The judge was Fons Van den Bosch from Belgium.

This was our second time in grade 3. I didn’t expect much, and that’s about how it went. Some exercises were good, others didn’t go well at all. We definitely need more training.

Sitting in a group for 2 minutes, handlers out of sight. Lying in a group for 1 minute, and recall

Poor Kaïa in the rain. Since she was in heat, I had to do the exercise alone (no other females in grade 3). She was confused about being left on her own and ended up lying down. It wasn’t a great experience, but I’m glad she stayed ‘calm’ and didn’t walk off.

Heelwork

Heelwork was never our strong exercise, and for some reason, she did the backward walk wrong.

Recall with sit and stand

Beside the tempo changes, this is a good exercise. She could stop faster for the “stand”.

Send away with directions, down and recall

Kaïa doesn’t really understand the concept of going forward to nowhere. This is a recurring issue, she’s searching for something to go to.

Directed retrieve

I’m a bit lucky, she goes forward to the left, where she needs to pick the dumbbell. If it was the right one, I would probably had trouble to make it happen.

Send around cones, stop, retrieve and jump

She was focused on the last dumbbell and didn’t see the cone. I should have prepared her better before the exercise and make her search for the cone first.

Scent discrimination and retrieve

This exercise was nearly perfect. She scans, found the good one, pick it up, and came back. A little tempo when she comes back, but that all.

Distance control

She moved forward a bit, otherwise, good exercise.

The judge was Patrick Villardry from France.

This is her first Obedience competition in a long time. We don’t have much training, but I wanted to see what she could do.

She did very well, it’s not easy to see it on the video, but she turns a little on the left. It’s something I have tried to correct for ages, but she doesn’t like to stay straight. Otherwise, it’s a good exercise.

She did it backward… It was a fun moment. We didn’t train this one much, she understands the concepts I guess.

She moved a bit when I turned, I need to do that more often. I was confused because I forgot that in grade 3, you can have the object at the edge of the line.
After some hesitation (I guess she was also confused), she took the right one. You can see my surprise in the video when they announce the result.

This is my favorite exercise of this competition, I didn’t even know that she could do it so well.

Heelwork was never our strong side. In grade 3 it’s a long walk of pain for Kaïa. You really can see that she struggles to focus, the stress of the competition takes its toll.

The backward walk is a lot better now, as well as the sidewalk. Positions were on point.

Going forward to nowhere, this makes no sense to me, and Kaïa doesn’t understand yet. I was too late for the stop command and she was outside of the box.

This is an other 0. But this one is just the lack of training, if she did go forward correctly, she would have succeeded.

Today was the Obedience competition of our friends at Hondenschool Amicus. Kaïa and I scored excellent marks in grade 2 with 266.5/320 for the first time and the last Obedience competition of the year!