PVybe Life Episode 3 – Merry New Year!
Here’s the third episode of the PVybe Show. We just got done with disc dog camp and got some video of the trip and some personal work with pretty awesome disc doggers.
0:00 – Rajin’ Cajun evaluation
Gail Mirabella, ex-circus performer and a legend in Dog Frisbee stopped by to hang out and to have us eval this awesome Performance Rescue, Cajun.
Cajun is pretty much perfect according to Gail and also according to what we saw here at PVybe HQ while he was here. We didn’t have the camera out much while he was indoors, and Cajun was a bit distracted on the field.
Apryl works some bitework with him and you get a good chance to see what the guy is made of. He’s awesome and available for adoption, as Gail already has 13 dogs on the road, and Cajun doesn’t get along, at all, with one of her stars.
05:20 – Driving down to Sunny FLA
We got a bit of a late start heading down to Dade City FLA. We’re lucky we did. If not we wouldn’t have gotten to experience this…
05:52 – Pitstop with 14 dogs
Potty breaks on the road with our pack are always interesting. Here we are in downtown Savannah, GA after a long hard pull from NY, stretching our legs and chilling out in the sun for a while.
Leilani & Juicy do some pairs synchronized something at the beginning of this segment.
07:26 – Arriving at One Drop Ranch for Camp
Driving in to the Fahle’s One Drop Ranch is a pretty wild experience. Grass roads, whoopty-doos, hairpin turns, it’s pretty crazy. It’s like driving in to a Scooby Doo episode.
Once we got there, the dogs did great and settled in rather quickly.
08:23 – Throwing Distance Snippet (after instruction)
Just a quick 20 second shot of some campers throwing distance during a distance session.
08:54 – Dre & Mox – Over Toss Adjustment & Yachi Vault
Dre & Moxie are an incredible team. I saw them perform a few times this year, and they were definitely in my top 3 for 2012. They are big, fast, and technically mature. Great team.
Dre wanted to work on Overs with Moxie, and we cover this in our personal session. The idea here is to set the disc towards the dog about a yard or so in order to ensure that the dog leaps early and gets conditioned to leap early.
This is not at all easy, especially when Moxie is moving so fast. Moxie, like many disc dogs, often moves too fast. Dogs that are sprinting can’t leap well. Part of the instruction for fixing her Over
An Over is any leaping catch that happens over top of the handler’s body. Overs are usually named by the part of the body over which the dog flies, i.e - Leg Over,... More was to work Oppositional Feeding to slow Moxie down.
We started with a short Passing maneuver to time the skill and to reduce the responsibility of the handler and to keep criteria low.
Dre does a good job here, a little slower and some more tuning on the toss and she can easily turn this into just about any Over she wants. As a bonus, it should help Moxies leaping for discs at a distance as well, due to her being conditioned to leap early through disc placement.
We also worked the Yachi Vault
The dog uses the player´s body as a launching pad to jump for a disc. A Vault is a leaping catch from the handler’s body. The dog leaves the ground for the target... More, a spin
Spins and Twists are tricks where the dog spins 360 degrees in a clockwise or counter clockwise fashion. Spin is clockwise and Twist is counter clockwise so it is important to have a... More kick kind of vault created by Yachi Hirai. Dre did a nice job here as well. The proper set up distance is hard to judge – this vault, especially when learning, requires a lot of distance, much more than you would expect.
The other thing that is important here is her right heel. It needs to turn first, 180 degrees, so the heel is pointing towards your dog. This is important for completing the spin on the finished product.
13:31 – Scott & Hazel Chest Vault adjustment
This session started out with Notecards, but the second skill, the Chest Vault, was really problematic for the team, and it was something that Scott wanted to improve. I decided to shift gears and focus on the Chest Vault.
Once Scott got the idea of cuing the vault verbally and then offering a directional cue instead of tapping the object, Hazel just kills it. Seriously, watch it.
16:46 – Notecard Demo with Jay & Kai
Jason and the Kai Bear do a Notecard Demo for everyone, and does it well. The only improvement that should be made would be to mark behaviors.
19:32 – New Years Eve with Apryl Art
Camp finished up on New Years Eve and those of us diehards hung out and brought in the new year with some Disc Dogging Debauchery and Demolition. Hanging out around the firepit that Apryl Lea made for the Fahle’s was a riot, and I’m very, very sorry that I lost the footage of the game of catch with discs and sparklers… woo hoo!
20:48 – Pendulum & Marking with Jan
Jan & Dakota really came a long way this weekend. The one thing that Jan wanted was to slow Dakota down so she didn’t feel the pressure of that crazy English Shepherd.
After working on slowing Dakota down with Oppositional Feeding, we started to use that slow purposeful movement and wouldn’t you know it, patterns became easy to create.
Here’s Jan & Dakota working on the Pendulum Pattern – dueling clockwise and counter clockwise flanks. Pretty sweet!
