Last night was the first run-through we had in a long long time. Months even. It was lightly populated with handlers, but most of the handlers had two or three dogs, so what I expected to be a quick evening turned out to be a substantial time out.

I brought only Leissl. She and I are trialing this weekend, and I wanted to focus on her. Raven is still on sabbatical, anyway. She’s got some things to learn and focus on before I invite her back into a trial ring to pair up with me for another agility dance. I think she’s feeling being slighted. I took her out in the back the other night to work on the front cross training from Susan Garrett’s Success With One Jump DVD. She wanted to play most of the night. She’d been shoving toys at me, and I ignored it, so when I got her outside, she was ready to cooperate.

I set her up and did the drill, and offered her the tug toy I’d made as a reward. She took it and tugged a little. Then we did the drill a few more times when she spotted the toy she really likes. She ran over to pick it up and bring it to me. I took it and put it up. It wasn’t a tugging type toy, and I was not going to let Raven dictate the toy we’d use because that’s what she’s doing on the agility field. She dictates the obstacles she takes. On the other hand, it hurt me to deny her playing with her favorite toy. I really wanted to take that toy and throw it for her because she loves running. But that wasn’t going to improve our communication in agility, and it wouldn’t work for the drill we were doing. I also stopped myself from playing the fetch game after we finished the drill. I wanted Raven to go inside and think about what we did and to get the idea that I’m the boss of toys and everything else. Really. Raven’s a little commando, and I’ve got to put my thumb on everything because she is a master at taking a yard when I give an inch.