Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

Rottweilers. Computers. Cameras. World Domination. Not necessarily in that order.

Rottweilers.
Computers. Cameras.
World Domination.
Not necessarily in that order.

Back to school

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Classes start again for Freya and me tomorrow after a three-week break. I originally thought we’d just be returning to our usual intermediate/advanced group obedience class. But there has been a rally obedience class added to the schedule immediately following the group class.

I’m not sure how it is going to work for us to take two hour-long classes in a row, but the times and locations for the weeknight classes I was considering aren’t going to work for us either for the first few months of the year. So I’ve decided to try the consecutive classes for a week or two and see how it goes. If it turns out to be too much in any way for either Freya or me, we’ll go to the as-yet-to-be developed Plan B.

I’m going to take some time now to figure out some goals for this set of classes. The immediate priority is to prepare for our first APDT trial, and also decide whether it will be the trials on January 23-24 or the trials on February 6-7. APDT does not allow choke collars for trialing, as UKC and AKC do, so I also need to get Freya accustomed to working in a martingale collar.

Of course, these goals may be modified, depending upon what happens tomorrow!

(NaBloPoMo | January ’10: 8 of 31)

Belated Saturday Freya

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Were you looking for Saturday Freya? No? I knew that title just wasn’t catchy enough to stick!

Saturday’s class was pretty uneventful. Freya works a lot better in her Saturday class than her weeknight class. I’m sure it has a lot to do with the fact that she gets to play for a while at home before we head out to class. For an early weeknight class, I’m running her out the door within 20 minutes after getting home and neither of us has time to relax.

We’ll have to work through it, though. For the upcoming trial, the Sunday 9:00 am start time and a very short drive to the trial location means we should have ample time for proper warm-up (including mental warmup, especially for me). For our weeknight class this week, I’ll have to hope for a slow day so I can try leaving work a little bit earlier and get in an actual warmup before leaving.

(NaBloPoMo | November ’09: 3 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 248 of 274)

Saturday Freya: last class of the session

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Today was the last class of Freya’s current group obedience class session. Much of the class was devoted to our final exams, where we each ran through a series of exercises similar to a Novice obedience routine, and received an oral critique from our instructor afterwards. The best-performing Intermediate dog and the best-performing Advanced dog each get small trophies.

Today the best-performing Advanced dog was Freya! It was nice to have the star student at the other end of the leash. I’m more accustomed to my canine teammates being class clown or junior gang banger, although they all come around eventually.

Freya always spends a good part of the afternoon napping after we return home from class. Thinking apparently wears her out.

I took the opportunity to work with Axel on the AKC Rally Novice exercises he hasn’t learned yet. The Call Front-1, 2, 3 Steps Backward actually went very well. He caught on right away to what he was supposed to do. Stop and Down didn’t go quite as easily, so I stopped before he… make that I… really screwed something up and we’ll work on that tomorrow.

(NaBloPoMo | October ’09: 17 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 239 of 274)

Friday… I mean, Saturday… Freya

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When Freya was a puppy, we used to do a “Friday Freya” which was a photo of her with Dan and sometimes Oscar, too. I have sometimes wanted to find a Friday obedience class for her so I could have a weekly Friday Freya update post. But that would be a lot of inconvenience to play upon the fact that Friday is the day named for the Norse goddess Freya, if not the Rottweiler Freya, and of course the alliteration.

But I digress seriously from my real topic. So, anyway!

Saturday is group obedience class day. Since we’ve had a few big (read well-paying) projects at work that required working the weekend, we missed a couple of classes. Plus we had a week off due to Rosh Hashanah. So Freya and I were both eager to get back to class. Freya seems to work especially well after missing a class or two, and I’m not really sure why. If I could somehow use that fact for trials, I’d love it. But I would be very nervous about missing the extra practice close to a trial day, especially the practice in ignoring the distraction of other dogs in close quarters.

We also got the good news that our current instructor will be offering a class specifically for rally obedience soon. He incorporates quite a few rally exercises, such as the 360° and 270° circles, into the regular group obedience classes already to help improve heeling position and body awareness. Plus we learn and practice both left and right finishes. That actually helped us a lot for our first rally trial in July.

It probably won’t start in time to help us for Freya’s next trial (either later this month or in mid-November, or perhaps both of those dates) but definitely in time to help where we will need it most: for Rally Advanced and RO2 which are done off-leash.

(NaBloPoMo | October ’09: 3 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 225 of 274)

Rottweiler rambles (28 of 31/63 of 274)

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Saturday is obedience class day for the lovely Freya. I consider group training classes a lifelong activity for my dogs, and I’m always happy to find those classes, clubs and instructors that can make those classes a good experience for both me and my dogs.

We like our current class very much. It is an intermediate/advanced class, which means some of the dogs are fresh out of beginner class, some are more experienced and some are working on off-lead or competition. Class size is small: 10 dogs when everyone is there. We use mostly positive training with food and praise, but correction collars and corrections are not forbidden. After owning six rather stubborn Rottweilers, I no longer believe that all dogs can be trained solely with pure positive methods. If you do, that is fine, and we will just have to agree to disagree.

What I really like about our instructor is that he is able to help reactive and unruly dogs work in class, without undermining the experience for the other dogs. The hall is large enough to provide enough space for dogs to work at a comfortable distance. Over the past few weeks, an extremely reactive dog has gone from working outside the group at one edge of the training room, slowly moving closer to the group, to being able to work with the group for at least half the class period now. Freya is reactive herself to small hyper dogs, so this has also been a good opportunity to get help in teaching her to work through what to her is a huge distraction. This has been so much better for me than having to rely on random public encounters where I have no control over the skill or intelligence of the other dog and its handler.

I need to set up some specific training goals for Freya, and make them more real by picking out some actual trial dates to shoot for. She is a pretty smart dog whose lack of working titles is due mostly to my own procrastination and somewhat weak dog training skills when it comes to competitive obedience.

I am so glad there is such a thing as Rally Obedience now. When our first Rottweiler Heidi came to live with us in 1994, the sport did not exist. All of our Rottweilers go through obedience classes, and we actually did trial with Heidi and her little brother Oscar, but never did title them. Traditional obedience competition demands a lot of precision, which is something I am terrible at. Rally Obedience requires the same routines and exercises as traditional obedience, but it is more relaxed for both dog and handler. This I can probably do, so this is what I will work towards.

My real dog sport love is Schutzhund, but I don’t know if I will ever get back to it. It requires even more commitment in training time and practice time than many other dog sports. Since it involves a protection component, you really cannot do this without a club with an experienced and safe helper. With the current legal climate for all dog owners, there is a particular responsibility for dog owners participating in protection sports and unfortunately, that is not something that can be ignored these days.

Did I not mention Axel yet? No, apparently I did not. I am still deciding on what his activities should be while he is taking a break from conformation showing. We were doing private lessons before he left in December, and I’m not opposed to continuing those, but I also feel he needs to get back into group classes so he remains accustomed to seeing dogs of different breeds on a regular basis. I won’t even think about working titles for him until after he completes his championship.