Tell me about Rally

I do think that, when you work a dog in the same facility in two different sports, you will lose some attitude when they're doing the "lesser" sport.  You do have to put in extra effort to get the same attitude for any sport that you're doing.   I handle Cher for rally classes, while someone else handles her for agility classes. (same facility)  She used to be much happier on the agility field than she was in the rally ring.  (I would have thought that she prefered her other handler, but she was the same way when I was handling her in agility class.) 

I've worked to make sure that rally class is just as fun & as exciting as agilty.  We tug.  We play, & we generally have a great time.  If she does something extremely well during a course, I'll break her off & play for a moment or two as a reward.  Then, we resume the course.  Not all trainers support it, but my biggest goal is to make sure that Cher is having a good time & thankfully, ours doesn't care that I break her off for a few seconds to play.  For Cher, knowing that there is potential for play during the run keeps her super enthusiastic, & trying much harder.  Now that she knows that she can be have fun in rally class, she's excited to be in the ring.

I think that training in as many places as possible is a great idea.  We train regularly at two different locations.  Rally & agility at one location, obedience at another.  We do things from all of her sports at both locations though because she does need to be able to hold it together & perform in any location.  Show & go's are a great way to expose him to 'working' in a new location, as is taking him to a show & working him there.

griffinej5

I'm having lots of trouble with the sit and down walk-arounds. He keeps shuffling to try to keep eye contact with me. Everything else so far, he's okay with (we need to straighten the sits, bring the fronts in closer, but I know how to do that). I think I basically have to teach him that the quickest way to get back into eye contact with me is to just wait for me to get back around, but if anyone has any tips on this, I'd love to here them. 

It sounds like you need to work to solidify your stays.  If you have a stay command, use it once you stop & have him in a sit.  You may have to work him up to walking all the way around him.  Stay him, move to a front, then step back into heel position & reward him.  Then extend it as he grasps what's happening. 

I also use another command when I'm ready to heel.  For Cher, I would heel her up to the sign, halt, signal for a stay, walk around, & when I came back to heel position, I say "let's go" to command her to heel again. 

 The problem, even I can move him to another facility for Rally, or if I were to move him to another facility for Flyball (not likely we would do classes somewhere else, would be more likely that we'd just drop the classes and he'd continue to practice with whatever team we end up with). The classes for Flyball and Rally are held in different areas, with different entrances, of the same facility. I'm still pretty certain he knows he's at the same place though, since we drive the same way, the floors are the same, he sees one of the trainers who has her dog in the Flyball class (she's not teaching this, but she walks through sometimes).  There are basically three places near us that off APDT Rally trials. One is where we are currently training at. The other two are places where he will probably run in Flyball tournaments at some point also. If I wanted to avoid being in the same places for both activities, that would mean I'd be limited to AKC trials, or I'd have to go over an hour away to get to an APDT trial not in a Flyball place. He's just going to have to learn that the light collar means we're doing rally,  and otherwise it  means we're playing flyball.

He actually will stay right on the same spot, but he shifts in order to maintain the eye contact. I didn't know when I taught him to stay when he was a puppy I would have any reason to want to teach him not to look at me when he was in a stay. 

 That's exactly what he does. He moves his head until he can't move it any more, then the butt slides. I'm trying to work on him keeping his head in position, not even beginning to try to follow my eyes, because once he starts following with his eyes, the head follows, and then the body comes with it. I wonder what would happen if I broke eye contact with him before I started the movement, or if I worked on stays beside me, where I broke eye contact, but required him to hold the stay. He can do an out of sight stay where I obviously must break eye contact, but I don't really know too much about how well he could do a stay in sight where I break eye contact. Perhaps teaching him first that he can stay without looking staring at my eyes would be helpfully (couldn't hurt either way I suppose).

Well, I confirmed my suspicion. He has the stay in sight where he can make eye contact, he has the out of sight stay, but a stay in sight where he cannot make eye contact- nope. He was thoroughly baffled when I had him do a sit-stay in the heel position, then turned my head away from him. He  started to throw his "I don't  know" behaviors. Interesting that the first time we did it, he threw the behaviors, and later on, in a different location, he decided to see if this meant he should walk off. This might have worked, if he were actually sneaky at all. So, our first step will be sitting, with me in  various positions, around him, without looking at each other.

When we did it the first time, since we were downstairs where we usually work on the practice chute for box turns, once he got it,  we did some work on the chute. I'm thinking chute work for the stay (which means I will have to get off my butt and build him one since the one we have is a loaner from the team) and we might just get somewhere. Now, if only I can get them to go for setting up a box after the finish for him, we'd be all set.