Well, I thought that earlier in the week my training challenge might be to take Twist to a ring set-up to work on his stays, but my friend changed her mind about going up to the ASCA trial yesterday. Which was fine. I was tired anyway. Then she emailed this morning saying maybe we should go today, but then we both decided against making the drive to Salt Lake this afternoon. It’s such a bummer that the ring set-ups and stuff are 2 1/2 hours away, (one way). Makes it so hard to be motivated to go.
So, I guess you’re just going to have to hear about Dare’s stride regulator work for this week. It’s certainly a challenge. Even though it’s an odd one. So, here’s the challenge. Dare jumps the stride regulator. The problem is that she lands as close to the front of it as possible. So for all intents and purposes it’s pointless. LOL Personally, I’d just bag the whole idea, but the person we are working with on Dare’s jump training said it would be helpful to us if we could get her to use it correctly.
Here’s what we’ve tried this week. She suggested just setting her up a foot or so behind it and going out in front and kneeling with a treat in my hand like a target to try to get her to land further away from the front of the jump. It was kind of successful. Then she said we could also try just having a fun game of fetch over the stride regulator and see if that lengthened out the stride. We tried that too. Next you’ll remember Diana suggested uprights might help. I had tried this earlier, but thought I’d try it again anyway. My mom suggested flipping the stride regulator upside down to present a different picture. Tried that on Friday I think it was. Andrea had suggested striping the stride regulator like a jump bar to see if that visual helped. Tried that tonight.
Here’s what seemed to be true in almost every scenario. If she was set up just behind the stride regulator, and I targeted her out a couple of feet from the front, she did land a little further out in front than before. However, if I put another jump out 4 feet from the stride regulator and targeted past the second jump, she reverted right back to her pattern of jumping and landing her front and rear feet directly in front of the stride regulator rather than splitting the difference of the 4′ between the jumps.
In the case of the fetching over the stride regulator. That was a mixed grab bag of results. Sometimes she looked like she was just striding over it, like you might expect. Other times she jumped it, with a decent amount of distance on the landing side, and once…she came back to me carrying the toy and took off about 7 feet in front of the stride regulator in this huge leap.
Go figure.
I think when the trainer gets back on Monday she’s going to be wishing she had looked for different jobs while she was gone, so she didn’t have to try to figure out what in the world is going on in Dare’s brain as far as jumping is concerned.