i think i just nearly wee'd myself...i do like that a super special snowflake....it is amazing how we have been doing this dog training lark wrong for soooo many years, well at least now we have our very own expert!
As you say, if the dogs don't want to do it they won't, one of mine isn't too thrilled with the tunnel, if she wants to go through she will if she doesn't want too we leave her be and she can try it again if she wants to

That's what I love about agility the most. We play a lot of "it's your choice" games. The dog does it...big reward! The dog doesn't? We try again. Ben has really come so far. He was so completely distracted by EVERYTHING when we first tried. OMG it's a bird up there! OMG there's DIRT! OMG LOOK AT THAT WEIRD THING IN THE CORNER! OMG I MUST SNIFF ALL THE THINGS! Even just getting him to pay attention to me was a lot of work. But now we're forming a bond and he wants to work with me. I guess I could have just tossed him out in a field with a shock collar on and let him chase wildlife, but I think that he can do far more than that.

yes, i like reward based training, our class does ttouch too which is fascinating

I've known some folks who have done ttouch. I've not learned much about it myself but it does seem to be really helpful for some dogs. Ben is a dog who stresses easily, so something like that might hit our repertoire eventually!

oh, if you get the chance, give it a go, it is really magic

I may have to. It's on my list of 18 million things I want to do with my dogs. LOL

Ben's agility training is really coming right along! He's not jumping full height yet (20 inches) but he's regularly jumping 16 inches with no trouble and we're getting into more and more complicated sequences. Here's a short one from our most recent classes. We were focusing on learning specific types of turns and how to use them when in a sequence, so the sequences were short 4-5 jump and/or tunnel sequences so we could practice them.

Shame that was so short he looked really good. My daughter does agility over there to.

Well, we're still learning! The class was focused on specific types of ways to turn the dogs so we did several 4-5 obstacle sequences to practice specific turns. That was the first time he'd seen that kind of weird turn and he did great!

I haven't posted here in forever! Ben is doing fantastic in agility. We went to our first trial last month and while we didn't get any Q's we had some great successes (he struggled a bit with concentration and took off a couple times to run around before coming back to me to work).

This was him at a seminar last July.





He LOVES it and he is so happy. He pretty much looks like this in every photo I ever see of him doing it. This one was taken by the photographer at his trial!




This is one by me that I got when a friend ran him in the park for me.