Agility equipment

[mrskti]

I was wondering how many of you have had your cairns on agility equipment? At our thursday night training last week, Pat took us outside to her field where she has the equipment. I was thinking dori would be afraid of it, boy was I wrong. She went on everything except the tube! She had such a great time, i was so proud of her, she was fearless.....except for the tube of course!!! I wish I'd had someone there to take pics. It was a hoot watching her slide down the slides. I thought that would freak her out for sure, but it didnt.

When we got home and went to bed, she found a pile of pillows, flopped in the middle of them and didnt move! we were both worn out.

Now I'm thinking my nicely manicured lawn (nuclear green ) would look great with equipment all over it!!!! LOL

they are out on the porch right now, i can hear them running back and forth, sounds like they're dragging something....love to hear them playing.

[toomanypaws]

That sounds like fun! My dd loves setting up her version of agility equipment, which the Cairns seem to find entertaining. I've posted this before, but here's Abbey and Hannah w/ their tube. My dd threw a toy in it to get them to run through the first time. Now they'll run through on command (most of the time). She also gets them to jump through a hoop.

[mrskti]

You know we bought the same tube and they absolutely hate it. Emily and I sat out there one day what seemed like forever working with them. We finally crapped out and said forget it. Pat (the trainer) says they dont understand it yet. So maybe at her "Back the the Roots Day", they see. I guess I need to throw a rat or something in there, I bet they'd hop to it real quick like!!!! LOL

THe tube was in their play yard and when we came home from florida last time it had blew out of the fenced area (must have been some wind) and took it about a quarter mile away into our woods.

[wags]

Please Tell me about the slides- they sound interesting!!

I just saw the slide on the other posting. Hmmm... gives me an idea!

[mrskti]

All pat has was a ramp that went up about a 30 degree angle, then a cat walk about 5 ft or so across then a plastic slide that hooked on the other side. THe height of the cat walk was about chest high to me, I'm almost 5'3" (big woo huh)...which i'm sure seemed really high up for dori. all you'd have to do is make a 2x4 frame for the cat walk, put a plywood top on it, some legs and attach the other pieces to the ends. An easy project for sure.

edit: if you do a google on 'agility equipment', you'll get tons of stuff that comes up and you can see how simple the designs are.

[tena]

That sounds like the best fun. I have always wondered how Sophie would do. It's cute that she was more fearless than you during the whole experience.

[ParNone]

I was training my Collie for agility, so my lil' Cairn Murph got to participate too. He was about 12 or 13 yrs old when we started, so we were just doing it for fun. I spent months trying to get the Collie not to fear the teeter totter. I bought my own teeter to help practice. Took Murph out there and I taught it to him within about 5 mins. He never was afraid of it and if me and the Collie even looked like we were headed for it, he'd race to beat us there and wait patiently in the middle for a treat. You can see video of him, going up and down the teeter on my website, MusicDogVideos.com

He's also pretty good at going through the tunnel. No fear. I'll have to put that on my list of video footage to capture this week.

I've been teaching my younger Collie the weave poles and low and behold, Murph decided to join us. Where there's treats, he follows. Even though he's almost 16, I've been doing a lil' training of the weaves with him too. I've got a video of his current version of the poles on MusicDogVideos.com, but if he gets to the level of the other 2 Collies, I'll get some more weaving video of him. He's a remarkable lil' guy. Wish I'd known about agility when he was younger, I think we could have had a blast together.

Les...

[dianer]

I think Cassie would love agility. She really is more of an athlete than a model, if you know what I mean. Our local trainers had to cancel their class this spring because of all the rain we had. They are talking about rescheduling now so I am going to stay in touch with them. We jumped a hurdle in family dog class and she took to that on the second try and seemed to enjoy it.