This is Benton. Benton is taking a shrimp nap after a hard day of totally breaking his agility teacher. But wait, you say, how did he break his teacher?
Benton has struggled with hind end awareness, which is dangerous for obstacles like the dog walk, a high, narrow bridge. If a dog on the dog walk turns wrong on it or forgets they have a hind end, they can have a nasty fall and get hurt. Fortunately, we have an excellent agility teacher who teaches backing up onto a platform to teach them to be aware of their feet.
First you teach them to back up. For 6-8 months, Benton and I worked almost daily on teaching him to go backwards on command. No matter what I did, for months, he sat down and visibly fretted, didn't try to back up, even though I've watched him climb stairs backwards. Finally he started reversing!
Next, you introduce a board or other contrasting texture so that they learn to target the object backwards with their hind feet. You repeat this until you see them searching for the board with their little leggies. Once he could reverse, he started looking for the board quite quickly and graduated to platforms.
Sounds successful, right? Why would this break his teacher? Sure, he went slow, but he can do it, right?
Well, there's one more piece to the puzzle. Eventually you have to get them onto a narrower platform because they need to aim. They need to be able to find the platform with their feet and steer towards them.
Benton goes backwards in circles. He cannot go straight at all. He just turns like a baffled Roomba until he finds the platform by accident or I call him off, reset him, and start again.
Today his teacher admitted defeat. He knows he needs to have his feet on the platform. He knows to look for it. He cannot go straight, even after a year. After thirty years of training agility, having her students be the best in the state at contact obstacles like the dog walk, she has admitted that he will not progress further so we're going to stop this exercise and move on to the next steps of agility.
PLEASE go check out this chihuahua doing a full sized agility course.
I think it should be taken into consideration that the jumps are taller than she is when the judges calculate the time. Of course she's slower! She has to go so far!!
This was Kermit’s first time actually competing in an agility trial-- at the previous one I only had him entered as FEO.
His Jumpers Starters run was amazing. I think he was a bit tired by then because he was slowing down a bit on the final stretch, but again I love the enthusiasm. He had a great time and was very popular with the audience.
I believe he was also the only 4-inch dog entered in the trial.
Agility is definitely a game changer and by this I'm specifically referring to mental agility. Circumstances and situations are unique, each having a distinct set of challenges. Your mind's instant ability to weigh the matter in less than a fraction of seconds and to determine the response action is something that must defy the computing powers of even the most advanced language models. The world we live in today sees time as the most valuable asset. Your allocation to perform may be just a few seconds. How you handle a given situation and what decision you formulate within those milliseconds could either make you or break you. So cultivate the habit of fast thinking, quick analysis and agile thought processing. It will literally save your day!