ResqTails

It’s already Thurs. and I don’t know what’s happened to the first part of the week. A friend of mine is having a yard sale tomorrow and Saturday, and is letting me take some stuff that I’ve had sitting around here over to throw in with her stuff. There are just a couple of hitches to that. She wants to set everything up today, and it’s still cloudy and when I walked outside to take care of the boarders a bit ago I saw more lightning, so I don’t think that we’re done with the storm that came in yesterday. The other problem is that I need to go through and clean off all the dust that’s accumulated on the stuff that’s been sitting in the barn waiting to be sold. I guess I’ll do some cleanup this morning and try to get it hauled over there this afternoon.

Then tomorrow, I’m going to head to Parowan to do some Obedience and possibly some agility at another friend’s yard. She has open practice on Friday mornings, and since Twist’s obedience trial is coming up next weekend and it’s outdoors, I thought this would be a good chance to get some training in a semi-new place, with dogs that he doesn’t see each week. I think I’ll also take Layla since she’s never been there, and Dare for socialization. The bummer about it is that I’ll have to leave here by a little before 6:00 am to get there on time.

Sat. I need to help out with the yard sale, (since I’m pretty much taking my stuff over and then bailing out on her Friday), but my husband’s parents and grandparents are both coming in from out of town to visit. I don’t know how that’s going to work out. They aren’t dog people, so I’m always in a fit about trying to get the house cleaned for them, but this time…I’m just to rushed for time to do a whole lot. I never look forward to their visits even though they are just really nice people. I think it’s just that our lifestyles are so different… They are spending the night in a hotel at least, so I don’t have to worry about that part.

Sun. we’re supposed to have a barbeque at another friends house, and I’ve got to get the food together that I’m assigned to bring. I guess if I survive till Sunday, this will be the least of my worries. LOL

Layla and I have been working on her agility since we’ve got the equipment back out in the field, and she’s doing really well. My mom was here today and so I took advantage of having someone here to video her run. So…here it is. We still have a lot of training to do, but we’re having fun!

P.S. don’t look at all the darn weeds coming up in the field. I’m trying to keep on top of them, but it’s tough. LOL

I’m not complaining, honest. LOL I love summertime, but doing much of anything in the middle of the day now has become nearly impossible because it’s really gotten hot the last week or so. We were talking at agility class today about changing classes over to an evening for the rest of the summer. Would be much nicer for the dogs and for us. Here’s a picture I got after all the dogs were out playing in the yard yesterday afternoon. It’s not a great picture quality wise, but just look at the length of that tongue! Layla says “it’s hot, mom!”

Well, I didn’t find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow this morning, but just the site of something so beautiful was enough to start my morning off nicely! I was really pleased that the camera caught the colors so well.

The boarding kennel has been keeping me busy lately. Which is a mixed blessing I suppose. It’s of course great that the business seems to be taking off, but it’s also nice when it’s slow and I have more time to just spend with my own dogs.

Training is going well though, Twist and I have been working on his broadjump for Open Obedience and I think we’re making progress. It’s been really nice having the agility field back again. Raven’s doing nicely with her obedience training, but her agility contacts still aren’t what I would like them to be. I think I’ve tried just about every method for training contacts, (2ox2o, using stride regulators for a running contact, 4 on the floor), but none seems to work for her. I am kind of stumped right now. Zoe’s still running great, even though we haven’t been able to trial as much as I would have liked this year. It’s hard to believe that she turned 9 today! Seems impossible. I wish I could just freeze time so that she didn’t get any older. Doesn’t work that way though. Layla’s 10 months old now, and is coming right along with her training too. Penny and Lucy are doing still doing great, although Penny wishes that all the afternoon thunderstorms that we’ve been getting would end.

I guess that’s about it, for what’s been going on here…

I was beginning to wonder if I was ever going to be able to get the agility equipment back out of the barn this year. Ever since I decided to let the boarding dogs run and play out where the agility field used to be, I’ve been trying to get another area cleared for us to move the equipment. It was a much bigger project than I expected!

Three acres might sound lovely, except that when a good portion of the acreage is growing weeds, it’s a bit discouraging. The area where we’ve moved the agility field now was covered in dead weeds from last fall that were nearly as tall as I am. Those had to be raked out and burned before I could even tell what kind of a mess I had growing underneath them. That took what seemed like forever!!! Then I tackled the new crop of weeds coming up this spring. I was beginning to lose heart when my husband suprised me last week by renting a tractor and tilling up the rest of what was left and leveling out the big bumpy areas. (What a great guy!) So, after a bit more leveling by hand this week, I now have a somewhat manageable, though not perfect new agility field again.

We got all the equipment out just in time to get a few runs in between the afternoon storms that we’ve been getting each day. It was perfect since our regular agility class was cancelled, once again. It felt so good to get back out and be running again, it’s been waay too long. Woohoo!

Here’s some pictures of the field.

I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off, once again. Twist, Raven, Layla, Angel (the foster sheltie) and myself are packing up and heading out to go to an obedience trial in Farmington this weekend. Well, Angel’s not going to the Obedience trial, she is just going back to Sheltie Rescue of Utah, since they are now back from their trip to Bucharest, so her brief stay with us has come to it’s end.

I’m really hoping that Raven will be able to finish her CD this weekend. She got her first leg at the Sheltie Specialty at the end of April, so she only needs two more. Twist is just entered on Sat. of this trial to see if our work on the broadjump has improved to the point that he might be able to qualifiy in Open for the first time. I’m a little nervous. Ok, I’m a lot nervous. Obedience always makes me more nervous that agility does, for whatever reason. I love it though.

Layla is going along to have a lesson tonight, so I’m really looking forward to that. It’s always nice to see if we are making progress and then what areas still need our attention. Anyway, hopefully we’ll have lots of good news and some pictures or some video to share when we get home…

This past weekend I got the chance to attend an agility seminar, by Jim Basic. It was focused on distance handling skills, something that I’ve never excelled in training with my dogs. I didn’t have a working spot, just went to audit the first two days, but it was such a good seminar, I don’t think that you had to have a working spot to benefit.

The first day focused on foundation skills to teach your dog to work away from you. I loved how Jim presented the drills. They were simple and they made sense. Nothing complicated, just the kind of thing that I needed.

The second day focused on more advanced distance work, and by the time the day was finished I was so impressed by how well all the dogs in the working spots were putting the skills together to accomplish much more complicated distance drills. It was really cool.

I came home with lots and lots to work on, but at least now I have a really clear idea in my head of how to start, and then build these skills. It was a really great weekend!

I haven’t posted about this before now because I wanted to make sure that our registration had been accepted first. I finally got the email confirmation that I’d been waiting for…yesterday! So, the good news is we’re going to Camp W in Lake Tahoe again this year in September! Woohoo!

We got to go back in 2007 and we had a fantastic time. I took Twist and Zoe with me that year. It’s just a camp where you have the option of trying out a ton of different dog sports, like herding, obedience, agility, flyball, tracking, lure coursing and carting. Or, you can just choose to take absolutely gorgeous hikes, relax on the beach, do crafts…well you get the picture. It’s a no pressure vacation with the dogs! Did I mention that the food is great too?!

These are some pictures from camp with Zoe and Twist. Now the big decision for me is which dogs or dog to take?

Layla has been playing around on her booja board and her little tippy plank thing for a while now, so I thought maybe it was time to get out the real teeter and give it a try.

Honestly, I was expecting something along the lines of what Rogue did when she learned the teeter. She just ran as fast as she could to the end and banged that teeter as hard as she could. LOL I think Rogue got satisfaction out of making the teeter hit the ground full speed. In fact, a couple of times she banged it down so hard that it bounced her off, (which amazingly didn’t bother her). Sorry, I’m getting off track here.

Well, Layla’s reaction was nothing like I expected! First, let me say that Layla is not sound sensitive, or motion sensitive. In fact, there really isn’t much that phases her, but something about the teeter was not to her liking. So, I remembered an article in Clean Run about a dog who had developed teeter phobias and how they overcame them, and I decided that instead of trying to coax her along faster than she was comfortable, I’d use the Premack Principle.

Basically stated, Premack is this: In operant conditioning, the Premack principle, developed by David Premack states that a commonly occurring action (one more desirable for the actor) can be used effectively as a reinforcer for a less commonly occurring one (that is, one less desirable for the actor). The example I’ve heard used most is that of child when a parent wants them to clean their room. They are more likely to watch tv…so in order to watch tv, they have to do the less desirable action of cleaning the room. (I hope that makes sense).

In Layla’s case with the teeter today, the likely or reinforcing behavior for her was that she would stay away from the teeter. So, I decided to use that as the reward. It worked something like this: If Layla will look at the teeter I will toss a treat away from it to reward her. Then after that step…I waited, she stepped on the teeter. Again, I tossed the treat away from the teeter. Eventually, she was jumping on the teeter on her own, without me coaxing her.

So here are a couple videos that we got of her first day on the teeter. These are taken after I remembered to grab the camera in the second session of training, so this is after all the initial work to get her more comfortable with the teeter. As you can see, by the end, she was able to go out to the teeter on her own, without coaxing. Yay! We still have a long ways to go, but at least she’s not as anxious as she was in the beginning.

This week is getting away from me quicker than I expected. LOL We had a really nice weekend! Friday started off with an obedience lesson for Twist and Raven. We have lots and lots to work on before the Utah Sheltie Specialty at the end of April. That’s good though.

Saturday and Sunday we spent at the DOCNA trial. I only had Zoe entered, but then they offered day of trial entries, so I broke down and entered Raven for the last run of the day on Sunday. Zoe had a nice weekend. She was really consistent and Q’d with first place in 8 of the 10 classes that she ran in. The other two were my fault. I got lost and sent her into an offcourse tunnel on one class, and realized it too late to get her turned around, and the other was a class called Strategic Time Gamble, and you make up your own course to accumulate points in the opening time period of 30 seconds. Then they blow a whistle and you have another 10-15 seconds to cross the finish jump. The problem is that you can’t finish too early or too late, it’s more a gamble of whether you can estimate how many obstacles your dog can complete in a certain amount of time, and I suck at that. We crossed the finish jump too soon, and lost the Q. Raven Q’d in her one jumpers run, which should have finished her Beginner’s jumper title.

Zoe did qualify in the North American Challenge Class though, and that is DOCNA’s qualifier for their Championships, so if we decide that we can get away (time and moneywise), we are qualified to go to Prescott, AZ in Oct. for the Western Championships. That would be fun!