Is it A Cute Angle? Am I Obtuse? Test My Reflexes!

SUMMARY: Practicing 270-degree turns.

So yesterday, using my new coneage, I set up what claimed to be a 270-degree-angle jumping drill from the very Clean Run "Backyard Dogs" article that I showed yesterday.

It claims to be an exercise in 270-degree turns. But it is lies, lies, lies! Basically the set-up is 6 jumps arranged in a sexagram (that's the technical name for a 6-sided figure if you don't care for actual vocabularial accuracy). This means that, if you go around the outside from one jump to its adjacent jump, you are in fact DOING ONLY 240 DEGREES! Let's be honest, here! Accuracy is important! Indeed, had the article claimed to be doing reflex angles, then my dogs would have performed much better, because they would have known that the turns would be greater than 180 degrees but not necessarily exactly 270 degrees.

But instead, when I told my dogs that we were going to practice 270s, boy, did they get confused and end up all over the place, on the wrong jumps, coming inside the ring instead of staying outside, all sorts of errors like that, and all because they thought they were doing 270 angles instead of 240s!

Before you confuse your dogs like I confused mine, brush up on your angleish vocabulary.

Tomorrow, we will discuss some other irrelevant reason why I'm not able to successfully get my dogs through a course containing reflex angles in my very own back yard, let alone at a trial. (I guess it's a good thing that I'm trying to actually practice some actual agility moves. I must say that Boost did some beautiful jumps at very sharp angles of approach, which is something she's had trouble with in the ring. I just need to do a million more of those so that she's comfortable with them when she's very excited.)

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