Spider dog – almost there!

Between kids and work and life, I don’t think I’m going to make it down to Y2K9s this weekend.  So since I won’t have any agility to blog about, I thought I’d put together the history of our spider dog trick to date.

Carla and I took a dog tricks seminar with Sassie Joiris back in January.  One of the tricks she is teaching her dogs (Norfolk Terriers and a Whippet) is a handstand.  We decided to try it with Carla.

I started off sitting down facing her and getting her to back onto a folded towel.  Carla knows a few body targets, so she picked up on this pretty quickly.  Then I moved the towel to a ramp, and then started working with just a ramp.

Here’s our first try with the ramp, my camera operator is my 7 year old.  She charges a $1 for 5 minutes of camera work.  LOL

Here’s more of the same session, you can see that I raised the incline too quickly, but once we brought it back down, I thought Carla did quite nicely.

And finally:

 

She’s even better at it now, I can just squat near the wall instead of sort of coralling her with my legs.  Last night at the Beginner’s Rally class I help teach,  I was trying to demonstrate backing up to a target, but Carla kept trying to put her rear end up in the air, even without a wall.  I’ll try to get a more recent video soon.

I think the total amount of time we’ve spent working on this trick is probably about an hour – spread out over a few weeks of 5 – 7 minute sessions.   It was easy and fun and made us the hit of my dog training class!