Dog Dancing 1.0

You won't believe what we did tonight! Thanks to our super cool friend Emmy, and I am sure the Hazyland boys helped as well, we had our first lesson of our freestyle class tonight :-) Freestyle is sort of like dog dancing.

We met indoors, five dogs and their handlers. One was Tobi the Jack Russell, who is a professional and belonged to Malin the instructor. Then it was a border collie/springer spaniel mix, a bulldog, a Danish/Swedish farmdog and - me. The initial barking and chaos was overwhelming. We were all trying to get to each other, to no avail.

Then we began. First a warm-up walking around to music, which was harder than it sounds. Then we did basic clicker training technique. Mum had to wait for me to come up with a behaviour, and then click and reward until she had gotten the timing right. I did good on this. Then we learned the "eight". It's kind of like slalom, but I should walk in an eight around mum's legs over and over. It's an important trick to know, apparently. Tobi showed us how to do it.

The last minutes, the humans had coffee. The dogs had to practice doing absolutely nothing in close proximity to each other, which was nearly impossible. I am now completely exhausted. Thank you and good night!

Note from mum: loads of distractions tonight, but we had fun! and learned new things. Brilliant!