Dog Agility Equipment: Where do I begin?
There is such a wide selection of dog agility equipment, where do I begin? There are several factors to consider when making your agility equipment purchases. Two major factors are your goals and your dog.
Are your goals to develop a deeper bonding with your dog by taking agility classes together, having fun, and seeing how far you and your dog can progress with agility skills? Do you have a timid dog and want to develop confidence in him? Or do you have a high drive dog and want to help him burn energy in a controlled manner? Do you want to do agility as a just for fun activity or are you setting your sights on making it to the nationals and becoming an agility instructor? All the previous factors are important to consider when purchasing your equipment.
An agility course has contact equipment, jumps, weaves, tunnels, closed tunnel, and possibly a pause table (depending on your agility venue). It would be wonderful have a full course of agility equipment in your backyard, but its not necessary to learn the sport. Contact equipment consists of dog-walks, A-frames, and teeters. It is a good idea to have at least one contact obstacle. Many people select to purchase a teeter because the motion often causes a dog hesitation. If you can't fit a regulation piece of equipment in your yard, consider an 8' dog-walk instead of a 12' or even select from mini-contact equipment that is available to train your dog on.
Jumps. You can never have enough single jumps, but you also might think about a double jump or triple jump. If you cannot purchase a double or triple jump, you can place two or three single jumps together to practice. Eight single jumps give you lots of drills and exercises to practice and interchange.
Tunnels, chutes, and tables are variations to add to your course. Tire jumps are very popular to have in backyard training. Pause tables are essential in our agility training program. They are our center and focal point for developing our directional commands and building distance.
Weaves, critical for having at home. The type of weave to purchase depends on your method of teaching. Is your agility class using weave chutes, angled weaves, or straight lined weaves. If your instructor is teaching a specific method, than its easiest to purchase the same type of weaves. We have trained five different agility dogs, each with a different method and in the end they all have nice weaves.
There are a variety of training aids that can help you develop the behavior you want from your dog on the equipment. Buja boards are excellent for timid dogs that need to build confidence slowly. Contact trainers are great for back chaining your contact behavior, and they are smaller so you can bring them indoors for winter training also.
Brad Carlson is a dog trainer at Agility by Carlson. For more training details, visit our website at http://www.carlson-agility.com/
How You Can Prevent Your Dog From Aggression, Destroying Furniture, And To Avoid Stress
Puppy training is very important, whether you are training your first puppy or your 20th. Properly training and socializing a puppy is vital to making it a valued member of your family and your community.
In some ways training a puppy is easier than training an adult or adolescent dog. One reason is that the puppy is essentially a "blank slate", untroubled by past training techniques and other issues. In other ways, however, the puppy can be more difficult to train than an older dog.
One challenge to training a new puppy is that puppies are more easily distractible than adolescent and adult dogs. Everything is new to a puppy, and every new experience provides a new chance for distraction. For this reason, it is best to keep training sessions short when working with a puppy, and to end each training sessions on a positive note.
It is also important to allow the puppy plenty of time to play, and to interact with other puppies and dogs. Socialization training is vital to making your new puppy a good canine citizen, as dog aggression is a growing problem in many areas. A properly socialized dog learns how to play properly with other dogs, and overly aggressive play is punished by the other dogs in the play group.
This type of play learning is something that happens among siblings in litters of puppies. As the puppies play with each other, they learn what is appropriate and what is not. Inappropriate behavior, such as hard biting or scratching, is punished by the other puppies, by the mother dog, or both.
Unfortunately, many puppies are removed from their mothers and sold or adopted before this socialization has fully occurred. Therefore, puppy play sessions are a very important part of any puppy training session. Most good puppy preschool training programs provide time in each session for this type of dog interaction.
Introducing your puppy to new experiences and new locations is also an important part of puppy training. Teaching your dog to be obedient and responsive, even in the face of many distractions, is very important when training dogs and puppies.
It is important for puppy owners to structure their pet's environment so that the puppy is rewarded for good behaviors and not rewarded for others. One good example of this is jumping on people. Many people inadvertently reward this behavior because it can be cute. While it is true that jumping can be cute for a 10 pound puppy, it will not be so cute when that puppy has grown into a 100 pound dog.
Instead of rewarding the puppy for jumping, try rewarding it for sitting instead. This type of positive reinforcement will result in a well behaved adult dog that is a valued member of both the family and the community at large.
This type of reinforcement can also be used in potty training the new puppy. For instance, teaching a puppy to use a unique surface such as gravel or asphalt is a good technique. The theory is that the puppy will associate this surface with going potty, and therefore be reluctant to use other surfaces (like your kitchen carpet for instance) as a potty.
Do You Want To Find a Purebred Cat?
For some of us, a common-or-garden Tom cat is not enough. We want quality feline company with a pedigree and the only way to guarantee that a cat is a purebreed is to contact one of the national cat associations or similar organisations in other countries.
To find a purebred cat, you may start with the Cat Fancier's Association. The CFA was created to maintain breed standards and to register litters as purebreds. The association also holds cat shows and judges them based on how closely they adhere to the standards. They recognize only 41 breeds of cats.
The breeder registers a litter of kittens with the Cat Fancier's Association. Then they have the option of deciding whether or not to allow the kitten to be bred. Only cats with a pin number on their registration forms will be eligible to have their kittens registered. This allows the breeders to continue to better their breeds. Once the litter is registered, each kitten will need to be individually registered by its new owner.
There are three categories of recognized cats. They are the Championship Class, the Provisional Class, and the Miscellaneous Class. Each bred that the CFA recognizes is in one of these groups. They must win first place in their breed and then their class before they can compete for the title of best in show.
The Championship Class are those cats who are established cat breeds. The breeds in the Provisional Class have been more recently established. They are still being watched to insure that they conform to the new breed standard. Finally, the one breed currently in the Miscellaneous Class is still having a breed standard created and cannot actually compete for the best in show title.
In Canada, you can register your cat in the Canadian Cat Association. This association was formed by Canadians who did not want to register their cats with an association in another country. There are other popular cat registries including the Traditional Cat Association, which supports original breed standards and does not uphold current trends that exaggerate breed characteristics, the Governing Council of the Cat Fancy, which is the United Kingdom's cat registry, and the Fédération Internationale Féline, which is the European cat registry.
All cats fit into one of two categories. They are either short hair or long haired. Short haired are breeds like the Abyssinian and British Shorthair. The long haired beads include Turkish Angora and Norwegian Forest Cats. The most popular of them all is the American Shorthair which has been in the US for over 300 years. They have been carefully bred for generations to develop characteristics that would appear in each kitten born. Others include the Siamese, the Rex, the Main Coon, the Ragdoll and the Persian.
Choosing a cat with a pedigree allows you to choose a cat that has the characteristics that you want it to have. They are no more affectionate than other cats but they can be a prized possession no matter what.
Best Pet Health Information is a resource that brings you information and news, tips and reviews to help find cat medication for your pedigree feline. http://www.Best-Pet-Health.info
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