I'm still new to the whole dog-showing world(as you can see on the left with a 12 month old puppy learning to free stack) but here are some tips from me and my juniors dog(picture on home page, center dog) to you and your juniors dog.

- Always have treats on hand while working with your dog, especially in the ring in case the judge is looking for expression and your dog is ignoring the squeaky! Also, try different types of treats to keep your dogs guessing on how the next one will taste like and it will interest them more.

- Be sure to do other things with your dog at home besides just practicing. For example, create a fun, new trick and teach it to your dog. Train him or her to do something useful like be a door stop(on a light door) or carry your bag. Most dogs devote their lives to please their people! Or even go to an agility or obedience class to try a new sport!

- Even if you don't plan on ever doing obedience with your dog, you may want to train him or her some of the skills an obedience dog knows anyway. Such as heel, stay, come and stand. They can be useful in the ring at times because you can have your dog do a "stand stay" while the judge isn't looking at your dog.

- If you are training a young dog some of the basics like how to stack, then here's a tip you may want to use. Occasionally, throughout your day you may want to just get on the ground with your dog and stack him or her when they don't expect it. Then tell them how wonderful they are and play with them or let them go back to whatever they were doing. This helps them prepare to be stacked all of a sudden when it's the end of a big juniors class and the judge is taking his final look.

- Now, here's a rumor. We've all heard that a show dog cannot be an obedience dog at the same time! In some cases it is true, but in some cases it is not. It can be possible by training things for obedience using very different commands than in conformation. Obedience can also be useful because you can train stand, and then stay while you are not being judged. Also, you can use "look" or "watch" or whatever to get your dogs attention when the judge is looking for expression. Then again, in some cases, obedience and conformation can be a bad mixture. Your signals for stand and sit may seem similar, creating a young dog in training to think you are commanding a sit in the show ring! So depending on your dog, it's your decision on whether or not to train obedience and conformation on the same dog.

These are just a few training tips and I'll post more later. If you have any training questions or tips for me to add, feel free to e-mail me at gophyg88@aol.com.