Mad spaniels!

God I love these two little spaniels!! They are such characters, and so very, very bright! And my, aren't they beautiful?! These lovely photos were taken by our Four Paws friend Philip Watts at training a few weeks ago.

I'm so proud of everything mum and I have achieved with the pair of them so far (and really proud of the progress of our new friends Jacky and Heidi as well, what a fab team they are!). It's been a large investment of time in terms of researching all these new training ideas with regards to Foundation Agility training, trying to combine all the best bits but make sure there are no conflicting ideas in there, adapting methods to ensure it all fits with our handling system (or Greg Derrett's handling system!), making sure it's all age-appropriate and fun, but it's definitely been worth it so far! The two of them are already showing more understanding of how to control their bodies, focus ahead, look for the next obstacle, hold a start line wait etc than Finn and Willow did at 15 months of age (and some might say more than they do at almost 4 years!!)! They're going to be absolute little crackers! And the best bit...they love their training sessions so much!

I feel we've managed to strike that balance between laying the foundations for later training and letting them just be puppies; all the exercises we've been doing are very low-impact (no 'jumping' at all at any point yet), we only do one or two short sessions a week, it's all done using huge amounts of positive reinforcement and play, and it's all done at their own pace without a huge weight of expectation on them or a desire to push them too hard - they deserve to be pups, after all! But the benefits are enormous - they're so confident, they have an incredible understanding of how to play the training 'game', and they have oodles of enthusiasm.

At one point I think I'd started to take for granted just how confident they were at interacting with any surface or object put in front of them, but the benefits of continuing this habituation work were highlighted for me at the end of January when I ran a little 'top up' class for some of the pups who used to come to class that I hadn't seen for a few weeks, and back in Novemeber they were at a comparable age and confidence level to Whirli, Dazzle and Heidi, but having not done anything much for several months I was amazed to see just how much confidence they'd lost compared to our three. Makes me wish I had the capacity to run puppy classes again, as I think we're doing a lot of things right! Maybe in the future...

For now my plans are a little hampered as I'm still suffering from post-concussion syndrome following that head injury at work, so everything has been put a little on hold for now. But hopefully in the near future I might have some more interesting things to report. In the meanwhile you'll have to be content with this 'ode to Whirli and Dazzle'!!

Blimey she's a cute little monkey...