I’ve got the old posts through August back on the blog now. That means I only have July, June and part of May to go! LOL It’s pretty time consuming, since I’m restoring each post from RSS, but it’s also kind of interesting to go back and see how much I’ve already forgotten from the last few months.. I don’t know if anybody else is like me or not, but I tend to have a very bad memory. Anyway, enough rambling for now.
I’m soo proud of Twist! He has come such a long way since we adopted him. Yesterday we were entered in an obedience trial to finish off that last leg for his CD. The trial site was going to be a challenge I knew since it is outdoors and they were holding an agility trial and conformation shows at the same site. Well, it was a big challenge. He was more distracted at this site than I’ve seen him in a long time, so I was glad that we only entered the one day. His heeling was no where near what he normally does, but it passed. His recall and stand for exam were beautiful. He ended up with a 187 and third place in his class. They had pretty ribbons for placements, but bummer…no title ribbons! Oh well, Twist could care less about ribbons, just show him the treats!
Well, it’s been hectic around here the last couple of days. I spent what time I did have on Thurs. trying to find out where the girls live exactly so I could talk to the parents. Still haven’t been able to figure out more than that the neighbors think the two girls are just friends and that they are somewhere in the houses to the Southeast of me. Then Twist had an obedience trial yesterday that was in Farmington, (3 hours North of here), so that ate up yesterday.
So, since I don’t know their names or which house they belong to, I decided to focus on what I could do here. I got some left-over panels from the fence and have wired them up to the gate spaces. I am going to town today to get “No Trespassing” signs. So now, I basically am locked out of my own agility yard too! LOL Oh well, small price to pay for some piece of mind. My dad came yesterday and took measurements to make the gates. Thank goodness!
I’ll post as more develops.
Well, I had an experience this afternoon, that I’d rather not have repeated ever. It all started a couple days ago when two young girls from around my neighborhood came by to ask if they could bring their dog to my agility yard and play. I’m of the opinion, or I have been up to today that if I did what I could to be friendly with the neighborhood kids it would go a long way with their parents in tolerating my dogs. So, in the past I’ve had the boyscouts here and demos for the 4-Hers and I’ve had other groups of kids here and everything has been fine.
However, when I pulled into my driveway to be greeted by the girls and their 12 week old Yellow Lab puppy, my heart sank! So began a battle of me telling them that their puppy is too young to do agility, and them pushing every limit I gave them. I told them that it would be best to work on some basic foundation training and games right now. That wasn’t what they wanted to hear at all. I tried to show them targeting games with Raven that they could do with the puppy but they weren’t interested. So they just kept pushing. I specifically forbid them to take the puppy on any of my contact obstacles. Then I caved and told them that they could let the puppy learn to run through the tunnel and that they could have her run through the hoops I have instead of jumps. Probably the dumbest thing I could have done in hindsight…other than going inside for aminute to take my groceries out of the car.
Well, to make a long story short I come outside after taking my groceries in the house to find both girls standing, balancing on my teeter totter and to my horror they have the puppy up there with them. In the course of moving back and forth, they launch the puppy. OMG!!!!! I nearly died. Fortunately, no one was hurt, not the girls or the pup. The really weird thing was that even though I emphatically told them that they were done since they had directly done something that I told them was not allowed, they just were like: “OK, well we’ve got to go home for now, we’ll see you later.” Are you kidding me? I hope they don’t ever come back!!!!!!! The whole thing just freaked me out.
I don’t ever want to discourage a kid from taking an interest in their pet and I don’t want to do anything that would get my neighbors upset but I also do not want to become a free babysitter for someone else kids and I’m not running a free dog training service for the neighborhood. Ughhh! What to do!?
I meant to post a summary of what I learned from our August training challege at the first of September, but with the computer problems we’ve been having…it just didn’t happen. So, here it is now, better late than never.
I thought that the challenge worked as I had hoped for both Raven and Twist. They both were able to maintain focus in new places we trained and by the end of the month Twist had successfully been able to compete for three days in an outdoor obedience trial that he had never been to before. Raven also showed improvement by the end of the month when we went to a new place for agility. She didn’t shutdown or show signs of stress over the new environment. Yay! On the other hand, I had really hoped that this challenge would benefit Rogue most of all and in looking back I don’t think accomplished what I had hoped for her.
The thing that is hard for me to keep in mind is that this challenge was not so much based on how the dogs did, but in my ability to observe how the dogs handled new situations and help them to become more confident and focused. So looking at it from that perspective, even though Rogue did not seem to have any breakthroughs, in fact she seemed to regress in some places, she gave me lots of information to work with.
So, Raven and Twist were relatively easy for me in different places. They just needed to have a few minutes to walk around and figure out where we were before we started training. As long as I made sure that they could focus on simple behaviors first, neither seemed to have any trouble working on more complex training. The information that I got from Rogue though was way different! It didn’t seem to matter if she had time to walk around and explore. That didn’t alleviate the anxiety around the people, agility equipment or even around the ringates at the obedience trial. Simple tasks were too much for her to focus on at that point. The one thing that we tried that did make a difference was something that I just stumbled onto by accident. I got out the clicker and her little food dish. When we went out by the agility equipment I set her food dish down and asked her to “hit it” when she heard the clicker it was like a little lightbulb went on for her. I still don’t really understand why the clicker brings her attitude up more than a simple “yes”, like I normally use, but it did, so we’re going with it. Once she can do those basic things a couple of times, her tail comes back up, the glazed look disappears and she can work almost like she can at home. It has worked for us in several places now. It may be a small piece of information, but it seems to be a very valuable one right now. So if nothing else, I think the training challenge was a success in that it gave me a tool to help Rogue.
Well, we’re back! The host crashed and so we’ve been gone for several days now. Sorry to anyone that tried to stop by and found us missing. The good news is that things are back up now and running. Now hopefully in the next little while we’ll be able to restore most of what we lost. 
I’m headed out now to work on some projects around the place that I’ve been procrastinating about for way too long. The weather is starting to cool down and I think that’s my cue to get in gear before it gets too cold to work outside.
I know it’s not winter yet, but this picture of Rogue has always been a favorite! I actually hate winter, but I do love taking pictures of the dogs playing in the snow.
Well, I couldn’t stand it. I had to go take some pictures of Zoe and her gorgeous new MACH chair! I just love the embroidery, it’s so pretty!
WOOHOO!!!! She did it! It was a nervewracking weekend, and we couldn’t have drug out the suspense any longer if we had tried, but on our very last run on the very last day we got our double Q for Zoe’s MACH!
Cynthia was sweet enough to stay up last night and send me one of the pictures that she took. Thanks Cyn!
Check out the gorgeous new chair that our friends had made for us! What an awesome suprise! Zoe gives it a big paws up! Zoe didn’t like the MACH bar however. She couldn’t figure out why in the world we were running around the course with a big stick…was I going to whack her with it or something? LOL So her vote is leave the bar on the wall at home and bring the chair with us everywhere so people know how cool she is!
A huge thanks to all our friends that supported us all weekend!!! I don’t know how I ended up with such a fantastic dog as an agility partner and such an awesome circle of friends, but I am extremely grateful for both!
