Monday 26 January 2009

Assessment Day

I have really progressed well with Dinky at college, she is walking back 2 meters and targeting a mat with her back foot. I have begun to elevate the target to 2 mats on wood, so it’s about an 2 inches high.
She is also targeting a box with her front feet and now doing a rear movement quarter circle to the left and right on the box. She is just the best dog ever!
Wednesday was assessment day, me and Dinky were stooges for 2 assessments. Dinky decided to do ‘dead’ in one when practicing down. I have free shaped Dinky to play dead and its kind of her default behaviour so if she’s not sure she offers ‘dead’. Dinky was also very well behaved and good demo dog for my fellow students.

My assessment was on Thursday. I woke up at 3 am on Thursday morning and couldn’t get back to sleep for ages thinking about my assessment. Then when I eventually managed to get to sleep I just kept dreaming about my assessment going horribly wrong.
At least in the morning I was well prepared for every eventuality of it going wrong. I was so tired, I’d been training (in my head) for hours!!

For my assessment I taught ‘Leave’ ‘Stay’ ‘Touch’ and Loose Lead Walking all with Clicker Training. Thankfully all went well and I passed, one of my tutors commented that she can see I really know my stuff and the other asked when I was moving to Hull so she can come to my classes. How cool is that!!!
Then my tutor asked if they could use my lesson plans as examples for next year’s students. I’m such a swat, I’ll have no friends left at this rate!!
Me and Dinky stooged again for 1 more assessment.

Ah don’t you just love that great sense of relief when it’s all over and it went well.

In the afternoon a vet came who does alternative therapies and we watched her do acupuncture on one of the tutors old shepherd with bad hips. Wow!!
It was really interesting as she explained how the needles work and what they do from a science medical point of view and how they create energy flows. She also explained it works well used alongside modern medicine and the importance of tests etc to diagnose a condition so the acupuncture is appropriate for the specific condition. She said used incorrectly could make a problem worse. The needles increase blood flow in the area they are inserted so an inappropriate example would be if the discomfort was caused by as tumour, the last thing you want around a tumour is increased blood flow.
Watching the difference in the shepherd’s movement afterwards made me well up a bit it was quite significant.

Our tutor then gave us a little taster of the inappropriate canine behaviour module which we begin in March. I’m really looking forwards to this module and I’m hoping I already have most of the books for this already in my ever expanding dog stuff book collection.

Well back to work, training and finishing those last few assignments before our short break in February.

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