So the plan today was to set the bars at 4" and see what he did. The very first attempt, he took an extra stride on the third jump again. I took a good look at the jumps and thought, okay... maybe 5' distances is too much for him to bounce. The DVD was pretty clear that you shouldn't practice failure so I had to change something else besides the height in order for Auggie to succeed.
The difficulty here is that I have no idea if Auggie should be considered a "small dog" or a "medium dog." I don't consider him a small dog - I think he's medium. But that's MY scale. For the program, small dogs had distances of 4' to 5', and for medium dogs 5' to 6'. So I thought I'd be safe settling at 5' - right there on the cusp of small and medium. But obviously that wasn't working out for Auggie.
So I took a shot and moved the distances to 4'. And ta-da! Lovely bounces.
Looking back at Clothier's Natural Jumping book (which has you measure your dog's height and body length, determine their body proportions, and then look on a chart to determine distances for bounces, 1-stride, and 2-stride lengths) Auggie's calculated bounce distance there was 30". I guess I should have looked at that earlier; I would have realized that 5', or 60", was not appropriate.
So Auggie must be a "small dog" for Susan Salo's program. Which is sort of confusing, because in the DVD Susan works her JRT, and says his jump height is 12" (Auggie's height) but yet she runs him at the 5' distances. Or maybe we should be able to, and should try to, work UP to 5' bounce distances?
I really don't know what I'm supposed to do here. It was much easier to have a chart rather than trying to blindly dump him into a category of "small" or "medium." Again, I feel like I've been given a box of tools, but I'm supposed to go build a house now without really knowing how to use any of them.
So I'll just hope for the best, I guess. So much for measure twice, cut once.
Video here:
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