Over the weekend, at the last minute, I decided to attend a skills seminar at my local training club, the same one where I teach. I had originally planned to take weekends off between now and when my obedience teaching schedule starts back up in September, but I knew this would be a good opportunity to practice relaxing in a busy dog-centric environment – similar to how trials are.

I always like opportunities to get Beau engaged with me and not the environment. Part of the Doberman make-up is that they don’t miss a trick and spend a lot of time scanning for threat (or fun), so having him relax and ignore the chaos around him can only help us in competition and in life.

The seminar, from Marsha Smith, was focused on bridging skills to refine them and ensure crispness and precision as much as possible. I wasn’t sure what to expect as I have been underwhelmed at past seminars. I purchased a working spot and was eager to see how it would go.

I was pleasantly surprised. While I didn’t agree with, or understand, some of the concepts, there was a lot of incredibly valuable information, and we got to put it into practice with hands-on assistance from Marsha. The main takeaways I got were a few novel exercises, for getting engagement before entering the ring, some techniques to set up for an exercise, and some tricks to get a perfect drop-on-recall.

I am sure there is more that will come to me as I filter all the new information through my brain, but I can affirm that it was worth spending $50 and 5 hours. One of the best outcomes is that Beau and his (frat bro) Argos were able to keep their brains engaged and focus on working instead of chest bumping and roughhousing. 😁 That alone gives me hope that we can trial the boys at the same show and not worry about them abandoning the ring to go play.