Thursday, February 21, 2008

Carmie! Practice

Heh, heh....I had to trick Ike last night in order to work with Carmen. I started by cleaning her ears, brushing her, and clipping her nails. As a result Ike decided he would rather go hang with his Papa (FIL) upstairs than with me! This is mostly because Carmen is a drama-queen and typically yells at me the whole time I am grooming her and Ike hates when ANY animal is upset! Part of the yelling is because her fur is so fine and plush; she very easily gets mats. A Schnauzer's fur is supposed to be coarse and wiry!

After the grooming was finished I worked with Carmen and her target plate for about 15 minutes. I am getting more speed from her, so that is good. She is a much more flexible learner than Ike is, which is a huge relief. She lacks confidence and I spoke to Katrin about how I can work on teaching her to be "wrong." MannyMuddyPaws recently wrote a post on teaching her PyrShep Boone it is okay to be wrong, and while it is not something that works for Ike due to his rigidity, I think it is something to explore with Carmen. I think Carmen has a lot of potential for agility and I want to set us both up for a successful relationship!

Next we worked on creating that motivating toy. At first Carmie looked at me like, "You want to play...with just me?" Then she got into it!! Hooray. She is a FAST little bugger when she is tearing after something. I used the chipmunk jackpot toy and the raccoon tail. She gladly tugged with me and let me pull her half-way across the room! I let her "win" quite a few times to keep her interested in the game and then offered to trade cookies for tail. She was completely happy with that arrangement.

I am going to bring the tail to class tonight. I want to try and get her to play at the barn without having any work involved; just play for the sake of playing. I think I skipped a step a couple of weeks ago when I was trying to use a toy working on outs. Carmen didn't realize she could play with me!

By the time Carmen and I were playing, Ike had figured out it wasn't all torture downstairs and was whining like a mad dog at the door. "You haven't worked with me in weeks; I only get boiled meat; wah, wah, wah!" Very funny.

3 comments:

manymuddypaws said...

Very clever to trick Ike with the boredom and pain of nail trimming!

Check out my blog later today- I plan to blog this morning....

Shelly said...

Mean MAMA!! Poor Ikey! Life's so tough... LOLOLOLOLO

Jules said...

I am a big meanie!

I will go check out your blog....