Spread jumps

Today Hawk and I focused on spread jumps. I'm in Kokomo this week, so I don't have an actual double/triple here like we do in Muncie. Instead I had to improvise, by setting up 2-3 normal jumps such that the distance between the bars and the heights of the bars were correct. It looked a little odd, but didn't seem to phase Hawk at all. It could actually be good proofing in the future, for odd-looking jumps/jump wings I suppose. Hawk had no trouble with the triple and double, and I was pleased to see she took their size into account when wrapping(1) - in order to leave the bars up.

She hadn't seen a broad jump up to this point, so I decided to work on that a bit as well. At first she attempted to do a 2 on, 2 off (2o2o)(2) contact on it. When she realized that wasn't getting her anywhere, she proceeding to jump over it. Bingo! Lots of cookies for the smart girlie. After that she had no problem doing the broad jump regardless of where I was at.

Her rear cross is coming along nicely, but she's not comfortable enough with it to ask for it in trials yet. She understands it on the flat, but we're not very consistent over jumps yet (still need to work out timing to not turn her before the jump).

If anyone's interested, here's a video of Hawk doing agility. There's one spot where a rear cross would've been preferable, but given the above issue with the rear cross, we went for an ugly front cross instead.



(1) Wrapping - taking the jump and then turning as tightly as possible to the left or right upon landing (depending on which side the handler is on), around the side of the jump, and back to the handler.
(2) 2o2o (2 on 2 off) - method of doing the bottom of the contact such that the dog stops at the bottom with his/her front feet on the ground and the back feet on the board.