Reminder: The Midwest Agility Championships will be held On October 23-25, 2009 at a new site with indoor sports turf, the Libertyville Sports Complex, Liberty, IL. Closing date for entries is September 26th. Here's a link to the premium.Looks like recreational dog agility is the latest business venture to be franchised. The Zoom Room announced today their launch of the Nation's first dog agility franchise opportunity. Read more.
OK, this is just cool! We've seen sheep, pigs, hammies, cats and other 4-leggers do agility, but I've never seen a parakeet do agility, until now!!! Check out this post and vid :)
Tricks? You want tricks?
- Here's a great vid, '40 new dog tricks' from http://www.unsere-tara.de.vu%20%20">TaraDog
- Our friends Tani (8 month old Pyr) and Barbie with some fun tricks for puppies!
- Fun vid - teaching your pup to walk on your feet from Sian!
- Here is a nice little playlist to help teach your dog how to lift back legs, right legs, and weave backwards, from Polona!
This would be so much fun! Cosi did an agility demo at their local fair and they set up an agility race between two dogs at the same time. I wanna try that!!!!
Check out our latest article for Dog Sport Magazine - Greening the Doo! How you can take care of your dog's poo and keep earth friendly at the same time.ESPN will broadcast the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge Eastern Regionals on Sun, September 20, 5pm – 6pm. Check your local listings for any changes.
A new series from Animal Planet will kick off on Saturday, October 3, at 8 PM (ET/PT). Featuring Zak George of YouTube fame the series, SuperFetch, will focus on Zak and his proteges, as he works with pet parents showing them how to transform their ordinary pet into a trick-doing stunt jockey and in the process strengthens the bond they have with their beloved companion. Should be fun!
The new HBO Films movie, based on Jon Katz book, "A Dog Year" will premiere tomorrow night, 8 PM on HBO, starring Jeff Bridges.
New video of Bi doing agility training with Silvia Trkman, such a young pup and awesome contacts. Also love he start line stay :)
The 2009 Agility Association of Canada National Championships were held in Ottawa, Ontario, July 30 - August 2, 2009. A draft of the aggregate final results are up. Courses and class results here. YouTube vids here.
At the July 09 board meeting of the Agility Association of Canada 24" weave pole spacing was approved. Here's more info from their site:
As of September 1, 2010, weave pole spacing will be changed to 24” on centre. The long implementation period reflects the need to replace equipment and allows both host clubs and individuals the time to do so. Because of concerns about dogs having to adjust back and forth between sets of poles with different spacing, there will be no period during which current and new requirements will both be acceptable. That is, 24” poles must be used after September 1, 2010, but are not acceptable in the trial ring prior to that date. Further work is underway to develop a plan to subsidize clubs purchasing new weave bases and to investigate the possibility of working with suppliers to manufacture and provide new bases to both clubs and individuals at a favourable price.
If you haven't stopped over and visited Jesse's (the JRT) YouTube channel, it is so worth a look. 20 year old Heather trains Jesse, quite an accomplishment! Lots and lots of tricks.
The USDAA NC Regionals were held this past weekend in Crystal Lake, IL. We don't have the results, but have heard that Angie Beniquisto & Dylan kicked some dog agility butt, winning the Team (with Judy Schor/Moxie and Jen Crank/Blast), 16" GP and SC. Angie and Duncan also won the 12" SC. Nice job Angie! SC Regionals will be the weekend of the 29th of August, SW Regionals will be held the weekend of September 5th.
The Border Collie Classic Open European Agility Championships are taking this weekend in Bettembourg, Luxemburg. You can see results from Friday, and we expect other results will be posted soon. Thank you to aurea.userworld.com for keeping us posted.
Thanks to our friends at Just Agility, who dug up another good site to help you build your own agility equipment.
Dates for Karen Pryor's ClickExpo 2010 have been announced and registration is open. Bios of presenters are here. Dates and locations are:
ClickerExpo 2010
January 29-31, 2010 — Portland, Oregon
Doubletree, Portland
March 19-21 - Lexington, Kentucky
Griffin Gate Marriot Resort and Spa
Here's a nice little vid of Bernadette and Zen (O'Bay Shelties) at EO 09, 4th place in Ind Jumping. You can read their blog post about the event here.
There's a new K9 athlete online community run by Ron Watson, a disc dog fanatic and dog trainer in Michigan, you may want to check out. Not that new, I guess, since about January or so. Don't know what the plans are for the site, but so far they have a few agility articles from Susan Garrett and Bud Houston. There's also a forum, although it looks like it's used primarily with the disc dog lovers. There are now over 900 members, including Mum and yours truly.
For all of you wanting or needing info on dog agility injuries, one of my favorite resources is Dr. Stephen Canapp at the Veterinary Orthopedic Sports Medicine Group in Annapolis Junction, Maryland. He has written often for Clean Run about dog agility injuries; including the iliopsoas, rotator cuff, shoulder and cruciate ligament injuries. You can see some of his articles here. And now you can follow him on Twitter.
And last but not least, the system I utilize to keep track of my agility runs, placements, times, titles, etc., is Agility Record Book. Love it, love it, love it!!! We see today that they released support for Mac OSX! Nice work! They also have a Yahoo Group with amazing service to help you along.
To view past dog agility blog-o-sphere articles, click here!
Gracie and I have continued working on our running dogwalk training over the past weeks. And we think it's coming along very nicely, although a little slower than we expected, mostly because of time we have to work on it.You may remember in previous posts (Progressions #1, #2, #3, #4), we had a bit of challenge in getting Gracie to run deeper into the yellow. Well, it's fixed for now!
We got some great tips from a great agility trainer (aka, one time world team member who I'm sure would love to remain anonymous :). Thank you to her for helping us get Gracie running through. It was a super easy fix, and an idea that we would never have thought of. I'll be sure and ask her if it's ok to share her tip and get back with ya.
Now that Gracie's running through, and I'm doing pretty well in striding through the yellow, we raised the board another 6 or so inches. And guess what? We've been at 100% for the past three sessions at the height in the vid below. So it's time to raise it again tonight! Yeah!
We had a big breakthrough just a few days before this vid. Gracie can now drive to a target after the weaves and doesn't need any 'babysitting.' Wow, this is huge for her!!!! It's taken a long time for her to be confident enough to get to this point and we are super proud of her. To get her to drive Mum was having to really stick with her in the weaves and cheer her on with good girls. But now, she's driving on her own. Mum is so happy!!!
Hoping to get a vid comparison of her weaves before targeting and after targeting this week sometime, and time the difference. Should be interesting! She sure doesn't need any fat burner, skinny girl, but Mum could, BOL!!!
For me we worked a little on tight turns and both Gracie and I got some work on rear crosses. I didn't need them so much, but Gracie sure did. And she did great! We think she is really starting to read Mum. Oh, and you can see Gracie doing a little heeling, she likes it, I don't :)
So here's the vid, enjoy!
We didn't get to do much dog walk in April because of the weather, but we did get a good session in near the end of April. And it looks like we may get some in this coming week, now that I'm feeling better.After previous sessions here, here and here, we elevated the dog walk another six or so inches for this session. A few bobbles, but we're coming along. Still not sure we like where Gracie is hitting the yellow, so we may have to work on that. But Mum's liking where I'm hitting, except for that first fly off, BOL! Next session we will elevate again with Gracie and see what happens, if she's still hitting in the same spot we may have to alter our plan.
In this session Mum put a tunnel about 10-12 feet from the dog walk; drew us right in.
