Found Another Lop in his Side

I've lamented a few times on Porter's lopsidedness. He heels much better on my left than my right due to the fact that I work that side a lot more often.

Today I discovered that in one situation his success flip flops and he's much better on the right than left.

This week in agility I noticed (again) that sometimes Porter will do everything he can to be glued to my side. This means that when we approach a jump standard he will squeeze his big gangly body between me and the standard instead of just running through the jump. He has to slow himself down and almost cut behind me (ack, no side changes behind my back!) in order to make it.

So today I brought out my jump and worked him at home. Hmmm, he was doing just fine and had no problem running right though the middle of the jump, not even hugging the standard closest to me. Maybe it's the change in location?

But then he finally did it again and glued himself to my side. I realized that when he's on my left he's trying to heel like we practice for rally and therefore he stays very close. On the right he feels more comfortable being a slight distance away if necessary. Any time we approached the jump with him on my right he was fine. On the left he crammed in next to me.

Now that I know more specifically what the issue is I can work on fixing it.

I'm wondering if I should refrain from rally practice until he understands the difference. I know that dogs can learn to discriminate and know when they are at agility, or rally, or obedience and change their behavior accordingly. I have no doubt that Porter will eventually be able to do this. But that's going to take some time and in the meantime it's slowly down our agility progress. Since agility is my priority I'd rather not hamper our efforts with the work I'm doing for other sports.

I'll need to think about this some more. In the meantime, I am going to get different collars and leads for each sport to help him discrimination the required tasks more easily.