Lucy's first rally trial

Lucy and I participated in our first rally trial today, outside at Guides Canins. She was entered in two novice runs. For the first run, it was a real struggle to get and keep her attention, even though she was getting food. I got a ton of deductions for tight leash. Had I not completely forgotten to do one of the stations, she would have Q'd, but only just barely.

Her second run was somewhat better attention-wise, but she was still slow and lacking her usual rally spark even though I was again giving plenty of food on course. Watching the video, most of it doesn't look too bad, but I felt like I had to cheerlead all the way through. She scored a 192 with her first rally Q.

I'm shocked that we got through two courses with neither of us knocking anything over! ;-)

Although it's like watching paint dry, here's the video of her first run:



And her second run:

Hmmmm

Took Lucy to a field we don't go to very often, to practice some rally. I set out four margarine tub lids to act as cones for some weaving...

... And discovered that a huge gap in our training is getting her used to the presence of objects on the ground and ignoring them. Ok, maybe not so much a discovery as a reminder, since she's always been interested in checking out the rally signs. Hoo boy will we have our work cut out if we ever make it to the offset figure 8 in Advanced! Heh.

With our first trial coming up soon (which I realized with a start just a few days ago), I'm going to bring her out a few more times and just practice heeling past various miscellaneous objects on the ground.

Nothing like an upcoming trial to get one back into training mode, though I wish I had gotten back into it a bit sooner!

Heeling? What's that?

Stopped by Petsmart for a few minutes to work on rally in a distracting environment.

She did fine with the "stations", but holy mackerel just getting a nice attention heel was practically impossible! She wanted to inspect and sniff everything on the shelves. And we didn't even go down the rawhide aisle!

Will try this again with more of a focus on the heeling part since the stations were fine, and bringing lots more kibble next time!