Our Rally O Weekend in North Yorkshire.

This weekend the Pawsitively Pets team were split!
Miss Chief the rat, Smitch the cat, Felix the hamster and Old man Eddy stayed with my mum, little Bubble went to stay with her mum, dad and aunty in a lovely kennels and Takara and I went to Scarborough!

I had booked us onto a Rally Obedience workshop in Malton with a friend and her dog (Dexter) and we travelled up to Scarborough on the Friday night where we had a hotel booked, stopped the night and walked on the beach in the morning then travelled the half hour journey to Wolds Way Canine Behaviour & Training Centre for the first day of our workshop.

Rally Obedience is a new dog sport, originating from America (but don't let that put you off!). It's designed to allow any person and dog team to 'have a go'. You can have a go for fun or you can compete and it works in such a way that you are only ever working against yourself - to beat your own record. It is designed in such a way that any dog, irrespective of age, breed or physical ability can take part and similarly, any person also. Wheelchair users have been known to join in as well as myself on sticks this weekend!

Rally Obedience is a course composed of signs telling you what behaviour to perform or which way to turn to get to the next sign as well as a small cavaletti jump and weaves around cones. There are 3 levels and the turns and behaviours get more difficult the further up the levels you go. The nice thing about Rally Obedience is if your dog has, for instance, hip dysplasia and struggles to do a sit you can still take part and as long as the dog's disability has been explained to the organisers/judge they will be aware that you will be doing stands instead of sits and so won't mark you down.

Under the excellent guidance of Jane Heritage of the APDT we learned the essential skills for Rally Obedience - now this may seem easy - but it's much harder than I expected!

It's one thing being able to negotiate a 270 degree turn, it's another to read a sign telling you to 270 degrees and to actually go the right way around and it's an entirely different thing to be able to read the sign whilst keeping a dog close and then negotiate the turn without falling over your dog!

Thankfully, Takara is quite good at making sure she doesn't get trodden on but it didn't mean her feet were quite moving in the correct way. Additionally you then had to continue from that move to the next which would then tell you to do a 360 degree turn the
other way!

We had great fun and by the end of the first day both the dogs and my friend and I were shattered and ready for bed at 4 o'clock when the workshop finished! There was no worries that they may need a walk so we drove back to Scarborough, picked up a pizza and retired to our hotel.

The next morning it was up at the break of dawn (thanks Dexter!), checked out of the hotel (which was fantastic) and off for a walk on the beach.
After half an hour of 'taking the edge off' we set off back to Wolds Way CBT.

This time we were doing courses that had been set up for us, receiving feedback on our 'run' on each course and we were given advice on how to improve.

I was very impressed with Takara, her attention and focus were fantastic despite my mobility being a little poor and me having to use a stick towards the end. She carried out many of the tasks with little fuss and the ones she wasn't sure of she picked up quickly.

We still need some practice - a lot of the work we did relied on me having food in my hand but I wasn't going to push her further than she could manage. We were in the middle of North Yorkshire and kept hearing gunshots as well as there being larger dogs there that she was a little spooked by. The gunshots were putting her off a lot so I kept it easy for her!

Overall we had a fantastic weekend and would definitely recommend Rally Obedience to anyone wanting to do something fun with their dog!
I'm certainly looking at doing some Rally Obedience workshops here in Sheffield and I'm sure that after this weekend the other dog trainers who attended Jane's workshop will be looking at starting something up in their areas too!

A big thank you to Christine Stansfield of Wolds Way for organising this workshop and to Jane Heritage for her fantastic instruction and extremely fun and interesting workshop!