Resq TailsThe trials and triumphs of rescued dogs

So, this weekend is Twist’s obedience trial. He’s entered on Friday and Saturday. We’ll be back up in Farmington again. Seems like we’ve spent more time in the Salt Lake area than we have at home the last little while. Fortunately, the dogs don’t mind traveling and for the most part neither do I. One of the only things that I don’t like about traveling is trying to eat well.

Last year a friend of mine convinced me to try a diet with her and basically it involved just eating fresh whole foods rather than all the processed refined junk that it so easy and convenient. I felt so much better and I lost about 25 lbs. The problem is that ever since we went to AZ for DOCNA Championships last Oct. though I’ve had a hard time eating right consistently. In the last 6 months I’ve gained back around 5-7 lbs. Sometimes it’s just so tempting to try to find some fad diets that work, but I just don’t think anything but eating right and exercising more works for me. Since this is the last trial for this month until May, I think I’ll be able to get back on track starting next week.

Back to the obedience trial. Twist will be giving Open a try again. He’s such a funny boy. I know that he knows all the exercises, but he’s just so distractable. Hopefully with this being an indoor trial the distractions will be at a minimum and he’ll do great. He can do such nice work when he’s on. I should be able to update everybody tomorrow on how it goes.

So, the DOCNA trial on Saturday was great. Zoe started off the day with Jumpers, her favorite. She had a beautiful run. Unfortunately, our video camera wasn’t cooperating and so a friend has the runs on her camera, so I can’t post anything yet. Her Beginner’s Gambler course was next. Again, beautiful. Then Standard, or regular or whatever they call it. LOL It was a train wreck. I ticked Zoe off at the start of the course, giving her a really hard “here” to get her to come in to the dogwalk, rather than the tunnel on the outside. Well, she came in and told me off about the cue. Bleh. That’s never a good sign. So when I did get her on the dogwalk, she just flew across and bailed the contact. I wasn’t going to let that pass, since you can train in the ring in DOCNA. I took her back and we did the dogwalk again. I think that just made her even more ticked off. We did get around the course, but not without several other bobbles and arguing from Zoe. She’s such a brat! I just love her. I’m sure it would really make me angry if it happened all the time, but here and there it just makes me happy that she’s still feeling that sassy at her age.

Anyway, the class to qualify for DOCNA Championships is the North American Challenge. It would have been a really pretty run, except that again on the dogwalk, (maybe a little sass was still left over), she wouldn’t turn off it into the tunnel, instead she jumped back onto the dogwalk first. So that’s a 10 point fault. Fortunately…DOCNA allows up to 12 faults in this class. So, despite our bobble, Zoe will be going to Championships again this year.

The drive up and back both had parts I could have done without. On the way up we saw lots of deer because it was so darn early in the morning. We almost hit one coming into a town. Fortunately, Zoe was in a crate, so she was fine. My friend’s dog was riding loose in the back seat, and she got thrown off the seat, but was still ok. On the way home, we hit snow, and rain and slush and mess. It made for a very tense ride home. I’m definitely going to be grateful for warmer weather and decent road conditions again in the next few months.

My husband is out putting in more resumes today. One is a janitorial position. Not his ideal line of work, but it’s with the school district, so that part is good. He probably won’t be using any Anilox roll brushes for cleaning printing presses, just regular old cleaning. LOL For the rest of the week, a friend of ours has asked him to refinish her cabinets, so that’s a small job to keep him busy.

I’m headed out later today for an obedience lesson with Dare. Should be fun. Hopefully we’ll come away with lots of interesting stuff to share.

It’s going to be a busy, busy week. Tomorrow I need to dremel nails, brush dogs and make treats for Wednesday!!! Wednesday I am going to Salt Lake for an agility day with Stacy Peardot-Goudy. I’m really excited, but also nervous. Everyone that has been to these mini workshops just raves about how great they are. Then I have to get back home and Thurs. I have a cleaning job, Friday I have to bathe dogs and pack to leave again for the DOCNA trial on Sat. back up in Farmington. It looks like I’ll be racking up the miles on the car this week.

I’ve spent the last few days printing up some things for a some friends of mine. Not on an epson tm-t88iv, or anything, just on my regular printer. It was one of those projects that seemed like a good idea at the time, but once you get started you realize that you’ve taken on something much bigger than you expected. At least I’m pretty much done now, and I hope they like it.

Layla and I got out in the yard today and I finally got the video camera out too. So, here is a really quick video clip of her working on the next step of the Jump Around the Clock drill. It’s called, “run by” if I remember right. The idea is to run with the dog, (no stay or wait required) which should encourage an extended jump style. You do the same thing you did on the previous drills, working the jump from different numbers on the face of the clock. Here is the video. It’s nothing great, but you get the idea.

Anyway, I’ll try to update throughout the week as I have time. If you want to check out what Dare is working on, here’s her latest trick video.

We all know I’ve been griping for months about the cold and the snow. Well, last week we had a good thaw and it was a horrible muddy mess, but it finally all seemed to be close to drying out when we got hit with that storm that dumped 7 in. of new snow on us. Bleh. Well, once again, it’s warmed up enough to really get things thawing and here’s what greeted me at the front door today.

As you can see, keeping my house clean for the next little while is going to be a real task. LOL It never ceases to amaze me how dirty these two can get. But, they sure do have a good time running and playing out there, so I guess a little clean up is well worth it. In fact it’s not really anything to complain about. It’s not something serious like if someone we knew had Mesothelioma Cancer or something. Today I’m really grateful to have what teeny tiny problems are mine. I’m going to try to keep in mind that these two muddy girls are trying to tell me that spring and warmer weather are just around the corner.

Layla is not the only one around here that is getting some needed direction in her training. I also wanted to get something clear in mind for Dare. So, I found this great training outline by Sue Ailsby called the “Training Levels”. It is a really detailed program to give the dogs a good foundation of skills that are useful in Obedience, Agility and also in general life. Because it is so detailed I decided to move my posting about Dare’s training to her own blog. Don’t worry, it’s not like we’re not going all the way to medical travel Mexico or anything. I just didn’t want hog all of ResqTails with posts about Dare, (who certainly isn’t a rescue). There will still be posts about Dare on here too, if you don’t want to be bothered with having to check out yet another blog. LOL For those of you that are gluttons for punishment though and that do want to read more about Dare’s training, here is Dares new blog.

Lately I’ve found myself stuck in a rut of just going out to train with the young girls, without much direction in mind. Not the most productive way to train. LOL So, the last week or so, I started really trying to sort out in my head a direction to go with each of the girls.

For Layla, I think I’m going to focus more on agility stuff right now. I think I did really well when I had a goal of getting her weaving. However, once she got the general idea and the weather turned all bad, I lost a bit of focus. Ok, so I lost a lot of focus and motivation. Maybe some nutritional supplements would help. We are limited to a much smaller space in the barn right now, but that’s really no excuse. I got a DVD called “One Jump, Two Jump” by Sandy Rogers a while back. It gives you a lot of exercises to do in limited space to build a good foundation for handling. I’m going to watch it again today and get started with Layla. I’ll try to keep you posted on our progress.

Now that we’ve finally caught up on the agility part of the past weekend, we can share the other bit of good news. Dare passed her CGC test. I know it’s nothing ground shattering, but it was fun, and I’m glad we did it! She’s such a good girl and I think she’s got so much potential for doing great things in both obedience and agility. I don’t think we need any stainless steel drums to store all her titles and ribbons in just yet, but I bet we will one of these days…

So, I keep hearing about how important a good warm-up routine can be for agility. I have to say that I’ve never really concentrated much on it with Zoe. But with Layla and Dare I don’t want to take anything for granted and I want to help them anyway I can. I especially worry about Layla. Ever since she came up lame for no reason that I could see, I’ve been worried about her injuring herself again. I was intrigued by Diana and Miley’s trip to see Debbie Gross Sanders and to attend her seminar. I would love to know more about what kind of warm-up routine she recommended, but I do know that one thing that Diana mentioned was having Miley weave through her legs. So…with a little help from Ricky we were able to find a video to help me figure out how to train that behavior.

Anyway, this is just a silly short video of different skills Dare has been working on, including weaving through my legs. I don’t know if any of them would work into a good warm-up routine or not, but I figure it can’t hurt to teach all these different things anyway, and if we don’t end up having a use for them, oh well!

We made it home from the agility trial. I just have to say…I don’t know how all of you out there can manage to go to a trial and come back that same night, upload all your videos and then write a blog post. It amazes me. LOL After being at the trial for 12 hours, I’m just beat. I tried to get my videos uploaded onto Youtube at least, but I didn’t have the energy to blog after that. Anyway…the girls did great.

On Friday, Raven finished her Open FAST title the first day. However, I wasn’t on top of things and I didn’t remember if it was her second or third leg, so I didn’t move her up. Bleh! Bad mom. She also Q’d in her Ex A Standard run that day, so she only needs one more leg for her AX. Here’s her Open FAST run.

Layla had her agility debut on Friday too. She started out really well in Nov FAST. Qualifying with a total of 75 out of 80 possible points. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw her score. Here is her video.

Next was Layla’s Standard run. It didn’t go quite as well. She decided that she needed to visit the jump setter really bad and then she didn’t want to weave. I think both things are just common green dog mistakes though and other than that, she did a good job. Here’s that run.

Last of all was Jumpers with Weaves. It was such a nice course, was really excited. Layla did the first two jumps and again the urge to say hi to someone was just too much for her, and she left me to go see the judge. The problem is that she took an offcourse jump to do it. Bleh. So, even though she then came back and finished the rest of the course under time, we couldn’t have the one wrong course and Q. She also seemed to get really sniffy at the end of the run. I didn’t know if she was stressed, but I don’t think so. She’s always been a real sniffer, it’s something we’ve tried to work on, but I think by the third run she finally decided that the arena dirt was just too interesting to pass up on anymore. LOL Anyway, here’s her last run of the day.

All in all, I was pleased with both the girls. Ricky you mentioned when you saw one of Layla’s videos that it’s nice to see a friendly Sheltie, and I have to agree. I definitely love that Layla thinks everyone is a potential friend. I just need to make sure that she understands that we visit our friends after we’re done running. LOL

We got to see Dare’s half sister Tennille again, and her “brother” Captain this weekend too. I couldn’t believe how much Tennille had grown. She is almost the same size as Dare already and she’s 7 weeks younger. Anyway, here’s a picture of them all together. Dare on the left, Captain in the middle and Tennille on the right.

Ok, so I really have a hard time saying the word pivot without thinking of an old episode of the tv show “Friends”. They were trying to move a couch to Ross’ apartment and they were going up some stairs and he just kept saying, “pivot, pivot, pivot”. Just makes me laugh everytime I think about it.

Anyway, to get back to the subject at hand. Dawn and Ricky wanted to know how I taught Dare to pivot. So I went out and attempted to get a video showing what we did. The problem is that since she already knows the game, she kept offering it with or without me asking. LOL So, this was our best attempt. I will forewarn you that it’s not great. You have to keep in mind that I’m not a teacher by any stretch of the imagination, and Dare kept wanting to just give me the finished skill. I still think that the video on youtube of Kikopups was probably better.

A couple things to keep in mind if you do want to use a dowel instead of the perch box. Some dogs don’t like the dowel at all initially. If that’s the case and they are worried about it, I would do some work with them to get them comfortable with the dowel separately before you could even start using it in combination with teaching the pivot. The other thing is that if you are as uncoordinated as I can be, you may want to practice using the dowel without the dog there at first too. Just see if you can keep your hand with the treats were you want the eyes to focus and still move the other hand in the direction you’ll need it to direct the rear end. It might sound silly, but I know that I find that sometimes my hands don’t follow the plan that I had in my head. LOL Anyway…here is the video.