A Good Agility Class

I'm happy!  I just had a nice agility class with Weasel.  She has this distraction problem.  Lots of triggers, like border collies, running dogs, strange men.  She points at them and strains and barks all during class and I fight and struggle to compete for a scrap of her attention.  I've been reading "Control Unleashed" and trying to apply some of it to pry her attention from all those other things so she can function in class.  The sensation of trying to physically force the dog to turn her head toward me for an instant so that I can reward it (and failing) is very familiar to me. 

Anyway, tonight, I stuffed her in the car and harnessed her in.  She ran back and forth to the extent that she could in the harness and was over the top stimulation-wise by the time we got to class.  However, class was apparently cancelled.  Some of us didn't get the message.  So we worked a bit and I tried an exercise from Control Unleashed called "Look at that Dog"  It felt so weird.  But it seems to be working!  The other dogs running about were much less fascinating and she was soon much more focused on me than she ever had been with all the Look at Me and constant treating.  In the space of a few minutes, she was staring at me, barely flicking her eyes at the other dog. 

Since their were so few dogs there, she was off leash a lot, and no running off or checking out to sniff.  She stuck with me.  Her expression was happy and engaged, rather than frantic and obsessive.  She actually was interested in her toy instead of magically loosing interest as soon as we got to agility class.  I wasn't competing for her attention, and it was great!   Hope I can carry it forward to the next class.