Fun Match - Open Obedience

Now that Red has his CD title in Novice Obedience, we've moved onto training for Open. It's so nice to train something different for a change! Novice Obedience is kinda boring imo, so its good to be able to work with jumps and the dumbbell now. Red loves learning new things and is doing pretty well in the short time we've been working on all the new stuff.

Our heel off leash and figure 8 are fine. The retrieve on flat is usually decent except for some unknown reason today he picked up the dumbbell wrong and then dropped it when he came back - which he hasn't done in a long time, so not sure what's up with that.

We've really been working on the drop on recall. I had to change from a verbal command to a hand signal, because for some reason he wouldn't drop fast enough with the command and wanted to get as close as possible to me before going down. The hand signal seems to be working better. We're still at a short distance and I'm working us up to longer.

The retrieve over jump is our hardest exercise. He'll go over the jump to get the dumbbell, but he wants to run around it on the way back. So I did it on-leash for this fun match and ran with him. When training this at home, I'm going to have to find some way to set up a jump with barrier on each side so he doesn't have a choice but to come back over. But I can only do it outside and there's snow on the ground now, so not sure how that's going to work...

The broad jump is the one thing we haven't practiced at all and he did it beautifully today. Go figure, lol

Anyway, here's the video:




The judge commented at the end... "Well he's certainly enthusiastic!" haha yep, no problems there...