Stewie JRT

This article is a part of Dog Agility Bloggers Action Day on Success!

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When I first started doing agility with my Jack Russell Terrier Stewie success was getting a Q. Now that we have been doing agility for 9 years together, success is more about having a good run than whether we Q or not. Stewie and I trial in NADAC and we love to work distance and still feel the connection between us even if he is working 30 or more feet away from me.

This year Stewie is 11 years old, and success is that he is still ready, willing and able to compete in agility. We have worked hard to keep him healthy and in good physical shape and he is still running courses fast and extremely enthusiastically. We are truly addicted to the adrenalin burst of a good fast run.

This blog post is part of the Dog Agility Blogger Event:
Starting Your Puppy, please see the other articles here:
http://dogagilityblogevents. wordpress.com/starting-your- puppy/

I’m still running my 11 year old Jack Russell Terrier, Stewie in NADAC agility. Stewie is my first agility dog. I don’t have plans for a pup in the near future, but here are some thoughts on things I would do differently.

I wouldn’t start obstacle training as soon as I did with Stewie. Instead of teaching each obstacle, I would concentrate much more on flat work, relationship building and play.

Toys and such:
Stewie is very food motivated which made him easy to train, but I would spend more time working with toys so I would have toy play in my toolbox.

Distance!

Stewie is great at distance work, but we didn’t start off training distance and we had to build it later after we had been competing for quite some time. With a new puppy I would start working distance and sends to obstacles right away, and remember, when working distance, if the dog tries the distance, he is never wrong. You want to have a joyful dog that isn’t worried about making a mistake.

Enjoy training your puppy, I will be there someday…..