Today Lightning turned nine months old, and I thought I’d get a couple of videos of his work in Stage 2 of our PRT program, both the yard progression and the field progression.

For the yard progression, we’ve  completed pile work step 1, Back from heel, and are just beginning to work on step 2, sit to pile. But I managed to bring Lightning out for the yard work session withou my whistle, so I went ahead and ran a step 1 session. Here’s the video:

For the field progression, we’re mostly working on singles offf multiple guns on both land and water, with occasional land doubles and occasional retired land singles. For the video I wanted to record a double, but I only had two assistants and needed one of them to take the video. So we ran a somewhat artificial double with a poorman mark as the memory bird. Here’s that video:

I could provide a blow-by-blow narrative for each of the videos, but I think I’d be doing mostly two things: I’d be repeating information from previous posts, such as addressing the dropped bumper in the first video by picking it up and tossing it away. That was Lightning’s only bumper dropped at the line today. Or I’d be trying to explain flaws in the work, such as having to cue Sit so many times during the second video’s memory mark because we haven’t practiced poorman marks in a few weeks.

Instead, I think I’ll let the videos stand as fairly representative examples of Lightning’s current level of performance within the PRT program. While not perfect, I think they show a high level of enthusiasm and a developing proficiency..