| Lessons: Turns, Spirals, Side Step, 360s, and Navigating a 90 degree turn
Teaching a dog to turn in cart is a long process, and I urge you take your time with this. Pushing a dog further than it is comfortable may cause the dog to lose confidence or spook in cart. I start teaching turns by making large spirals in the cart. Sometimes the radius of such spirals begin at 50 yards. Once the dog is comfortable doing smaller circles (~20 ft in radius), I will start to teach a dog to turn and to perform side steps. Once a dog can side step, I teach the dog how to do 360 turns. Here’s two videos demonstrating how to teach a turn and how to navigate a 90 degree turn. Teaching a dog to turn and perform 360s Navigating a 90 degree turn |
Balancing this Front Heavy Cart
| This cart showed up at a training session, and the owners had a problem. The judge at the previous test deemed this cart unbalanced. How could an empty cart be unbalanced? Upon further inspection, it was noted that the shafts on this cart were particularly heavy, and thus, it put a substantial amount of weight in the front of the cart (in front of the axle). To balance this cart, we added a counter weight. That might seem odd, but we added the counter weight BEHIND the axle, thus, balancing the cart on both sides of the axle.
The best way to do it would have been to measure the weight of the shafts, and then to add that exact weight to the back section of the cart. This was a quick way to solve the issue for now. |
