Resq TailsThe trials and triumphs of rescued dogs

The last three weeks have been a whirlwind of activity around here. I knew it was going to be busy, but I really didn’t have a clue how busy! The middle of the month Cynthia and I had a trip planned to fly to Newark pick up her new Danish Swedish Farmdog puppy, Jet! We’d been waiting, (not patiently I might add LOL) for what seemed like months for him to come. To check out what a cutie Jet is you should hop on over to Tiptail and read all about his adventures! www.tiptail.com

That would have been plenty exciting and fun in itself but just a few days before we were scheduled to leave, I got an email from Judy with Himark Shelties in Florida. I’d been on a waiting list for one of her puppies. She was writing to let me know that a puppy had become available that she thought was just what I was looking for. Judy and Dave Guaraldo have consistently been producing some of the top ranked performance shelties in the country for years. They are even being spotlighted in this summer’s issue of the Sheltie Pacesetter.

I have to say that I was a bundle of mixed emotions. I was so excited to meet this little girl! At the same time there is always that question of when, (if ever), is a good time to introduce another dog into the family. Also, since I’ve been involved in rescue, our dogs have mainly been rescues. I think I felt a twinge of guilt for looking at buying from a breeder, (regardless of how reputable), when there are so many Shelties in rescue. However, while I absolutely adore my rescues, at times the baggage that has come along with them has made competition Obedience and Agility a real challenge. So, to make this long story shorter…the conclusion I came to was that Cynthia and I would fly down there and meet her and make the final decision then.

Well, I’m sure that you’ve all guessed…we brought her home with us. She is everything that I was hoping for and more! All my hesitancy is gone. I can’t thank Judy enough for matching me up with and entrusting me with this little girl. We’ve named her Dare. All the dogs in the house have been quite taken with her too, which is wonderful. Layla is thrilled to have a new playmate and even Zoe is playing with her. Here is quick clip of Dare and her littermates the day we met them tugging on a toy. I’ll post more pictures in a separate post.

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 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 just love this time of year! Everything is finally turning green again, and I feel like I’m coming to life again after a long winter. So, today we went down to our friends place to train with the dogs. She lives about 1/2 an hour away and the drive is a beautiful one. It’s through a gorgeous canyon with water running through it. It’s one of my favorite drives.

So, we worked on Obedience with Raven, Twist and Layla. We worked outside today, which proved to be a huge distraction for all three dogs. My friend has geese, chickens, horses and a goat all within eye and earshot of where we were training. It was a challenge, but a really nice day. We have alot of work to do at different outdoor locations before the first of June because that obedience trial is outside (Yikes!).

On the way home everything just looked so pretty and green that I couldn’t help but pull off for a minute and take some pictures. Here are my favorites of the day.

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.

So, we’ve been putting together a little bag full of items with all kinds of different textures that Layla can fetch. Here’s a picture of what she’s got in her bag. We started out with just basic stuffie type toys, and we’ve been adding things to the bag as time goes on. The plastic pudding cup is one of her personal favorites. LOL

I took some pictures of her fetching some of the stuff, but my lighting was worse than I thought today in the house, and my camera’s flash didn’t come up right. So all I got was a bunch of really blurry pictures. Sorry for the poor photo quality, but you get the idea.

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!

The next few days are going to be busy. I am sitting waiting right now for a client to pick up their dog. I hate waiting for people. It seems like that’s what a majority of my time is spent doing with the boarding kennel. Waiting for people to pick-up/drop-off dogs. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could count on them showing up at a specific time, but you just can’t. People tell you that they’ll be there at one time and then show up hours later. It’s very frustrating because it means that you are tied to the house, and can’t leave.

Anyway, in the meantime, today I’m trying to get a packing list together so that I can be ready to leave Friday morning for Salt Lake. Zoe is entered in a DOCNA agility trial this weekend. I was only planning on travelling with Zoe and Layla this time, but there is an obedience ring set-up on Friday if we can get there early enough that would be ideal training for Twist and Raven. So…it’s looking like I’ll be bringing all the Shelties but Rogue this time. She’ll have to stay home with her dad and keep things in line here.

I have a three boarding dogs going home tomorrow, and at least one coming in, and then I have agility class with Zoe and Raven, and somewhere in between that I’d love to get a chance to bathe everybody. It’s not looking real promising though. LOL I almost forgot I have the cats that I’m watching for some friends while they are in Indiana too. All in all, it’s going to be a busy last half of the week, but I think alot of it is going to be spent hurrying up to sit around a wait for people.