I’m now wearing the bite suit for at least a little bit on most training days. Do I still like it? You bet. Do I still feel the dogs when they’re gripping in? Absolutely. Maybe I wouldn’t feel it as much if there were dogs that didn’t bite very hard (like my own dog…). It’s now on to ordering my own bite suit here in the next couple of days, which takes a little more than I realized in many ways. I’ve settled on the brand, almost settled on the color, and just need to get all the correct measurements written down since each of these suits are both made to measure and made to order.

Back to the training. King Man’s obedience continues to go very well, and now I just have to find different variations of obedience patterns and add in further distractions. I’m still very comfortable with the PSA PDC obedience routine for him and we’ve done a lot of training work comparable to what he would see in a PSA 1 routine as well, such as one decoy on the field, a few items thrown in the dog’s general direction when he’s in a down, etc.

On bitework, we just recently transitioned back to the jacket. I do like his targeting into the upper arm area of the front of the jacket, but our initial thoughts that he may not ever be a full biter seem to be accurate. It will be interesting to see if any changes happen when he’s being driven, etc., but it may just be that he won’t have a full bite and I’ll have to work on getting points everywhere else.

This video is of one fast dog that seems to be getting good at knocking me down on escape bites. I’m trying to figure out why (and how), but in the meantime I have at least been able to get up a little (read: a lot) faster…