Weave poles, celebrating our successes. Week 2.

Weave pole training has hit an impasse with only 6 poles to work with at home, and the almost-constant rain. I think progress will be slow from here on out. However...

Last night we had our agility class and there were 12 poles set up in a corner. My eyes lit up!

I sent Cohen through them and whoops, she popped out 3/4s of the way through. Sent her through again and she missed the tenth pole. So I slowed down, sent her through and rewarded 2 poles in. Restarted, rewarded 4 poles in. Restarted, rewarded at 6. At that point I think Cohen kind of "got" it and was able to finish the rest (slowly) while watching me out of the corner of her eye. After that she was doing the full row of twelve as long as there were few distractions. She would do the full row with me a fair distance away as long as she could hear me encouraging her.

Ideally in true 2x2 fashion there would have been a space between the two sets of 6 poles and she would have been introduced more slowly to keep her confidence higher. The weaves weren't the focus of the evening so there wasn't really an opportunity to introduce them properly.

So, Cohen can do 12 poles in ideal circumstances. Confidence is still a bit low (she's great on 6 though) but we're definitely making progress.

Last night was a good class.

On other class-related news, the last agility class I took there were only 4 dogs. Now there's 8 and class is noticeably slower and more chaotic. It's frustrating. Especially when it takes other dogs 2-3 minutes to get through a mock-course that takes Cohen 30 seconds. Ah well!