Update on Kenzie's reactivity training post-vacation...she is fine! A little more reactive to the sound of dogs barking than she was before, but that I can handle =)  We are still able to go to the dog park and be social...HUGE. I have a new dog training class starting tomorrow that I intend to use Kenzie in as a demo dog, we will see how it goes! I have never been able to use her in any of my classes before because she was way too reactive and required 100% of my attention any time there were dogs within sight. SO, I am a little nervous, especially since Steve is out of town and cannot come along as a backup handler, should things not go as planned.

Ok, back to the Running Contacts topic. So I have not commented on our RC training all summer, and that is because we have not been training them! In the move from CA to OR, I did not have the DW for a while, and then once I did, I was just too focused on the reactivity training to be able to be fully invested in that. Not to mention, the fact that there are so many dogs surrounding our house made it very difficult for her to be able to focus on DW behavior. She would be just too stressed about the dogs on the other side of the fence.

Now that Kenzie is doing so much better with her reactivity, I am able to pull back from that a little and devote time to something else...AGILITY!!!! We are doing so great. We have our full sized teeter now, so she is on that and doing wonderfully. We are still working on getting her a little faster to the end, rather than creeping down, but she is doing very well sticking her 2o2o (two on two off). We did this by lowering our old teeter down to very low, and getting the 2o2o behavior I want on that. THEN raising it back up to where she was before. So we conquered the fear of big moving thing first, got as high as I could on our old teeter, then lowered it back down to get the exact behavior I wanted.

RC Dogwalk: Ok, so after getting very frustrated these last few weeks trying to figure out how to get her back to hitting the contact zone (because she had gotten into the habit of jumping it due to a misunderstanding on my part of the trkman method), I have started her back on one plank work, just with the plank up about 12", resting on the other down plank of the DW. This is working well so far, using the ball and double throws with lots of praise when she gets it right, and ball but no comment and straight back on the board for another try when she misses. This is what we were doing at the end of the spring while we were still in CA, but once we came down here, she was just too distracted to be able to concentrate on her end of contact behavior. She is doing much better now (partly because we moved the DW to a better part of the yard), and I am hoping that it will work out this time. If it doesnt, I dont know what I am going to do. I am hoping to be ready to trial come Jan, when we go back down to CA.