We arrived at the venue for 10am to be met by the man himself, Richard caught my eye a few years ago when Amy and I saw him at Earls Court, he works his dogs in a very quiet way totally in tune with their behavior and incredibly motivational so I thought the opportunity to spend a day learning some of his techniques would be beneficial to Rupert's ongoing training, not because I want to go on to compete in HTM but because I love the learning opportunities different handlers and disciplines can offer. In preparation for the day I had taught Rupert to turn left and right with the help of a treat, and as it happened it was one of the techniques we used in the mornings session. We were split into two groups of eight so the session worked 10 minutes of training followed by 10 minutes of rest, during the morning this worked well for Rupes, but I could tell he was getting tired by the lunchtime break, he then had 2 hours of rest as immediately after lunch we looked at music and accents and changes in the track to make the most out of the interpretation. Rupert did struggle a little in the remainder of the afternoon so I just sat on the floor with him playing little games instead of asking him to try anything new, making the most of our 10 minutes off by writing plenty of notes for the future. Actually Rupert worked incredibly well, I haven't done as much offside work as I had planned and this already showed in his ability to work on my right, but only after a couple of goes he was trotting along in a nice position quite happily, we mainly worked off lead and for a 5 month old puppy in a room of 16 dogs all working for treats or squeaky toys! his focus was really amazing, their wasn't a single occasion when he thought anyone else was more interesting than me, so we both came home very tired and very happy.
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