This past weekend, the pups and I attended the WSDTC show & go. It’s a good 2 hrs away from my house, but you got to do what you got to do! The dog show environment, and its associated distractions and stressors, is such a big part of the challenge in helping a dog get ready for the ring, it’s more than worth it to spend a day.
Our main focus was play and confidence building. We actually did 2 runs, this is the second one (first one didn’t get videoed). The first run was with no judge, just play and tricks. He did so well, I decided to do a little more training with our 2nd run. I still asked for less than half the difficulty in the exercises as I would at home. The environment and distractions are difficulty enough! So in the interest of temporarily lowering criteria while increasing distractions, I shortened the duration and reduced my speed a little, generally asking for smaller chunks of behavior and reinforcing heavily.
