Intro!

Welcome to my blog! I hope to use this as both a way to get info to my clients easily and quickly (eventually I will link this to the clinic web page, but first I want to get my feet under me!) and also I am hoping to chronicle some experiments in training for a couple of my email lists- I am hoping to have time this winter to do some clicker training with Stevie, our clinic cat.

Stevie isn't terribly long on brains, but he IS very food motivated, and will offer behaviors for quite a while. A few years back, I taught him to do a jump-tunnel-pause table sequence (using a small, round popcorn tin for a pause table) and I have always wanted to teach him to do weaves. Recently I was looking at some videos of agility demos at cat shows, and it seems to me cats should be capable of doing MUCH better weaves that are much closer to those we see in dog competitions. Mostly they are only asking them to do 4 or 5, very widely spaced weaves; the cats are mostly lured through with no real understanding of the behavior, and there is a LOT of starting and stopping. Since Stevie is now my only kitty at the moment, my plan is to bring him home with me on the weekends I am around, and play around with him a bit in the training room. He won't be lonely, I won't be catless, and I won't have to make a special trip back to the clinic just to check on him... a win/win situation. Now we'll see if I actually follow through...

Please bear with me also, as I dumped a coke in my laptop keyboard and as a result periodically I will have weird typos or inability to capitalize as a result...so if I mess up and don't catch it before I post, I'm really not illiterate, just a caffeine addict!