Milo (unraced) has joined the Greyhounds can sit in public brigade (pictured on the right getting lots of praise from Martin!). Woohoo! All the class greyhounds can now sit on command (most of the time! ;-) ).
It's an impressive sight to see the whole class sitting considering it's mostly greyhounds! Mika our Dalmation friend is an awesome sitter!
As usual during class we work through our drills. One I haven't talked about is practicing passing another dog. In this one your hound should be on your left (they should always be on your left but you can have them on the right if you have a good reason) and you walk up to another owner and as you get shoulder to shoulder you instruct your dog to sit in the heel position. This is to enable the humans to have a wee chat without tripping over a dog or to help prevent the dogs lunging at each other. There's not much chatting to each other going on, as we meet in the middle, as we are all pretty occupied getting our dogs to sit at our sides but there has definitely been big improvements since the first class, with everyone now sitting (although once Milo did do a perfect heel sit -just facing the wrong way ;-)!)
We spend lots of time this week practicing our heel work. Ie keeping the dog walking closely by your side, or hip really. The trick is to have a treat in your left hand just out of reach of their nose so they have their heads up watching you and they keep very close! Sam is pretty good at this although sometimes it's like looking at a baby bird as he walks with his mouth open, hoping the treat will fall in. Greyhounds are usually pretty fantastic at walking on a lead but what the testers here are looking for is a nice relaxed lead and the dog walking by your side and responding to your change in directions and movements such as a change of pace. Having a regularly tight lead will lead to a fail as will the dog weaving around the handler or lunging at distractions. Most of the greyhounds are doing really well at this! Just like Leroy (Soho Prince) in this picture.
This is the last class of this term so we need to decide if our boys are ready to sit the foundation level assessment. Both the boys have learnt a lot this term (as have we!) but as you can't use treats through the assessment and are only allowed to repeat the command twice we know the boys aren't ready as their ears don't seem to work so well if their nose can't smell some Possyum! The assessment is at our local club though this weekend so we are going along to take a look at how they work so when it is our turn we will know what to expect! I'll let you know what the assessment is like.
Nice loose lead walking Sam (Gridiron)