Who knew we could move this fast?

So today I finally got to train just a little bot with Dempsey and Peepers. The new dog has been a little bit of a drain on my time, but we may be settling into a routine that will allow me to get back into the training that I've been doing.

So Dempsey got to work on his box turn. This is the first time we've done anything for 5 days, so I expected that I would almost have to start completely over with this. Dempsey needed to be reminded once that the box was the key to me throwing the ball, but we needed to keep really working the idea that 3 feet needed to get on the box. Overall, we had a good session, with a bunch of 3 foot turns towards the end. All that work was hard for Dempsey, though. He came out of the session with all the wrinkles that usually mean he has been thinking really hard about the project we've been working on.

Peepers got a session working with the sisal rope perch. I had one session before this one (I think I wrote about it here already), but I hadn't done anything with it since, besides keeping it near a bowl of strawberries to keep Peepers away from them. Anyway, the plan was to work the same way again, asking Peepers to do other things near the perch. He relaxed so quickly that I decided to try and ask for direct interaction with the perch. Peepers was a star, and by the end of the session was stepping up onto the perch and staying there to eat his almonds. I taped this one, and it is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuuvNDYmsCc

So my plan now is to do a few sends and recalls to and from the sisal perch, then add in the red perch and go back and forth. Then, we get to add in hoops to fly through. This is starting to get fun :)