This seminar was not just one of the best I've been to, it was THE best. I had just about reached the conclusion that seminars weren't really worth the effort and expense, but Amanda and Sunny's well paced and well thought out approach completely turned my thinking around on the value of the experience.
I especially liked the emphasis on knowing your performance criteria and sticking to them. Before we were allowed to do any distance work, A&S had us all run our dogs over a dogwalk to see what the performance looked like. Then they emphasized that you can't even start working on distance until your dog has consistent, reliable performance on individual obstacles. Then we did some other stuff and eventually called it a day. The next morning, we ran a sequence that included a dog walk, after which Sunny observed, "Hmmm, I saw very few examples of dogs giving the same contact performance as they did yesterday." Indeed. And why might that be? (Exercise left for the reader.)
I also liked the emphasis on finding any and every opportunity to tell a dog that he's doing the right thing. This is a life skill that can be used all day every day, not just in agility.
Lin and Greg were wonderful hosts too. On a seminar scale of 1 to 10, I give this one a near-perfect 9 (point removed for the desert heat...I'm still nursing my charred skin back to life
)
Kim
