Repetitions – 25th June 2009

Nic (my wife) and I took both dogs to the racecourse.  The sun was shining and it promised to be the only good day of the weekend so I intended to make the most of it.  We would be picking up a couple of steaks on the way home and a few beers – a barbecue was on the cards.  Between arriving at the racecourse and the inevitable barbecue there was work to be done though.  Grouse counting isn’t far off and the last thing I want is wild, uncontrolled dogs on the moorland so repetitions it was to be.  Repetitions interspersed with fun of course. I have no intention of making training boring for any of us.

I kept Archie on a lunge line while Grace ran free initially, then swapped them over.  They both had a few ‘get ons’ (standing start to flat out in a direction I choose) with Archie consistently running faster and further.  This is through no fault of Grace though; I have never trained her to do this.  I then set one dog up and walked away, leaving the dog sat in the hupped or dropped position.  I would walk a few hundred yards before the treble pip of the recall whistle when the dog would come charging towards me as if released form a greyhound trap.  I would then set the dog up again and walk back to where we started and repeat the whole exercise.  The next stage was introducing the single blast half way through the run.  Both dogs responded well although Grace does it with less enthusiasm, preferring to do her own thing, or go her own way should I drop my guard for a second.  I didn’t.

We did this for about twenty minutes before I let both dogs have a mad ten minutes racing about and generally letting out some of the pent up frustration at having sit still for any length of time.  During this ten minutes I give them no commands.  By the end of the session both dogs had had a good hour of either running flat out or having to think, both being equally exhausting for them.  Altogether a useful session.