We had an OK but not great training session this morning.

As Ice was worked pretty hard in class on Monday evening he got Tuesday off, lots of play and walks but no agility. So this morning was his first training session after class.

Here are the things that didn’t go so well.

For the past 4 to 6 weeks the grass has been bone dry in the mornings at training time and Ice has been very happy to run on it.  The past few mornings dew has settled on the grass overnight and the sun has not yet burnt it off before we started training.  Previously Icy has been very sensitive to the wet grass, frankly he doesn’t like it that much and prefers not to have to go on it.  I’d thought (hoped) he had forgotten about his “wet grass” fear but no such luck, he’s still prepared to run on the grass but I could see his enthusiasm had waned.

I have been working my way through the “Sizzling SeeSaw” DVD from Clean Run.  We have been playing the Bang! game and today was the first time Ice got to run the length of the Teeter with it banging onto the ground.  He did this fine, ran all the way to the end and waited with 4 feet on the board just like I’d trained him – what a good boy!.  He got several cookies for staying in position and then I released him – “break!”.  Ice remained on the board, he didn’t budge.  I threw the toy for him and still stayed on the board.  I picked him up, placed him on the ground and tried to get him excited about the toy, throwing it for him.  He retrieved the toy ran back towards me but stopped short and jumped on the table in a down dropping the toy.  OK I thought no problem, you obviously understand the automatic down on the table, good boy here’s another cookie.

So I repeated the Teeter and exactly the same thing happened only this Ice didn’t chase after the toy he ran straight to the table and went into a down.

The training session ended at this point.  Looks like I’m going to have to spend some time counter conditioning whatever the fear is that Ice has for the wet grass.  This is very frustrating but as the grass is going to be wet pretty much 24×7 for the rest of the year and beyond so I have no option but to do this even though I’d much sooner be spending time actually training agility.