Retrieve

Boy, it was a very long time since my last post. At the beginning of our training with Margot I started my training blog where I was making entries almost daily which left me no time for posting here. Hopefully now it will change, out training blog is closed and I have a strong desire to continue keeping the training diary as long as I have something to write about. At the beginning of the training daily blogging was easy and almost addictive, now, after we have finished with basic training I ran out of the ideas to write about.
This past Saturday we started working on the retrieve. I was waiting for this opportunity for at least two years. I don not know if all Kerries are like this or it's just mine but she has no desire to retrieve what so ever. The only time she will chase the ball is after I give her a bath, then she might chase the ball for about 5-10 min, but the ball never gets back into my hand, instead I have to chase after her to take it to throw it again. Oh, all those fun things that I could do with the dog that can retrieve were absolutely out of my reach. When I asked my previous trainer to help me to teach my dog to retrieve, I was told that we should wait until her sits are more relaxed. For a while I had those ideas of teaching her to pick up the toys and clothes that my kids leave around the house, now I am finally on the way to achieve this! Needless to say that I was all excited when I got Brandy the pretty new wooden dumbbell and a dumbbell holder. It's very important to have the correct accessories isn't it?:-)
This week all I have to do is to give the "fetch" command, open Brandy's mouth, put the dumbbell in, wait a sec, give the "give" command and take it out. Praise her a lot. Repeat this 20 times a day at least and we are done:-) You can probably guess that Brandy is not a big fan of this exercise, however she comes, jumps on the chair at "place" command and sits, even that she knows what's coming. So I think she is doing pretty good.
Last night I finally decided to introduce small distractions and took the dumbbell outside during our walk. Unfortunately, our walks take place somewhere between 9 and 10 p.m which means that it's cold and dark outside and almost no one around. Really hard to find a good distraction. However, when we were passing by someones house, I heard the dog barking inside which caught Brandy's attention and I used this as an opportunity to pull the dumbbell out and do a set of 10 fetches, will try to do the same tonight.