Why of course – how could I talk about anything else! This is our training, and it’s easily becoming our lives.
I’ve started to realise that in everything we do, be it training, walking, playing, tugging, waiting, we must all be happy and joyful. Yes, I know how bizarre that sounds – I knew that already! But I think I’d become so focused on Inka and what he could and couldn’t do and how to manage him so we can do what’s needed, and some of what I’d like to do, I think I’d lost sight of what it’s really all about – fun!
Thanks to Starr and Recallers though, it’s starting to come back for me, and I hope I can bring it to Inka too.
We’re all starting to train in a more effective, and efficient way; I’m learning to actually record-keep for our training sessions, rather than just having a pretty training journal which is more ornament than use, and make ‘mental notes’, which I promptly forget; and I no longer bumble through training sessions, jolting from one exercise to another. I have a plan (the critical core) and I stick to it!
For someone with OCD in being organised, I sure wasn’t applying it to my dog training!
Recallers proper only started yesterday, but between settling into the community, the pre-course and critical core games, and being excited to begin “real training”, the two weeks since I signed up have flown by.
Here’s a few clips I put together from a video I took this the weekend of Inka & I playing one of the games. Inka already had a sort-of recall (we’ve not worked on it much lately) so we progressed this quickly from our garden, to the street in front of our house (on a long line), and I thought this would be a good third location for us, as this is somewhere Inka & I have worked before and he has a history of paying attention here.
You can see the speed he’s coming back to me with already, and as I’ve said on the Recallers forum, I’m starting to have the sort of problem I like having, see if you can spot it!
And yes, this is even before the course has really started! So to the person who found my blog by Googling “do you get money worth susan garrett recallers” – my answer is: absolutely!
