you really hit the jackpot with her!! hbd sweet girl.....i still remember showing my carpool the video of her playing fetch in the garage as a baby and asking for their input on the two names you’d sent me.
you really hit the jackpot with her!! hbd sweet girl.....i still remember showing my carpool the video of her playing fetch in the garage as a baby and asking for their input on the two names you’d sent me.
I really feel like we did hit the jackpot. Cava is the sweetest dog, so happy all the time, with tons of drive and ridiculously athletic. I was just looking at that video a couple of weeks ago. She was so adorable, just a tiny little ball of fluff, but already a retrieving maniac.
I've posted some videos on FB, but I don't think they're on YouTube. Here's a sequence of stills I grabbed from video of Cava doing passing recalls at practice with Psyclone a month or so ago. We're still doing wall work to train the box turn but in the meantime she's getting lots of work passing into another dog and having another dog passing into her. This was a bit closer than we were aiming for, lol. The poles are at the start/finish line, which is 6 feet past the last jump. The pass is determined by how far back the entering dog is when the exiting dog crosses the plane of the finish. This looks to be about a 1 foot pass, which is pretty amazing for a green dog.
It's pretty amazing. Running at another dog and passing by so close takes a lot of desensitization work. For passing recalls, we pull the box and have one dog at each end of the course. The dog at the box end always goes first, the person restraining the dog at the other end of the course has to gauge when to release the dog depending on what pass we're aiming for. In the beginning, one dog runs completely by the other one before it's released, then we start to tighten it up. We'll use wings on the jumps or ring gates to split the lane lengthwise until dogs are comfortable with the close proximity of a running dog. Normally, if we can get a 5 or 6 foot pass with a green dog remaining in the lane, that's considered good. Even once dogs are experienced racers we usually don't try to push past a consistent 2 or 3 foot pass because you can end up being early and have to rerun.
An exercise we started doing not long ago involves the green dog recalling off the box with another dog passing into them doing a full run. What that does is add another dog in the runback area, while the green dog is on their tug. We started with just one lane, then added a dog recalling in the other lane, then a recall dog and full run dog in both lanes, so there are 4 dogs in the runback at the same time. She's handling everything we throw at her very well, I just want to get that box turn so she can start doing full runs!
Here's one from last month that I just uploaded to YouTube, Cava is grabbing a tennis ball off the wall for an Orbee on a rope. I'm on the left, telling her to go, and that's my teammate Mollie calling her off and throwing the reward toy. She has a much better eye of what she's looking for and wants to reward and she also moves much faster than I do, lol.
Igor turned 1 year old on the 16th of December and I'm a putz! I swear I looked where to post his bday info and I didn't see this Birthday section...so I posted it in General Info....oh well, as Mick said many years ago, "what a drag it is gettin old", meaning me...
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