Duke’s agility diary part 1

Last Wednesday, Duke and I attended our first agility class with Click Trick Dog Training. This is something I’ve wanted to do with Duke since we first bought him home but have either not found the right class for us or Duke hasn’t been ready for a class environment. We attempted to do our bronze Kennel Club Good Citizen award a few years ago but he found it too overwhelming. Duke was able to do the behaviours asked of him but he didn’t enjoy it and we left after two weeks. He’s now 5 years old and when I saw Click Trick’s post recently advertising their new agility class, I felt he and I were both ready for a new challenge. I was excited but a bit nervous heading into the class. I know Duke very well but still can’t always predict how he’s going to handle new environments and situations. Fortunately, this class is held outside and April and Lorraine from Click Trick are both committed to force free and reward based methods. So I knew there would be no pressure to ‘perform’ or to do anything we didn’t feel comfortable with. 

Duke's agility diary

Preparing for class

I was hoping to get to the place the class was being held, Cowgate farm in Hawkinge, a few minutes early so that I could give Duke an opportunity to have a sniff round and get used to it first. An unexpected road closure threw the start time off a bit but this worked in our favour as we could have a casual walk around the field and Duke could have a sniff of the different agility equipment. The road closure ended up changing the structure of the first class so it ended up being pretty informal which again worked well for us! 

Agility obstacles

The agility obstacles set up were the see saw, dog walk, tunnels, weaves and jumps. It was quite a windy evening so the see saw and tunnel were moving around and that put Duke off. We gave those a wide berth and we’ll give those another go in future sessions where hopefully the weather is calmer. I wasn’t really expecting Duke to be interested in giving many of the obstacles a go, but happily he was quite happy to do the jumps. He quite enjoys jumping over fallen trees and other obstacles on our walks so this wasn’t a big surprise. He also gave the dog walk a go! Which I was really surprised and happy to see. He was quite intimidated by coming back down the ramp so choose to jump up from the top, ha! We’ll work on building his confidence on the downward slop in our next class. The weaves were opened up to create a channel for the dogs to walk through to get them used to the equipment. Bless Duke, he has done a lot of wrapping around various objects so just wanted to wrap around the weave poles too! 

How it went

After about 25 minutes in the field Duke started looking towards the exit then back at me. I listened to his request and we walked out the field. Fortunately it’s right next to another field that is a public walkway so Duke could have a good run and let off some steam. We stayed here for a couple of minutes and then he walked back towards the agility field so we went back in and did another couple of rounds exploring the obstacles. He asked to leave again 10 mins later and again asked to go back in. After this I noticed his enthusiasm for actually going on the equipment was waning. However his actual engagement with me were super and I couldn’t fault his focus at all! We left a few minutes before the end of the class as Duke had had enough. He was starting to move around quite quickly and just generally looked a bit overwhelmed by this point. 

After class

Overall I’m really proud of Duke and we’ll definitely be going back for the next class. He had polite interactions with the other dogs and owners and was just generally very ‘well behaved’. Importantly, he didn’t seem to be overly exhausted or have a full bucket in the 24 hours after the class. We went on a lovely decompression walk the next morning to one of our favourite spots and he running around and paddling in muddy puddles as normal. This was something I was worried about as if he has been found something stressful you can clearly see it in his behaviour the next day. In our next class I’m hoping to continue to build on Duke’s confidence on the different obstacles. At the end of the day, if he just asks to leave that’s fine with me. I want it to be something we both enjoy together and if he’s not into it, he’s not into it! 

If you’re interested in learning more or attending an agility class with Click Trick, you can find more information on their website here.

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