Well done Barney - what a clever (and gorgeous) boy you are !

I'm sure you're training for it already! It's a good gap to build up your out of sight stays. I don't think that's an exercise to be rushed. Some of the tests in the Gold are quite basic IMO, such as the waiting to go to food bowl. That is one of the first things a pup or dog should learn.

Well done Barney, what a clever boy xx

Absolutely agree, I personally think the wait for food is easier than the walking by food I did in the silver and is something I trained him at about 12 weeks old.

As long as you have a dog with good relaxed nature and he's trained to focus on you, then the tests are not too difficult.
Barney made me look good but I wouldn't look too good if I was to do the test with my Westie, Daisy. She has plenty of focus but not the relaxed nature, she hates being messed about with and It took me two years before I found a groomer that didn't stress her out.

She will walk backwards and play dead and all that sort of thing but try grooming her and she gets the Terrier Trembles.

I've given Barney a day off training today as Sunday was a long, busy day for him

I know Gwen Bailey has had a bit of a bashing lately re her old fashioned attitude to dominance but she does have some very good suggestions. With grooming she recommends to go very slowly if the dog isn't happy. May be worth a try?

Just another couple of tips about training for Gold.

Go to bed/mat. Train this from the beginning by moving the mat from room to room, once pup has got the initial hang of it. Makes it much easier to generalise it to your training classes. Hide and seek with "Where's your mat?" is a great game to play.

Stop the dog. Came as a shock to me to find out (after I changed trainers from a rubbish class at 2 weeks before the test) that this can mean the dog coming towards you or going away from you. EEEK. Managed to train George running away and dropping and that was what the examiner asked for on the test!

Wow that's amazing. Well done both of you xx

I already have the beginnings off the send away/go to bed sorted. I need to work on the out of sight stay and improve the stop. He's surprisingly slow to go into a down which would be my first chose for a stop command so I've recently changed to a WAIT command, where he turns and looks at me.

Ah, lovely video with super pup.

Wait is fine, as you know. Whatever it takes to stop the dog in an emergency is what is needed.

I can see you'll sail through the Gold.

Shane I think Barney is a model pupil, well done both of you.

Well done both of you.