Jump Training for Rally Advanced

Readers of ThruMyLens will know that I’ve been doing Rally Obedience trials with our dogs this year.  So far I’ve put a UKC RO1 title on both Zeus and Maximus (our Rottweilers) and Zeus has one leg of his AKC RN (Rally Novice) title completed, and two legs of his UKC RO2 completed.  One of the potential obstacles we’ll face in an AKC Rally Advanced trial will be jumping over a 16″ hurdle.  So I decided to invest in a dog agility hurdle to practice.

I had no idea how I was going to get any of our dogs to jump over the hurdle, but within about an hour I had all four of our dogs responding to “over!”  We started with the bar set quite low – about 8″.  At that height our dogs could nearly just step over the bar, but I wanted to build their confidence slowly and get them associating the word “over” with their going over the bar:

 

It didn’t take long for Zeus to get board with this minimal challenge – he told us in his own subtle way that he was ready for the bar to be raised.  In this photo Zeus jump high enough to go out of frame for the shot:

So slowly we began raising the bar:

The higher we raised the bar, the more enthusiasm Zeus showed:

Zeus is easily clearing the bar set at 16″ which is where it will be set during an AKC Rally Advanced trial.  He REALLY loves jumping over the bar!  In fact, I’m seriously considering doing Agility work with him once we’ve completed his Rally Obedience titles.

Of course the other dogs got in on the act to – here’s a couple of photos of one of our Labradors Hans:

And here’s one of Zeus’s nephew Maximus:

For anyone interested, here’s a link to the agility jump hurdle we purchased (it’s not very expensive and works well!):

Agility Gear Fixed Base Competition Jump (One Jump with One 48″ Striped Bar)

Look for more jump photos coming soon!