Always Grateful
Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 6,947
Location: Durham, NC
Dogs Name: Mercury's Prince of the Universe (Boon)
Titles: CFFII,NW1, NW2, NWE1, CFFIII, CFFIV
Dogs Age: 12/29/12
Gallery Pics: 22
Visit triciakoontz's Gallery Thanks: 9,005
Thanked 12,652 Times in 4,151 Posts
Heeling Rear Cross
We’ve been working on this, literally, for a year. It looks so easy but it takes a ton of practice and adjustments to get those rear crosses at a dynamic flowing rhythm. At Level IV, the dynamics of rhythm and timing have to be really really good. No stuttering, breaks in team rhythm, etc. so it’s up to me to set Boon up perfectly to make the rear cross without falter, hesitation, or loss of gait. Our connectedness can take this to an awesome level. We are almost there.
To make this piece of movement vocabulary look perfectly fluid and rhythmic, I can’t slow my pace, therefore, Boon has to drive, in the trot, into the rear cross and gain the opposite heeling reference position without changing into a canter. He bobbled into a lag at that one spot driving around the outside of a curve because I didn’t support his attention going into it.
We are the only team with a cross that looks this smooth and elegant, thanks to Boon. We were the first team to bring it in to choreography like this, in the turn, and a few other teams started working on it when they saw ours, which I don’t mind. Imitation is flattery, they say.
Feel free to critique- do remember that freestyle heeling is much more, well, free, than obedience heeling. The dog chooses a distance from the human that is comfortable for maintaining a strong team connection so you’ll often see that dogs choose more space than is demanded in obedience. They rarely choose a position of hugging the pants leg. This “white space” between human and dog really works well to enhance the dog, one of our critical criteria in judging. Obviously, you cannot see the full grace and beauty of a dog when the dog is extremely close to the human.
THE BOONDOGGLE