The Spaniel Annals

Last night after my day of teaching, the springers and I headed to our local outlet mall for some attention training on their heeling.  I try to vary what we do each day, so none of us gets bored.  Other nights we might be doing full run-throughs of Kani’s exercises for the obedience ring, or working on details of other behaviors.   But tonight is attention heeling, with everyone practicing at different levels. The outlet mall is a perfect place for this, since there are lots of distractions, cover from the rain, posts to practice figure eights (an obedience trial heeling exercise), and a Starbucks for afterwards. 

Reardon is at the trickiest stage, where we’re working on both attention while heeling and proper gait.  Sometimes he paces instead of trots, meaning that both legs on one side match in movement, front to back.  This is a “lazy” gait that makes it harder to do turns, change pace and heel straight:

Instead, we’re working on Reardon trotting consistently, which is the most economical gait, the most flexible for the various movements required in precision heeling, and the most aesthetically pleasing:

There’s pages to say about gaits and how to encourage them, (and thank goodness the horse people have been studying gaits for literally 2000 years) but last night the priority was on Reardon’s attention in the midst of distractions.  At his young age, in a challenging environment, one thing at a time is the best approach. 

Each dog heeled with me for about 20 minutes.  The young dogs did brief individual stays on-leash, and Kani did her signal work.  Then off to Starbucks for a decaf latte and home!  We were all quite contented with our evening’s practice.