BAT Man

Today is a nice, crisp Fall-like day here in Wisconsin...the perfect weather for taking Oscar out to do some BAT work at a nearby park.  I met up with a woman and her cute-as-a-button Corgi, Tinkerbelle, and had a really good BAT session working Oscar.  He was a little A.D.D. at the onset (in all fairness we were in a completely new environment with all those new interesting smells that must be attended to!), so he didn't even realize that there was another dog.  After a while he came back down to earth and we did some great work.  Tinkerbelle was a fantastic decoy dog - she was very attentive to her owner, which took a lot of pressure off Oscar and we did about 5 minutes of actual BAT. 

After a while we did some parallel walking and Oscar was all over the place sniffing his nose off...to the left, forward, halt, to the right..."Oh, what's that!  It needs to be peed on!"  He did go over threshold twice, but it was only a couple bark-barks and he recovered almost instantly.  He is such a good boy in that way - he doesn't hold a grudge and usually moves on with little effort, well except with Garfunkel from agility, but that's over now.

I looked like the worse dog trainer in the world today when it came to having a dog that knew how to walk nicely on a loose leash, but that was excusable because my little white monster did wonderful all things considered.  Towards the end of the session we stopped and chatted for a little while and were about 10 yards away from the lady and Tinkerbelle; Oscar could have cared less at that point.  At the end of our session we all walked together back towards my car and he was a perfect gentleman.  I didn't force him into anything he didn't want and there was actually a time when he showed some curiousity toward Tinkerbelle and his owner, but we'll save the physcial introductions for another day.