Bella gets extremely excited doing agility and
hates sitting and waiting at the start - she does this "hmmMMMPH" whine every time, you can see her thinking "oh come ON! let's GO!"
and it's taken me quite a while to get her to a point where she will actually stay where she is until I'm ready. Even then there are times where she creeps forward in little bounces until she's got her chest up against the first jump
.
I realised early on that she'd need to learn to wait properly at the start as she was hopeless initially, just soooo excited about jumping (she's one of the dogs that barks their head off all the way round
) that she couldn't wait. Even now if I stop cos I've gone wrong, she'll carry on over 4 or 5 jumps and obstacles before stopping to see where I am
. Having said that though, she does pay really close attention when I'm running with her and the only time she makes a wrong turn is if
I get it wrong.
Anyway I taught her to wait initially under fairly calm conditions, eg put her in a sit, tell her to wait while I walk away and then call her really excitedly. I tried to distinguish between a wait and a stay, so if I'm doing a stay then she'll sit, stay, I walk away and then I walk back to her, i.e. "stay" means "stay here until I come back". "Wait" on the otherhand is "wait here until I tell you what to do next". I started using the wait command before she got her food (she already had to sit before getting it, I then started making her wait while it was on the floor in front of her for a couple of seconds). I also do offlead heelwork in the house where at any point I'll tell her to wait and will keep walking, so she stands still while I keep going - she's now very reliable at this in the house. I then took her to the park and found something small she could jump over, and each morning took her up there with the Chuckitt so she was quite excited, and got her to sit and wait by the jump, then threw the ball so that she had to go over the jump to get it. That seemed to be the clincher for her as after a week of doing that, she was much, much better at the start of the agility course.
In terms of focussing I've found with Bella although she naturally focusses very well, she works better if I've got her a bit excited, so on days when she's not got quite as much "go", I might need to do a bit of "come on, are you ready Bella? are you ready?" in a really excited voice to get her going. I usually show her a piece of sausage at the start of the course and she
definitely knows that's what she's working for because literally the instant she lands over the last jump, she's in front of me staring at my pocket
.
I think if you can get Molo to be really excited about agility then he'll have no problems focussing - I thought Bella would do the stopping and sniffing but she never has, once she's running she's completely into it and will even keep going if I stop, eg if she's missed a contact, I stop and she'll carry on over 3 jumps and the A frame (she has an amazing memory for the order of obstacles from the last round as well!). She seems to absolutely love it and she listens and watches very carefully. She does really pick up on my mood when I'm there though so if for some reason I'm not really that into it, she won't be either and she then won't pay as close attention and makes mistakes (as do I), so I think that's a major thing, you have to be as excited as you want them to be so that you're both really tuned into each other and this amazingly fun thing you're about to do together.
