys.

I have a GSD and he sheds A LOT! :laugh: Every week I get more hair off of him than the Kelpies put together for a whole year I think!

Very clever!

Nitro is currently entire at 12 months. I haven't decided whether I am going to desex him or not yet. He isn't causing any problems, is dog social, doesn't mark inside etc.

I have been in a similar sort of situation, with a friend breeding my chosen breed but I wasn't sure that her dogs were what I was looking for at the time. I talked to her a lot about what I was looking for and breeder recommendations etc, she didn't have a problem with me choosing a different breeder.

How often would you recommend using the tea rinse?

You are lucky if no ticks in VIC! They are all around Sydney so I make sure to cover mine year round.

What about teaching her to put her front feet in the car, and you help with the back end?

*Hugs* I went through this recently. Enjoy each day with them.

Trick training! Tricks are fun and many are also useful for body awareness and/or lead on to further training. Eg: Retrieve an item walk backwards get onto/under/around objects crawl balance on unstable surface spin bow the list is endless!

Leaving a child unattended with a dog who is eating a bone is taking all reasonable steps to prevent the risk of an attack?

How old is your dog? With a reactive dog, good engagement is essential. Your dog does not have to meet other dogs, but does need to be able to be around them without causing a problem, so having fun with you, focus and attention on you will help. I think before you try a club atmosphere, you should work on that first. Knowing your dog's critical distance and how to work and keep your dog under threshold is also very important. This will help you to know how much space you need to give other dogs to keep your dog's attention. It also depends on the club. Some clubs are better than others at educating members about giving space to some dogs, and some clubs are better organised than others.

Thanks everyone for your support :) I am getting something engraved that I can put on a photo frame to hang on the wall.

I do the same. I use verbal markers more than clickers at the moment, but they pick up what the clicker or verbal marker means very quickly without 'charging' it. My current youngster gets all of his food as training rewards, whether for an actual action or for something like going into his crate. No free meals ETA: I would do shorter training sessions. Puppies have the attention span of a gnat (less than a flea)! My training sessions are maximum 5 minutes and that includes our play session before and after, so the 'training of the behaviour' is much less than that.

I'm so sorry this happened to you I can't believe people were in such a hurry to see this as a troll! One of my dogs was also badly attacked by a pitbull X (identified as such by the owner afterwards) and I would have been so angry if I had posted the story here and had it not believed because of the breed involved.

Thanks guys :)

RIP Zoe Oct 1999 – 21 Feb 2014 You were my introduction to Kelpies – what a learning curve! You loved to run and you were super fast, chasing swallows and rabbits were some of your favourite activities. You were keen to learn and loved chasing a ball, food, a walk or training session even as you got older. But you didn't like other dogs, and this caused a lot of stress in our relationship. I'm so sorry I wasn't good enough to help you overcome that problem, as it meant that our activities were more limited and you didn't reach your potential. It was only as you got older that we were able to relax and enjoy each other. Run free and get those bunnies! We will miss you.

How do you know when it's time to say goodbye? Zoe is 14 with diagnosed kidney issues and suspected Lupus. She was going OK until recently, she is now starting to fall over when walking on the floor at times, sometimes cannot go up the steps, and this morning collapsed at the bottom of the steps, I had to pick her up to bring her inside She is still eating and looks bright when she sees I have food. Morning seems to be when she has the most trouble.

Dogs: A Startlingly New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behaviour and Evolution by Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger. Very interesting read.

I've never paid to participate. I tend to use all mock trials as NFC runs anyway :laugh:

Yes it is an interclub competition, held by some ANKC affiliated agility clubs, but not a 'proper' ANKC trial. My club holds a 'mock' trial once a month under trial conditions, and sometimes these trials are Auslink ones. There is a running pointscore for each club throughout the year.

She has proper big radar Kelpie ears doesn't she :laugh:

So sorry Kirislin

I guess I'm just worried about training Zeus completely off leash because he does have a horrible habit of running off and crossing the main highway at our local off leash park. Zeus is usually quite good at recall thought when my focus is on him 100% so I might give it a try next week. I think he might be less inclined to run off at training because he really seems to enjoy the work we're doing and he hasn't formed a learned habit like he has at the dog park. Zeus I think will be a hard one to teach to wait after a contact. He gets so excited to continue that he looks back at me for instruction and if I'm not fast enough, he'll make it up himself. He's not really a thinking dog, more of a doer. My club is teaching contacts by having the handler steady/slow the dog upon decent of the Dog Walk or A-Frame and have it sit at the bottom -- the idea here is that by slowing down near the bottom, the dog will learn it's not allowed to sneak off the side/edge. Is this similar to what you mean by teaching a dog to wait after a contact except that rather than slowing the dog down at the end, you'd have it hoon down then slam the breaks on at the bottom? That is how I was told to do it about 10 years ago lol. Nowadays my aim is to have my dog do the contact equipment independently - to run as fast as he can over the equipment no matter where I am or what I am doing, and to stop at the end with 2 feet on the board and 2 feet on the grass, without any prompting from me, until I release him. This is one example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kuyq_4SNEtw

Thanks that is helpful!