Susan Salo puppy jumping work-Session 1

Susan Salo- PUPPY JUMPING

http://www.dogwise.com/ItemDetails.cfm?ID=DTA345 Dogwise carries this video and if you look on the site there is a link to get a preview of the video ;-).

these are a few of my notes as I was watching this.

This work is designed to start with puppies at 4-6 months of age. This is the formative age for learning problem solving. This work is really designed more for teaching the problem solving not necessarily jumping. This will help with spacial orientation and puppies learn this very quickly. Dogs that learn this as adults may struggle with this and will have a much harder time learning.

Dogs growth plates and the muscle attachments are not totally formed until at least 18 months of age-so go slow with any jumping and things that require a lot of physical work. This work is done using speed jump bumps-no height. The jump bumps are 4" diameter PVC cut in half or the larger ones are 8" diameter cut in half.

Let the puppy experience things in different ways and different surfaces-jump bumps are easy to haul around to new places.

When puppies go through awkward phases do other training, you want to empower the puppy and make sure they are successful.

Use a target, it is only possible to pay close attention to one thing at a time and you want the dog to be paying attention to what they are doing, head forward and looking down. You stand by the target and they will be paying attention but you want them paying attention to their job not to you. As time goes on you will proof by adding in your motion, but to start with the dog needs to concentrate on what they are doing.

Always release the dog when they are focused on the target, not on you.

Here is cute little Cricket. Stays are not our strongest suit and I did not want this to be about that...so I got a helper to hold me, but you will see by the time we got to the second time of jumping my helper magically disappeared, LOL. How does that happen? Guess my daughter does not find puppy jump training very exciting, and I did not sufficiently motivate her....so we did the best we could.

Watching the video (I wanted to make video to be able to see the progress as we go along), I thought it was cool to see her figure out that the jump bump was not just in her way, first she almost steps on it, then she strides over it, then she finally figures out how to go over it, hummm, puppy problem solving.