Gitta – 2×2 – Day 1 – Sessions 1 & 2

Summary — Session 1 (4 mins): building and testing the value; Session 2 (2 mins): one set of poles at 2 and 8 oclock.

I’ve finally started 2×2 with Gitta! Officially! She’s had 2 sessions of ‘building the value’ (shaping her to go through the two poles) before today. But I’ll still call this the official day 1. Those other sessions were about 2 months ago and 2 weeks ago. She has the most shaping experience of any of our dogs, so that part went very smoothly. You put just about anything new in her environment – and she immediately starts interacting with it.

I attended ‘Contacts and Weaves’ day at the Susan Garrett seminar in Seattle this past June. Susan really advocates waiting to do 2x2s till 12-14 months old or later. That’s good advice for any dog – but especially good for large breeds. Gitta is now almost 15 months old – and starting agility classes; so I thought it was a good time to start. I’m hoping to have her pretty far along before weaves are introduced in class.

I think she’s driving to the poles quite nicely – and I love how she speeds forward for the tug. I decided to keep the tug on a long line for the first few sessions, though you can see the problems that occasionally causes. Maybe I’ll try it without the line next session and see how she does. She does seem to ‘like the game’ so hopefully she will be good about coming back. She did alot of wandering over to hubby the cameraman. At first I thought she was just destracted by him – though after checking him out once she should have worked for me just fine. Then I noticed that he had come onto my agility field with a rib!!! A RIB! I’m all for adding distraction. But when you are at STAGE ONE, trying to build value for the poles and then test if you’ve succeeded – having a rib on the field is a bit unfair After he left – things went much smoother

I put her up for just a few minutes between the two sessions while I rotated the poles to 2 and 8 and staked them down. We did a few reps down the middle to make sure she understood her line, then one ‘harder by not too hard’ entry from each side. I decided to quit while I was ahead – she was also slowing down on the tug and looking a little tired.