Sunday morning

I love the weekends! Very interesting day yesterday. I went to Pollys field to do a little training with Zazzy, mostly focussing on building up her weaving. But an interesting thing did arise, following from starting to teach her some turns last weekend. Here's a question for you. Imagine you are standing in front of a jump with your dog on your left. If you wanted to send your dog over the jump to the left away from you on body language alone, what hand signals would you use? Now imagine that you are back in front of the jump, and sending your dog to the right, round the wing and then over your feet (a front cross). What are your hand signals? How different do they look to each other? I work on the 'send with the hand nearest the dog, and turn it with the other hand' system, and using both hands to send the dog both left away from you and right to do a front cross, looked very similar to Zazzy. This is interesting, because I have worked both Becky and Kaydee with this system very effectively, but Zazzy is right, there is room for improvement from me. So I have had a good think about a better way and from now on will endeavor to employ a much clearer hand signalling system. Dawn Weaver happened to be there yesterday, and I took the opportunity to ask her about her handling system, which is a bit different to mine. She has already sussed this problem! So it was very useful and interesting to discuss it with her. I will let you know if the changes I have made work better!