dog-li-ness

Welcome back to the dog blog, I say to myself ...

2009-12-28T09:42:00.002-05:00

We've had tons of rain around here over the past two months, which has made the ground so extremely soggy that's it's been hard to get in a lot of agility training and practice with the girls. But did that mean I took the time to write about dogs and agility in my dog blog instead? No, it did not.

But I did move 8 of my 12 channel weave poles into my basement so I can get Tally and Pinky finally weaving. It's so funny the differences between them: Tally is go go go and doesn't seem to sweat it as the poles move closer together. Her main problem is that she goes too fast to always stay in the channel--she just sort of flys out accidentally. Pinky, however, is very deliberate, paying close attention to where she is stepping. She's very sensitive to any change in pole width, so we're progressing at a snail's pace. I don't see her becoming a fast weaver anytime soon. The only think holding Tally back is that I don't train and practice her nearly as often as I should be. She's probably be weaving a completely close set like a pro if she belonged to someone less lazy than I am.

Anyway, that's not what I came to talk about. I'm thinking about Doggie Stress, mostly because I just caught up with my Team Small Dog blog reading and This Post made me think somewhat about Pinky and Tally and stress, and rather than blah blah blah about my own dogs over in Laura's comments I figured I should do that here in my own blog.

So what I'm thinking about is how different dogs (and by that I mean Pinky and tally) handle stress so very differently. I just discovered this the other week in class with Tally, after I inadvertently completely stressed her out. Well, actually, I think she stressed me out first, because I've created a Shaping Monster: we've done so may shaping games that now I have a hard time just getting her to relax and chill while waiting our turn in class. She wants to throw behavior after behavior at me, and if they don't succeed in getting a reward she wants to start barking at me, as if to say "HELLO! I'm doing stuff here!" So when my turn came, I was exasperated and stressed. Then I wondered why I couldn't get her off of me; it's like she was stuck like glue, refusing to stop staring at me. Usually she has brilliant obstacle focus, but now suddenly she was all handler.

Val, my instructor, pointed out that I was stressed and had stressed Tally out, and her staring at me was because she wanted to be absolutely sure of what I wanted before she did anything, because obviously whatever she was doing wasn't pleasing me. I hadn't a clue ... Pinky and Lucy always exhibited their stress by going away and sniffing and pretending they couldn't hear me. Now suddenly I have a dog who stresses the opposite way, by gluing herself to me and refusing to take her eyes off me (I swear, even though she's only 14 lbs., her behavior reminds me so much of many border collies I know ...)

Anyway, I've decided that from now on, Tally goes into a crate between turns in class so I don't get stressed about her demand to play shaping games. (I tried shaping her to relax on her mat, but we got stuck on the "relax" part. I couldn't get past her thinking that the mat was just the place she was supposed to go and try out her repertoire of shaped behaviors, or bark at me if the didn't work ...) Good thing she's small and her crate is very portable.

There's also a big difference between what stresses Pinky and Tally in the first place: Pinky doesn't like too much pressure. It's as if she needs everything to be her idea. When she goes through the weave channel, she's more relaxed and faster if I keep some distance. If I act like her doing something is really important to me, she's more likely to shy away from it. If I pretend I'm not overly interested, she's more likely to try things. Tally, on the other hand, really really wants to know what I want her to do. She'll try all sorts of behaviors if it's not apparent to her, but she's very tuned in to my actions for any cues I may be throwing off. It's a little unnerving, actually. But if I can get used to it I'm going to have a tiny little kick-ass agility girl ...

In other news, I decided that since USDAA Nationals will be somewhere on this side of the country in 2010 (I really hope it's Kentucky), I may as well see if I can qualify Lucy. I'm pretty sure we'll have no problem in Perfomance Gran Prix and PVP Team, but I'm not so sure about the Performance Speed Jumping. Lucy's really a great dog, but she doesn't always take top honors for speed. I guess I'll just have to enter a lot and hope we get lucky ...

Snarked at by the alpha bitch ...

2009-11-18T12:25:00.012-05:00

I teach and assist doggie classes where I train to help support my agility habit. Mostly it's fun, and most of the people are just great, willing to try new things and wanting to have fun with their dogs. But every now and then there is someone who is just wound up waaaay too tightly and makes it less than fun. (Hmmmmm ... maybe sort of the way our dogs feel when WE get wound up too tightly? If you haven't done so already, go on over to Laura's place and read "Thinking different to make a change" and "Thinking different part 2-this is sort of about dog training if you can just get past the part about the naked, sandy people".)

I'm an assistant in a foundation class, and last night I got snapped at by one of the students ... the human kind, not the dog kind. Frankly, I'd rather have been bitten by her dog because it would have been much less disconcerting. (For the record, the dog was very easygoing and not at all inclined to bite me, and fortunately didn't seem at all fazed by her owner's obvious tension.) Today I'm still thinking "Wow, I didn't deserve that" (I really don't think I did) and wondering if maybe life would be easier if I stopped teaching and just focused on training my own dogs.

We were doing an exercise that involved capturing and shaping (basically waiting for the dog to interact with X object, rewarding it, then rewarding increasing interaction, paws on, etc.) I was observing everyone and offering tips and encouragement, and everyone seemed to be having great success. One of the things I'll do is point out something a person may be saying or doing with her body that she may not realize, because a lot of people become so focused on what the dog is doing that they don't pay any attention to what they are doing. Sometimes these inadvertent cues change what the dog is actually learning from the activity. I try very hard to be pleasant and positive about it, because I know from personal experience that, just like dogs, people learn best when they are having fun.

At the outset of the exercise, I said that what we WERE NOT doing was asking, indicating or commanding the dog to do anything--we were rewarding offered behavior. So when I saw one of the handlers using big arm motions to point her dog toward the object, I said "Oh, you're indicating ..." and she looked up at me and said in an outraged voice "WHAT, now we're not allowed to INDICATE? What ARE we supposed to do?" So I started to say "Well, the exercise is about shaping offered behav ..."

"I KNOW VERY WELL WHAT SHAPING IS!!" she said.

"I was only trying to point out [something something er, something] ..." I don't remember what exactly came out of my mouth, because my brain was thinking "JesusChristWhatTheHellIsYourProblemHolyF-ingMotherOfF-ingF! If you don't want my help then what the F are you taking this class for?" But I couldn't say that out loud, so I was trying to spit out something vaguely conciliatory to reassure her that my goal was to actually help her.

But I think she didn't really want my help, and I wish now that I had just left her to her own devices from the get-go and and focused on the nice people. I had sensed her tension from the beginning of class and gotten the feeling that her goal was to get the exact perfect behavior from her dog on the very first try every time, and anything less seemed to be very frustrating to her. Looking back, I think what I considered "helpful comments" were interpreted by her as an insult to her training ability.

I had surmised from observing her interactions with her dog (always working on the left, always insisting on precise heeling and side sits, holding food in her mouth and spitting it at the dog for a reward, etc.) that this woman had probably come from the formal obedience world. In my experience, these types of people (yes, I'm stereotyping, and of course there are exceptions) seem to hate allowing their dog do absolutely anything it wasn't told to do. So rewarding offered behavior may have been a difficult concept for her. She had been having problems getting her dog to even look away from her face and notice the object in question, so I had been trying to gently coach her through the whole exercise ("Don't stare at your dog, look at the object," etc. Also, whenever her dog did a rewardable action, she seemed reluctant to actually reward it (i.e., give it some food, as opposed to just saying "yes"). I kept telling her "reward your dog!" but she wouldn't do it. Maybe she's one of those people who thinks that a dog does thing for the sheer joy of pleasing its master. I dunno. But she certainly didn't seem to want any of my advice.

So now I certainly don't want to give it. You know how dogs will turn their head away slightly and refrain from eye contact when near a dog they want to avoid? That's what I feel like doing with this woman. She has lunged and snarled at me, and now I want to steer clear. It makes me NOT look forward to the next meeting of this class ...

I guess I'm just like the dog who learns that agility class is fraught with tension and would rather sniff the corners or zoom around the field ...

Silence of the squirrels

2009-10-26T09:45:00.005-04:00

Squirrels are great little sprinters and it's always impressive when a dog can catch one. After the catch ... maybe not so much fun. Definitely no fun for the squirrel.

Yesterday I was out with my three, and I guess I had a moment of inattention because Tally lunged for a squirrel and her leash just jumped right out of my hand. At first I thought "No biggie. She'll tree it then stand barking at the base of the tree and I'll go get her." I was a little flabbergasted that she caught it with absolutely no problem. She's an amazingly fast little dog.

For a second it looked like the squirrel would get away, because Tally released it ... no, then she caught it again, wounding it this time. She kept catching it, releasing it and catching it again like a cat would, and I couldn't stand to watch. So I let go of Lucy and Pinky, knowing that Lucy would go straight for the kill and end the poor squirrel's suffering. She did, with one quick bite.

So then I had three dogs playing tug-of-war with a dead squirrel, and I was hoping to creep in and grab their leashes before ... too late. Tally gained control of the squirrel and took off with the other two in pursuit. I became the crazy dog lady running down the street screaming her dog's names in vain. It was a nice day and neighbors were out, too.

Lucky for me Tally wanted to enjoy her prize on her home turf. She led us all straight home and when I caught up I only had to open the gate to the back yard and everyone ran in. Tally proceeded to take victory laps around the yard with her treasure while the other two chased her.

I didn't want to have to go searching for the squirrel or its bits later (when it was likely to start stinking) so I needed to get Tally to drop it. A while back I got Pinky to drop a dead rat (killed by Lucy) by throwing cheese at her, so I went in to get some food. I grabbed some meatballs--perfect for throwing! I also grabbed the camera, and here's what followed:

And no matter how many times I do it, I can never get over my squeamishness and revulsion at having to pick up a dead critter ...

In other news, Tally is adorable, if occasionally annoying:

My little stick of dynamite

2009-10-23T12:24:00.003-04:00

It's been almost five months since I got Talladega, and I'm really amazed with her. When she first showed up it was hard to even live with her. She was terribly rude and ill-behaved, and thought the best way to get a human to play was to bite a face or appendage. She wasn't house trained and couldn't be trusted out of my sight at any time whatsoever unless she was in a crate. Now she's house-trained (provided I make sure she gets out at the right times), only slightly rude and occasionally ill-behaved, and can be trusted out of my sight for minutes at a time! She still tries to nip the occasional face, but we're working on that.

But all that will come and I don't mind it so much because I think she's going to be a kick-ass little agility dog. Our major problem has been focus. She's so into everything and everyone (she loves the world and the world loves her!) that it's been hard for her to stay working with me when there are possibly exciting things around. Over the past six weeks I've had her in two classes designed to work on exactly that, and she's made remarkable improvement. She's not 100 percent yet, but she's good enough that I think can "mainstream" her into a normal agility class.

Meanwhile, on my own, I've been working on obstacle performance, and she's a dream. She learns so quickly and seems to really have a great time. She also overcomes her fears quickly; she's gotten a little startled by the teeter, and flew off the dogwalk once, but she's always willing to give it another go right away. This is a huge contrast to Pinky, who gets really shaken at the smallest scare. She was startled on the dogwalk once and I couldn't get her to approach it again. I had to start all over again on a low contact trainer and work all the way back up.

I've still got a lot of work to do on her jumping skills, and the weaves are a work in progress, but I've got time; based on the vet's age estimate, Tally won't even be old enough to compete in USDAA until next April. And I'm trying not to even focus on that, because I really want to enjoy the process. Now that I'm really getting her attention, training her is amazingly fun.

A great side effect of Tally's success is that she's made me completely relax about training Pinky, because now I know I'll have a dog to run when Lucy retires. Pinky can stay in training for years. This has had a wonderful effect on her training. With me relaxed, Pinky relaxes and we make good progress. Duh! I actually knew this would be the case, but it was getting myself to REALLY relax, as opposed to just pretending to relax, that was the key. Dogs notice!

It's a game. It needs to be fun!

Do our dogs bitch about us after a run?

2009-10-13T11:51:00.005-04:00

I had a good time doing USDAA this past weekend. Lucy was fabulous and I wasn't too bad either. We got a few Qs (2 Snooker super Qs and 1 Jumpers) and missed a few, but we were a good team all weekend.

But I've got a little rant inside me that I need to let loose ...

Over the weekend I got really sick of listening to people bitch about how something their dog did ruined their run. I felt like if I heard an indignant "S/he knows better!" one more time I was in danger of slapping whoever said it. It's almost heartbreaking to see someone out on a course with a dog who was trying hard to do the right thing, getting confusing, late or no instructions, and then getting lectured by the handler ("what were you doing? You're not listening Blah blah blah!") as they come off course.

If our poor dogs could talk amongst themselves they would probably be saying stuff like "What was s/he thinking waiting until I was on the landing side of the jump before telling me I needed to turn?" or "All of a sudden s/he moved in a way s/he never does in training, and it just threw me completely off and I popped a weave. She never does that--I don't know what got into her!" or "S/he was driving right toward that jump so I thought I was supposed to take it. Then s/he started screeching in a panicky voice 'Here here HERE HERE!!!' and it frightened me out of my wits. I slowed waaay down after that and hesitated before the rest of the jumps because I wanted to know for darn sure I was supposed to take it so s/he wouldn't yell at me again ..."

Full disclosure: I used to blame Lucy for stuff that was my fault all the time. So I'm not holier than anyone. (And I really hope I didn't make too huge a fuss about it to other people because god, it's awful to have to listen to!) At some point, however, I realized what a stupid dope I was and that Lucy was actually really, really good at this stuff and I was the one who sucked. And after that we just started getting better and better. I really wish I could share that revelation with the people I hear bitching about their dogs, but that would amount to saying "hey, your dog is great but you suck!" And that's pretty much an awful thing to say to anyone. I probably would have cried if anyone had ever said it to me even though it was the truth.

So I don't know if there's much a of a solution for me on this issue, aside from turning away and refusing to listen to anyone who's dissing their dog. Or maybe I should try sarcasm (I'm really, really good at that) and say something like "Yes, it's a shame that your dog keeps screwing up when you're always so perfect out there."

Or maybe I'll just come here and rant whenever it gets to me ...

But now a fun bit to counteract all my negativity! At one point over the weekend, Derrell Stover "got" me with a little joke: He asked, when I was bar-setting, whether I had raised the chute. I actually stopped, thought and looked toward the chute before I realized it was a joke. I had a good chuckle and decided I'd have to try it on someone else. So before our Standard run on Sunday, after table legs and whatnot had been changed for P 12", I asked the judge (Melanie Behrens) if she had lowered the chute. Yeah, I got her! But then in our run that followed, Lucy apparently decided the chute wasn't low enough:

Practice, practice ....

2009-09-21T09:57:00.001-04:00

practice pose
Originally uploaded by bunchofpants

I want to be able to put all three dogs into a sit or a down, move away, and have them all stay put while I take photos. Lucy is a champ at this. Pinky's getting better, but will change her sit to a down if she doesn't get a reward right away for the sit, because she thinks a down is a more lucrative position. Tally ... well I'm lucky if I can keep her is a sit for more than a moment, and she definitely doesn't stay while I move away. But we'll keep practicing ...

My lesson of the week: Stand up!

2009-09-08T09:35:00.001-04:00

I did three days of agility with Lucy in a trial on home turf over the Labor Day weekend. Not three full days--I don't ask the old girl to do that any more--I only entered her in three events per day. We had some great successes: a Jumpers Q (for the PIII jumpers title); two standard Qs (the first of which got us the PIII Standard title), and two more Snooker Super Qs (one more Snooker Q and we'll have PIII Snooker Bronze!) Our pairs run was beautiful; unfortunately our partner E'd, but we had a good time.

Notice I haven't mentioned any Gamblers Qs? Since achieving the ADCH and moving over to Performance, we have yet to get a gamble. I'm starting to think I should just stop entering Gamblers, since I'm not chasing the APD title. Maybe I should just enter the things we're really good at until I retire Lucy. Why keep trying at something that only leads to frustration? On the other hand, I keep thinking that sooner or later we'll do it. I work on gamble skills when we train (although now that she's getting old I don't spend a lot of time training her). It's something to think about.

Overall, the trial felt very positive and rewarding to me, and Lucy was running fast and seemed like she was having a good time out there. But I had one moment where I did a really boneheaded move that I knew was wrong, wrong, wrong, and that prematurely ended what was shaping up to be a fabulous Snooker run: I bent over to pull my dog into handler focus. Of course, it did not draw her toward me, as I intended, but pushed her out and away, so she jumped the #2 closing obstacle in the wrong direction.

I had been trying to threadle Lucy. There are lots of ways I could have handled this successfully, none of which involve bending over, and I had even planned to do it correctly (with a "backy-uppy" move) in the walkthrough. The problem is that to us humans, it seems like bending over should draw the dog in, so in a pinch or a panic, we resort to stupid instinct. To dogs, us bending over looks like we are pushing or pointing ourselves toward an obstacle (probably the wrong one). I used to make this mistake all the time with contact/tunnel discriminations. I want the near obstacle so I lean in toward Lucy thinking I'm somehow "engaging her," but she thinks I'm indicating the far obstacle. I see my friends do it all the time, and if they say "I don't know why she took X instead of Y" I can say "oh, you leaned over. You need to stand up straight."

So the fact that I know better and did it anyway makes me feel like even more of a dope. But I'm a trainable dope, I think. I swear if I got a do-over I wouldn't do the same mistake again. Maybe a whole new mistake to learn from, but not that one!

Fun with judges' discretion

2009-08-31T09:20:00.002-04:00

I ran Lucy in a USDAA trial in Colfax, NC, on Friday and Saturday. It was hosted with a brand-new club (Carolina Piedmont Agility) at a brand-new site (well, the site's been there for a while--it's a horse arena, but it's new to agility) and it really couldn't have been nicer. I'll definitely be going back.

I only entered Lucy in 4 classes on Friday and three on Saturday because now that she's old, I need to lighten up. We did pretty well--a Snooker Super Q and a Pairs Q (netting us our PIII relay title) on Friday, and another Super Q and a Standard Q on Saturday. I so wish I had gotten Saturday's Standard run on video, because it was exactly the kind of run that keeps me doing agility. I was where I was supposed to be when I was supposed to be there, and Lucy corresponded. Alas, you'll just have to take my word that occasionally I'm a really good handler!

Our Saturday Snooker run was another story. (It was caught on video by a friend, but I don't have it to post. Not sure if I want to, either.) I had made a simple plan, but then executed it badly, and at one point, after completing the 2-part number six obstacle in the opening, Lucy then back-jumped 6b (or, I should say, my bad handling caused her to back jump). I assumed I was toast and started heading to the finish line, but I wasn't hearing a whistle ... why no whistle? Then Lucy, smart little dog who apparently has learned the "if you don't hear a whistle just keep going" rule, decided to jump a red, which happened to be the red I had planned to go to after the number six anyway. I heard the judge call "One!" Holy moley, I thought, I'm still alive here! So I just proceeded with the rest of my plan, pushing for speed because I'd wasted time thinking I was cooked. The rest of the course was gorgeous! We finished before the buzzer with 42 points (which, because no one else in the running got enough points to even qualify, gained us a Super Q). But why didn't we get whistled off after that number 6?

I asked a few people and no one seemed to really know, so I buttonholed my friend Derrell Stover, who's a judge in addition to being one of the most awesome handlers I've ever seen. He told me there are two schools of thought about how to judge what we did, and our Judge (Allison Bryant) apparently subscribes to the Cheri Wittenberg philosophy, which is: we had successfully completed that obstacle combo, and we then faulted it before attempting another red and therefore we were not pointed for it but could continue to accumulate points. However, he said that if it happened again under a judge who subscribed to the Tom Kula school of thought it could be considered an off-course and we could be whistled off. For some reason I find these issues of discretion fascinating ... it sort of adds to the excitement of Snooker, really. Or maybe that's just me being geeky.

At any rate, the lesson, which I should have already learned by now (and Lucy seems to know!) is if I don't hear a whistle just keep going, even if I know I screwed up. As it was, lucky little Lucy saved my butt, but I'm supposed to be the one thinking out there.

Patience, possibilities, payoffs ...

2009-08-18T20:23:00.003-04:00

Tonight I felt like I had a big breakthrough. I've been struggling for the past few months to walk three dogs, two of whom are young and full of themselves. Talladega has been the toughest of the three, because when I got her at the end of May, she was almost like a little savage with absolutely no self-control whatsoever. On the leash she was awful, especially when we crossed paths with other dogs. She absolutely loves other dogs and thinks it's her god-given right to meet them all. She would ignore food, even if it was right under her face, preferring to whimper, bark and pull toward the other dog. It was mighty frustrating. But I tried to remain steadfast and patient, and tonight, for the first time ever, whenever we passed other dogs (three times), she fell into line at my side with the other two, looking up at me and not the other dogs. It was beautiful! One guy said "It looks like they're synchronized!" Of course, Tally's learned by now that not only is she never, ever going to get to go say hi to that other dog, but that Charlee Bears are pretty good and there's probably going to be one for her when we get past the other dogs. It also helped that I spent a lot of time hand-feeding her meals in exchange for attention, tricks etc., so she's learned that food has value.

She's also a whiz to train in general. After working her with the wobble board and skateboard, I decided to try some other cool stuff with her. A friend lent me a little wooden spool so I could try to teach Tally to roll it with her front feet while walking with her back (it's a first step in teaching a dog to do something like pushing a baby carriage). All I did was get a bag of treats and set the spool in front of me, and the first thing Tally did was put her front feet on it and start rolling it! I think after the skate board she just assumed that's what I wanted. I was completely amazed. I also wanted to teach her to push a playground ball with her nose, but when I put the ball in front of her she put her front feet on it and started rolling it with them while she walked on her hind legs! We still have some coordination issues to work out before she can sustain the spool and ball tricks for more than five or six steps, so I have some practicing to do. By that point maybe I'll have picked up a tripod so I can video it all properly. She's a truly amazing little dog.

I have a lot of focus work to do to move forward with her agility training. It's hard for her to keep her mind off the people, other dogs and great smells in class. She's improving, however, and next session we're signed up for a Focus and Motivation class taught by Melanie Miller (I took the class last summer with Pinky). I'm hoping it helps.

As for Pinky, moving her down to the "baby" level class was the best thing, I think. Making things very simple and progressing very slowly turned out to be exactly what she needs. She's really blossoming doesn't seem nearly as nervous as she used to be. She seems to enjoy the class much more than when I was trying to have her on a more accelerated track. I was just asking too much to quickly.

And Lucy is still good little Lucy. We took another distance class because gambles are still tough for us, and I learned that I'm relying too much on body cues for "right" and "left" and not enough for verbals. When your dog is heading directly away from you to a distant gamble obstacle, they're not necessarily going to see the body cue for a change of direction. They have to hear it (something I should have remembered and worked on after Stuart Mah, but I didn't).

My dogs are filling me with optimism ...

Tally ho!

2009-07-17T11:17:00.003-04:00

I've been working with Tally on the skateboard and wobble board:

Training with Tally from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

I need to find a bigger paved surface to take her skateboarding, because the screen porch is a bit cramped. My driveway is gravel, so that's out. I'll be on the lookout for a seldom-used tennis court.

In Pinky news, moving her back down to "baby" classes, where the exercises are easy and short and the jumps are left low, turned out to be a great idea. She seemed to have a lot of fun in class last night, with only a few short incidents of stress sniffing. I think that while Tally will do well with an accelerated training schedule because she's always willing to try new things and overcomes her fears very quickly, Pinky will do best if I keep it slow and let her get really comfortable with things before I move on.

So many mini mutts, so little time ...

2009-07-15T11:27:00.005-04:00

It seems I need to start every blog post with an apology for not being a very good blogger. That may be, but I'm spending the time trying to be a better dog trainer and handler, and with three dogs now I'm getting plenty of opportunities. Here's a bit of a recap of what we've all been up to:

Lucy: The old girl is definitely slowing down a little, which is not surprising considering she turned 11 in May. But when she's on, she's good. I'm taking another distance class with her; the one we took last summer helped her get her ADCH, but since we moved over to Performance III we've gotten no gamble Qs. She did make one gamble very nicely, but since I was out of position and far from the gamble line when the horn sounded, the buzzer went off as she was launching over the last jump. So no Q, but it still felt good. She's really rocking the exercises in distance class, which gives me hope that we still have a few good gambles ahead of us.

I've reduced the number of runs that I'll put her in over any weekend, though, because she tires easily. It makes me a little sad because we really hit our stride as an agility team over the last two years, but I want to keep her injury-free and with me as long as possible. She's happy as long as she's with me, regardless of whether she's doing agility or not, so there's no reason for me to push her.

Pinky: Her leg is healed, although she still has intermittent lameness, but I've been allowed to phase in all of her previous activities. The problem is, her confidence is worse than before she broke her leg (and it was never great to begin with). I started her back in a young dogs class, but it's clear she can't really handle even short sequences anymore, and all of the progress I'd made on the dog walk and the A-frame are gone. So we're going back to baby stuff. Part of the problem is that after so much forced inactivity, none of her muscles are as strong as before, so she may have lost confidence in her body. So while I'm building that back up I've moved her into a Beginner 2 class where we will do single obstacles, the contact trainer and sequences of, at most, three obstacles. Meanwhile I'm working her on channel weaves at home. I'm not even thinking about the teeter at this point ... no sense in freaking her out even more. In fact, I've resigned myself to the fact that Pinky may never be a competition agility dog, which is OK because she's just a complete sweetheart and I love having her around. Maybe she'll be the one who makes me expand my horizons with Rally-O or Canine Musical freestyle.

Talladega: What a jewel I stumbled onto! I guess credit should go to my friend Cindy, who first sent me the Petfinder link. The first thing that wowed me after I got her home was her incredible attentiveness. I hadn't even decided on a name yet, so I couldn't really teach attention-to-name, but if I just said "hey" she'd turn on a dime and come to me, as whatever I wanted were more important that whatever she was about to do.

But she came to me with absolutely no manners whatsoever and an almost manic fondness of jumping and biting hands, feet, noses, eyeglasses. She seemed very starved for attention, which isn't surprising because she was a homeless dog who lived in the foster home's yard (their existing dog hated her and wouldn't let her in the house) for weeks until I got her. So my first task was to teach her a few manners, which I did at mealtimes. Instead of getting her food in a bowl on the floor, it all came from my hand in exchange for small acts of politeness. At first, she got food simply for keeping all four paws on the ground and not biting my legs or the hand with the food. Then I started feeding her for sits, then downs. Nothing she got was free. She was vastly improved after just one day of that and like an old pro after a week.

Tally's got bravery and drive, and she seems to thrive on all of the things that turned Pinky into a shrinking violet (skateboard, wobble board, contact trainer). Her incredible attentiveness makes her very easy to teach. She loves every toy I've tried, and always wants food. I have no doubt she's going to accelerate past Pinky in her training. In fact, before she broke her leg I had signed Pinky up for a September Stuart Mah beginner dog seminar, but I'm going to attend with Tally instead.

I'll try to beg or borrow a tripod and get some video of her to post here.

The dog has a name!

2009-05-28T15:51:00.003-04:00

I finally decided on a name for The Dog Formerly Known As Star: Talladega, or Tally for short. I just really like the word Talladega, and the fact that it brings to mind racing, as in the Talladega 500. Plus Tally is a great call name for a dog and it really seems to suit the little cutiepie.

Meanwhile, Pinky is still healing, and I can't wait until she's given the green light to properly play with other dogs. As it is, it's hard to have Pinky and Tally both out of their crates at the same time because all they want to do is rar-rar-rar and body-slam each other. In a good way ... they became instant friends. In fact, in the mornings and after work, I let Pinky out of her crate first, and after stretching the first thing she does is go to Tally's crate and wait for her to be let out.

Good times!

The pros and cons of looking for trouble ...

2009-05-27T12:41:00.003-04:00

I was discussing little Miss Alabama She-Ra Caprica Demeanor with Val, my agility instructor, and she said that before I decide to keep her I need to get her hips, knees and elbows x-rayed to make sure they are sound. I think she's thinking this way because she had her young border jack checked a few months ago and discovered that he's dysplastic in one hip, which really upset her. Not that it will stop his career or anything--I know lots of dysplastic border collies who have enjoyed long careers in agility and/or flyball. If you keep them lean and well-muscled they can do quite well. But since little cutiepie is a small dog, I started wondering about her knees--small dogs very often have luxating patellas, which can cause a lot of problems in sports.

But then Julie asked: Why go looking for trouble? Would it mean I wouldn't keep her and do agility with her? Good point. I like this dog (dang, I need to decide on a name for her SOON!!) and I think she's very smart. She's got a lot of natural attentiveness and a big desire to do stuff with me--she's not so interested in going off and noodling around on her own (makes me think there's no terrier in there!) Would I want to give her back at this point (even though I know she could get a good pet home in a heartbeat)? I think maybe not. So would it make a difference if I knew she had weak knees or a bad hip? Maybe not. Then again, after absorbing the financial shock of Pinky's broken leg, I'm not sure if I want to set myself up for a future of knee or elbow surgeries and rehab, either ...

Of course, she could always check out beautifully on all her parts and then go and break her leg in my backyard ...

In other news, a co-worker suggested the name "Talladega," which is a hellaciously good name for an agility dog! Decisions, decisons.

Say hello to ...

2009-05-26T11:25:00.003-04:00

... er, well, I don't have a name yet. So far she is "Star," but she doesn't actually know that name and since I know of several dogs named Star running agility, I'd like to name her something else. I've been referring to her as Cutiepie Whats-her-name. More on the name later ...

I brought "Star" home yesterday from a rescue group in Mt. Airy, NC. She had been listed on Petfinder as probably a border jack, but she looks nothing at all like any border jack I've ever seen. In my opinion she looks like a papillon/mini aussie mix. The important thing is that she's attentive, very playful and smart, and I think she will make a fun agility partner. She also has absolutely no manners at all, but I'm already working on that! She's estimated to be 7 months old, and she weighs about 12 lbs. I'm not sure how tall she is currently, but I think around 12-13." I may take her to PBH this evening and see if I can get her to stand under the wicket.

I've surprised even myself by getting another dog. I've had a couple of offers to adopt great dogs over the past few months, but I kept saying no because I really didn't think I wanted a third dog. But then Pinky broke her leg, putting her training on hold for a while. And then Lucy turned 11. She's still a fun agility dog, but she really can't do as much as she used to, particularly if it's hot. Another factor is that Pinky is likely to measure over 16", if only by a fraction, and I don't think I want to jump her at 22", so in USDAA I'll have to keep her in Performance. Nothing wrong with that, but I also want a Championship dog to run ... I'm not sure why that's important to me, but it is, and I don't want probably-too-tall-Pinky to have to work way too hard because of it.

So anyway, about her name: I've got several in mind, but I'm having a hard time deciding. I like "Miss Demeanor" (Miss D? Meana?), "She-Ra, Princess of Power" (just She-Ra or Ra for short), "Caprica Six" (only Battlestar Galactica Fans will like this one; Cappi for short) and "Alabama" (Bama or Bam). I'm also open to other suggestions (a co-worker wants me to name her "Eileen" so I can say "Come on, Eileen"). So I was able to summon just enough geekiness to make an online survey. Please play along!
Click Here to take survey

Interesting tidbit ...

2009-05-26T10:48:00.004-04:00

Yeah, I got a new dog, and I'll write more about that later. But right now I just wanted to share some info that may be interesting to dog owners in my area (Research Triangle, NC). The Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University is starting a Canine Cognition Center to study unique social cognitive abilities in dogs, (such as interpreting human gestures like pointing or eye gaze to find hidden food, a simple task that most other animals do not perform well in experiments.) The goal of the new lab is to run further experiments in the form of fun games on pet dogs to explore this unique ability.

The center will be starting its work next fall, but they are currently gathering information on potential participants. According to the information I received, the tests are expected to take 30 to 60 minutes and should not exceed two hours. Dog owners must be able to bring their dogs to the Center's lab on Duke's West Campus in Durham, where the dogs will participate in various problem solving games to win food rewards. Dogs of all breeds and ages are welcome and owners are welcome to sit in with their dogs while the testing is going on.

Although the studies will not start until Fall '09, dog owners who are interested in participating can fill out this questionnaire.

In the pink ... more or less

2009-05-19T13:55:00.003-04:00

I took Pinky to see a rehab vet yesterday to get an assessment of how she's doing on her healing leg. He thinks she doing extremely well! She's using the leg and putting weight on it, has good range of motion and the muscling in that leg is only slightly less than in the other. He encouraged me to start incrementally increasing her walks, and gave me the OK to start swimming her. He sees no reason at this point why she shouldn't be able to eventually get back to doing agility. This makes me very happy! I really can't wait until she can run and play, but until then I'll be patient and try to do exactly what's recommended.

In other news, yesterday a friend sent me a link to a little border-jack-jack on Petfinder. In a fit of insanity I put in an application on the dog. what am I thinking? I have yet to meet the dog because she's about 2 hours away, so I have no idea if I'll click with her or not. All I know is she's small, cute and has a lot of energy, which is part of what I would want in a dog. But why am I thinking about adding another dog? I must be crazy ... but Lucy turned 11 years old last week, and I'm thinking she's not going to be able to do whole trials, even at 12", for very much longer. I've missed not being able to train with Pinky, and it made me start considering adding a dog, just to make darn sure I've got one to play with when Lucy retires. Is that terribly crazy?

Six weeks to go ...

2009-04-27T10:23:00.003-04:00

So it's been two weeks since Pinky broke her leg, and I'm already starting to look forward to the end of crate/leash confinement. Must keep reminding myself not to rush anything. The photo above is Pinky doing one thing she's allowed: rolling in the grass (on leash, of course!)

She loves spending time outdoors, so I set up an X-pen in the yard where she can hang out while I'm doing yard work. I wish I had some sort of mobile pen, because my yard is very large and she gets upset when I'm all the way across the yard and she's stuck in the pen.

Yesterday I did a bit of shaping with her and made some progress towards "play dead." I figure that's a great thing to teach an injured dog! I'm also going to try Elayne's idea of teaching her the names of her toys, but first I have to come up with some names ... right now most of them are just called "toy!" She knows "ball" already, so I think I'll start by differentiating between "ball" and "tug." Then of course there's the problem of what to call the tug-ball, i.e. the ball-on-a-rope. Maybe I'll just name it "Bob" ...

Poor little Pinky ...

2009-04-21T10:14:00.005-04:00

I interrupt this blog's silence with some rather crummy news ... poor little Pinky broke her leg a week ago ... pretty badly, too. I suppose the upside of it is that now no matter what she she does in agility or whatever, I'll be thrilled that she's doing anything at all. All my frustrations about training her are gone ... I'll consider anything she's able to do to be awesome. Here's the damage:

Horrible, eh? "How did she do it?" is the first question everyone asks, and I really wish I knew. I wasn't watching. It was about 9:30 on a Saturday night and I had just gotten home from dinner with a friend and had taken her and Lucy into the backyard for a potty. Lucy had finished her business and wanted into the house, so I went to let her in, which put me out of sight of Pinky for a moment. The next thing I knew there was the sound of a dog screaming in pain from the yard ... it took me a few seconds to realize it was Pinky. I ran out to the middle of the yard and found her sitting sort of hunched and holding up her right front leg. I carried her into the light and could tell from a glance that something was really wrong with the leg, so I immediately stuck her in the her crate in the car and went to the emergency vet.

The prevailing theory seems to be that she stepped in a hole or something, although it had to have been just a shallow divot because that's all there are in the area where I found her (irony: most of the divots were dug by Pinky herself.). I'll never know for sure what it was, I guess, which makes me reluctant to ever let her out of my sight again once she's all healed.

The break required surgery to install a plate and some screws, which look something like this:

She got the bandage off after two days and is now putting some weight on the paw and using it a bit, but for the next seven weeks she is confined to her crate (or an x-pen I've set up in the living room) unless she's on the leash for potty breaks (or limited short walks after the fourth week). OK, I let her out to cuddle on the sofa with me every evening ... sue me! I do make sure I keep a hold on her so she can't impulsively jump off.

The great news is that she's expected to be able to do agility if I'm diligent about rehabbing her and manage not to let her re-injure herself during the healing process. It seems a bit ironic that the break happened the same day that I had had one of the best training sessions with her, ever ... I was feeling really upbeat about the fact that she was starting to relax and enjoy agility, and I was making plans to finally start training her on the teeter (I had even won a teeter base in a raffle!) Maybe after many months off she will be very excited to get back to it!

When she is allowed to do more activity, I think I'll take a tricks class with her before I get her back into agiltity. It seems like a low-impact way to get her working again, and she really seems to love any training that doesn't involve equipment.

Oh, and also, maybe I'll blog more ...

Pinkmalion

2008-12-12T09:41:00.003-05:00

Yes, I've been a bit absent from this blog, but I've been a busy dog lady. Hi again!

I've been trying to slowly turn Pinky into an agility dog. It's going to be harder than I thought, because she's turned out to be a bit of a shrinking violet when it comes to doing obstacle sequences. She feels no need for speed. She's a quick learner, but when it comes time to actually do some obstacles (outside of my yard at least--at home she gets quite speedy) she gets very slow and deliberate about it all. So as long as the competition takes place in my yard we'll be good to go ...

There is the saying that "you get the dog you need." In other words, you get the dog that will make you grow and develop as a trainer and handler. Well that may be and Pinky is definitely forcing me to learn and try new things, but I'm looking with longing at my friend's border-jacks, who come hard-wired for action and do nothing slowly. I start thinking that maybe I need one of those and that Pinky would be just as happy as a non-agility dog. She absolutely loves my sofa ...

At least Lucy is still happy to run for me. We've have competed a bit lately in NADAC and USDAA, and I'll be doing a local CPE trial this weekend. We do veterans in CPE and NADAC and I've moved her into Performance in USDAA, so she'll be jumping 12" from now until retirement.

Several weeks ago at a NADAC trial I discovered a way to make Hoopers actually fun and challenging: you have to run someone else's dog! So here I am trying to run a dog named Tanner ... if it weren't for an off-course jump at the end we would have Q'd:

I run Tanner in Hoopers from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

And here is Lucy running for Ryan Arnold, a friend's son. He's taken classes with one of their dogs but this is the first time he's run an entire couse in competition with a dog. They Q'd!!

Ryan runs Lucy in Hoopers from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

Happy "Gotcha Day" Pinky!

2008-10-08T10:23:00.002-04:00

One year ago today a little Puppy McNugget showed up at my house. I didn't think she was staying. I'm glad she did. I'm not sure exactly when she was born (around the end of August as near as I can figure), so at the suggestion of ... oh, I think it was Elayne, I celebrate Pinky's "Gotcha Day."

When I decided to keep her, I really had no idea whether she'd become a good agility dog or not. I just decided to take a risk because she's so damn cute and sweet and I had reached the point where there was no way I could NOT keep her. I'm still not sure how she's going to shape up, but I can report that we're making great progress ... but slowly.

Right now I have her in a class we're just calling "Agility Training Group." It's designed for young dogs with handlers who have already trained an agility dog and don't feel like spending time learning the difference between a front cross and a rear cross with the newbies. Pinky was a little stressy and spooky at first (something that wasn't such a problem with Lucy or Gomey), but she's starting to relax and have fun as the class goes on. I've been worried about speed because she tends to do the obstacles and mini-sequences very slowly, as if she's worried about doing the right thing or seriously considering wandering off to sniff the grass. But as I get her to relax more and more, she's speeding up quite a bit.

She particularly loves the contact trainer. After much mental debate, I decided not to teach running contacts for several reasons, but mostly because I think the amount of drilling and repetition required would be counterproductive at this point. What Pinky needs for motivation right now are extremely short and rewarding working sessions. Training 2o2o contact means the contact trainer has become the source of huge rewards and is very motivating.

She also seems to really love the closed chute. Something about barreling through the fabric seems to get her jazzed. In the house we play a game where I toss a sheet over her and she burrows around under it until she finds her way out, and she loves it so much that she goes nuts when I get a sheet of of the linen closet. I think the chute reminds her of that.

The jumps seem to worry her a little, so I've got to work on making them more motivating. I'm also being careful not to put them too high, because when she knocks bar, or even ticks it without knocking it, she gets rather stressed. This is new for me because Lucy has always loved jumps and rarely knocks bars. I never really had to any special exercises with her because she seems to have come hard-wired for good agility jumping style (it wasn't so great for flyball, however). I guess I need to take the Susan Salo and/or Linda Mecklenburg stuff more seriously now ...

In other news, I'm quite depressed about missing a local USDAA trial this weekend because I have to work. If Lucy and I hadn't got the ADCH already I'd be really heartbroken about missing the trial, but since we reached that goal I'm just a little sad. Really, aside from a health care plan, the main reason I maintain a steady job is to be able to consistently afford dog agility (I try to have a little something left over for housing, transportation and food, of course).

Flyball "pawness" survey

2008-09-17T06:49:00.004-04:00

The concept of "pawness" is familiar to people who train flyball dogs: it's the tendency of dogs to seem to prefer turning one way over the other. Many people (myself included) think it's a good idea to determine if a dog is "left-pawed" or "right-pawed" and then teach them to turn on the box in the appropriate direction to get a nice, fast turn. Now some researchers at UC-Davis are looking into the biology of "pawness," according to this e-mail I got from a flyball mailing list:

Dear Flyball Enthusiasts: The Canine Genetics group at the University of California, Davis, is interested in understanding the molecular basis of asymmetry in the context of developmental biology. A potentially elegant model of this is hand preference or "handedness".The insights of trainers and handlers of dogs competing in flyball presents a wonderful opportunity to establish the biology of "pawness" in dogs and to map the gene(s) underlying this asymmetry. We invite you to participate in an online survey informing us of your dogs' turning preference(s). The survey takes only seconds to complete and will be of great use to us in determining if the direction of choice is random or if there is indeed a biological basis for turn preference in mammals (dogs and humans alike).

Please follow the link below to complete the survey: http://www.vgl.ucdavis.edu/survey/index.php?sid=18992

The survey is only four questions and takes a minute or two to complete.

Who's a good girl?

2008-09-08T07:10:00.000-04:00

Yep, Lucy is a good girl! Yesterday she became ADCH Lucy! I got lucky, because I thought the Master's Gamble was really easy for us (although maybe I wouldn't have thought so a couple of years ago when we first got into Masters). I guess I should say that it was exactly the kind of thing we have practiced, which is what made it easy for us. It was out to a jump and then farther to another jump, followed by a 180 over another jump back to me and ending out to another jump that was only a few feet from the line. Some dogs had a hard time turning back in to the handler because they had already locked onto the last jump as they were going over the second one; others turned into the handler but didn't make the 180 jump, and a few didn't go out to the last jump. But good little Lucy executed it beautifully. In addition to being an ADCH run, it was also the first time we ever got two Gamblers Qs in one weekend. Our norm has been to get none.

Unfortunately, upon watching the video I realized that my last verbal to Lucy was "C'mere, out!" Poor Lucy. What the hell kind of instruction is "C'mere, out"? She puts up with so much from her stupid handler! What a good dog. Anyway, you can see it yourself, even though the zoom is a bit close to really see the layout of the gamble:

Lucy USDAA Gamble for the ADCH 09/07/08 from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

We also Q'd in our Standard run yesterday, the only other event I entered. And I got to run Derrell Stover's border collie L'il J, although I didn't do a very good job of it.

So now I guess I'll move Lucy into Performance and jump her at 12". She has no problems with the 16" jump height, but she's not getting any younger.

One down, one to go ...

2008-09-06T20:17:00.002-04:00

Lucy and I got a Gamblers Q today! That means if we get tomorrow's, we'll get our ADCH! We also got a Snooker Q and a Jumpers Q, which was a 100% Q rate for the day--all in the stupid sand ring. After I saw the Standard course I wished I had entered it, because it would have been a good one for us. But when I entered the trial I had been thinking of my little 10-year-old dog's energy and joints, so I think it was for the best to limit the day to three runs. We're only entered in two events tomorrow ... I think one is a Standard and the other, of course, is Gamblers. I'm feeling pretty confident right now, but we've never gotten two gamblers Qs in the same weekend before. Well, as the saying goes, there's a first time for everything!

Another DAM fine time

2008-09-06T08:12:00.003-04:00

I'm waiting for Tropical Storm Hanna to pass so I can go do some more agility. Today's events were supposed to start at 8 a.m., but Hanna's center is passing almost exactly over the trial site (Teamworks in Youngsville, NC) right now (according to weather radar). So today's start has been delayed until 2 pm. Probably only the craziest agility nuts will bother to go. You know I'll be there.

Yesterday's DAM tournament was good. My team came in fourth out of ten teams, not necessarily because we did everything really well, but because a lot of people did worse. That's the cool thing about DAM tournaments: because it's scored on a curve (so to speak) your misfortunes on course need only be not quite as bad as other peoples'.

My biggest issue with Lucy was running in the sand ring. We had been scheduled to run the whole thing in the grass ring, but in an effort to get finished before the rains started they decided to alternate between the grass and the sand ring so they could build one course while another was being run. I hate the sand ring at Teamworks. It's not just because it seems to magnify the sun or that it always fills whatever shoes I'm wearing with sand, but because the edges are infested with mice. If I were to pick the one thing Lucy loves above all other things, it would be hunting (and perhaps killing) little critters such as mice. Whenever we're in the sand ring, Lucy gets this half-dazed look and seems to be barely paying attention to me. This is a big improvement over when we first started competing there, when she would just check out and run to the corner of the ring sniffing frantically. These days she knows that she's supposed to do agility, and she's a very good dog who wants to do the right thing, but I think the rodent smell is just too alluring to let her concentrate. So she gets this half-dazed look on her face and really doesn't seem to have her full attention on me. I can't help but think that she's battling that primal urge: "Must .... kill ... little ... critters ..." Or maybe I'm just projecting and it's something entirely different. But our runs in the sand, especially gamblers, are almost always far worse than on grass.

I keep saying that I'm not going to enter Teamworks trials on days when the Masters classes are on sand, but then I go and do it anyway. So today we will be in the sand rig again. I'm hoping that all the rain will dilute the rodent odor a bit and give me at least a fighting chance for a Gamblers Q.

shakes fist at sky

2008-09-04T13:57:00.004-04:00

I'm really ticked off at Hanna, the tropical storm/maybe hurricane-to-be that's making a beeline almost right toward the site of the USDAA trial I entered this weekend (Youngsville, NC). Friday's DAM tournament should be safe because the storm isn't supposed to make landfall until early Saturday, but I'm sure Mother Nature is going to rob me of one, if not both, of my chances to get a Gamblers Q, dang it! Why can't the storm deflect into a big land mass to the south of us or something? And yes, in case you don't know me, I'm kidding. I'm always kidding.

Oh well, I'll just go ahead and post some videos. From last weekend. Please note that I am wearing skorts in these videos. I've been inspired by Laura to be a fashion-forward handler. Several other handlers were wearing skorts, and we all exchanged tips on where to find the best skortage (turns out to be Wal-Mart, if you can believe it). I apologize for the fact that my videos are always crappy. Someday I'll get a real video camera and I won't have to rely on my Sony Cybershot for this stuff.

So here's Lucy running the Standard course that would have been a lovely Q had she not suddenly veered away from the teeter:

Lucy USDAA Standard 08/30/08 from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

Here's Lucy on the DAM turnament Snooker course. She was going sloooww ... but, after the buzzer sounded and I was driving toward the finish line, she conscientiously took the set of weaves that was in front of her, even thought I was way ahead of her and heading away from the weaves. Now why can't she do that in Gamblers?

Lucy USDAA Snooker 08/29/08 from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

And here's me running Derrell Stover's dog Envy. Not successfully:

Envy USDAA Snooker 8/29/08 from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

PBH USDAA Labor Day trial: No ADCH, but more fun with dirt-kissing and DAM team

2008-09-01T17:10:00.004-04:00

Lucy and I spent our Labor Day weekend the way we always do, which is doing agility, of course. My big goal, the ADCH, was not even possible to achieve this time around because I need two Gamblers Qs and there was only one Masters Gamblers class offered all weekend. And we blew that gamble, so we still need the two Qs. Next weekend we have two chances, so we'll see ...

All we got as far as individual Qs was one in Jumpers (with a first place finish!) today. We had a really lovely Standard run yesterday except for the part where Lucy refused the teeter which, y'know, sort of spoils things ;-)

I also kissed the dirt again. It was actually running someone else's dog. On Saturday Derrell Stover let me run two of his amazing border collies, Li'l J and Envy, in Masters Snooker so he could devote his complete attention to running his young dog Qwest in the other ring. During Li'l J's run I was in a position that would have been perfectly safe had I been running Lucy, but it was not the right place to be for Li'l J, who's blazing fast. She exited a tunnel and before I could think "Crap, I shouldn't be here" she ran right into me and knocked me down. Fortunately she's accustomed to dealing with falling handlers, so she waited for further instruction while I jumped up and we continued the run. Time ran out before we completed the last obstacle, but apparently we Q'ed and, I'm told (I didn't look to verify) got first place (no Super Q, though--the P16 height class was combined with the 22s, and the first-place 22" dog got the SQ). I'm bummed that I didn't get the fall and my quick recovery on video.

The highlight of the weekend was probably the DAM tournament. Lucy and I were teamed with Janice Jones and Machias, an Akita, and Melanie Miller and her Visla Austin. We called our team "Irving" because, hey, it's a name, and no one thought of anything better. It turned out to be a good combination: Lucy is consistent, usually has decent speed and doesn't drop bars, Machias is no speed demon but she stays on course (the most important thing in DAM) and usually keeps her bars up and Austin is just usually awesome. The number one team, the FReaQs (Melanie's Regan, Derrell's Qwest and Nancy Burnapp's Fling, all great dogs with great handlers), would have been really hard to beat. So we did the next best thing and came in second (out of nine teams).

I have a few videos that I'll probably post this week. Then next weekend I'll do it all again ... DAM team and all.

"We are, in effect, breeding them to death"

2008-08-21T14:44:00.005-04:00

Thanks to Terrierman for posting these links:

UPDATE: Unfortunately, the "Pedigree Dogs Exposed" videos have been taken down from YouTube. You can see short promotional snippets of the program at the BBC website here and here. If anyone knows of another link to the entire program, please leave it in the comments.

The BBC program Pedigree Dogs Exposed is available for viewing on YouTube (in 6 parts):
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

I love my mutts.

Your warm fuzzy for the day ...

2008-08-15T09:26:00.003-04:00

In case you need a small dose of optimism: Today's LA Times has a nice little article about Tim Racer and Donna Reynolds of BAD RAP, one of the groups responsible for re-homing Michael Vick's pit bulls.

Working on it ...

2008-08-11T12:12:00.008-04:00

Well, I haven't been writing about it, but I have indeed been training my dogs lately. I'm getting back into a schedule of sorts, trying to get Lucy ready for the Fall trialing season (when I really hope we can get that ADCH!) and making some progress with Pinky so that maybe a year from now she can make her agility debut. It's hard for me to believe she's almost a year old already!

I've also started the ball rolling on acquiring some equipment for my new backyard training space. I started with a couple of jumps (I'll be adding more very soon). My friend Barb made the jumps using the Clean Run jump cup strips and sold me a couple at an amazing price (I think it may have been the "friend" price, so I'm going to keep it secret). She calls them the "Blast 1000" jumps, a play on her border jack's name (Blast) and the fact that she thinks the jumps are much better than the Max 200 ones (I agree). I only had one (not very good) jump before, so it's really great to be able to do more than single jump exercises.

Pinky has made a lot of progress lately. We've been taking a class called "Focus and Motivation Stations" taught by Melanie Miller. It's an interesting format: We pair up with another handler and go to different stations to work through various agility foundation exercises. One person works her dog while the other takes notes and/or helps out. Then a timer beeps (I'm not even sure how much time we spend at each station ... a minute, maybe? It's not a lot, at any rate) and the first handler puts her dog in its crate while the second gets hers out to work at the station. We do this until we get through all the stations (usually six) and then debrief/evaluate at the end of class.

I think Pinky and I both had a hard time adjusting to the crazy class format, and at first I felt like we were not making any progress at all. Pinky tends to be slightly nervous in new or strange situations, and she would get a little stressed in the class and not want to work. But over the last two weeks her stress level has decreased and she seems to be getting into the exercises a lot more. One telltale sign is that she's gone from willingly hopping back into her crate when the exercise is done to not wanting to go in at all. This indicates to me that before she felt weirded out by the situation and wanted the security of her crate, but now she's having a good time in the exercises and would rather not go back to the boring crate. Or maybe she's just suddenly gotten bratty about the crate and I have a whole new problem to work on ...

Based on the couple of Stuart Mah seminars I've been to (there will undoubtedly be more in my future), I really want to work more obstacle focus with Pinky than I did with Lucy. From what I understand of the way Stuart and Pati Mah train their dogs, I need to find ways to get Pinky to think that the obstacles themselves are rewarding and fun, not just something she has to do to get her tug or treat. I'm not sure exactly how to do this, but I've started playing a game ... lets call it "Any obstacle is a winner" ... in which Pinky gets a game of "mom will act like an idiot and tug with you" (one of her favorites) no matter which obstacle she chooses. There are no wrong answers in this game, although Pinky always, always takes whichever obstacle my body is turned toward (I don't indicate an obstacle or even say "go" at this point ... It's very much a shaping game where I wait for her to decide). Right now we're only playing with a few cones and my three jumps, but I'm hoping to add a tunnel to my equipment collection very soon. If nothing else Pinky seems to be having a lot of fun with the game, and so am I.

(Just in case anyone who reads this blog doesn't already read AgilityNerd, Steve recently attended a Stuart Mah seminar and has posted his take here. And also, try out Steve's new Googility search tool if you haven't already. Oh, and the AgilityNerd empire now includes a store. Please help Steve finance his expensive agility habit ;-) I wonder if he'll make me a rubber wristband that says "WWSD" or, "What Would Stuart Do"?)

In other very exciting news, I'm expecting word that my channel weaves will be ready for pickup sometime this week. I really want to work more weave entries at distances and odd angles with Lucy because it's something we almost never do successfully when it comes up in masters gambles.

Please excuse my absence ...

2008-07-15T11:08:00.002-04:00

The past few weeks have been filled with packing, moving, unpacking and now painting, so I haven't had much time for dog adventure blogging. My new yard (.59 acres) is doggie heaven compared to my old one (.17 acres), and the girls really like it (as does Mr. Gomez who has come for a few visits). There are thickets of azaleas and other shrubby-type things all along the edges, full of critter scents (bunnies for sure), so Lucy thinks it's heaven. Also I think I may have moles in one part of the yard.

I'm hoping to have some agility equipment in there soon. The first purchase: a set of channel weaves. A friend's husband makes them at a great price, the trouble is I have to wait for him to actually make them. That's supposed to be done this week. I can't wait to start Pinky on a 12-pole channel (I've already started her on 6 using a set of rebar-and-pvc stick-in-the-ground poles).

Pinky is currently in a "Focus and Motivation" class at PBH, taught by Melanie Miller. It's a fun but slightly strange class in which we pair up with another dog/handler team and then take turns spending two minutes at different stations doing various exercises with the dogs. It's a little bit mind-blowing for Pinky at this point, but I think it will help her out. Trouble is I have had so little time for training and practice lately with all of my home-related work, and it's hard to establish a regular schedule when everything is so disorganized.

Lucy is in a "distance" class, which I'm hoping will help us toward those two Gambler's Qs we need for the ADCH. Also maybe I should try to schedule some actual practice time with Lucy. That seems to help somewhat.

On a completely unrelated note: I think I'd like to DNA test Pinky just for fun to see what's in her. But there appear to be a million zillion companies now offering the tests, and I don't know which one i should try. I'd love to hear opinions from people who have tried any of them.

Swimming lessons

2008-06-22T07:14:00.007-04:00

I spent Thursday and Friday at a Stuart Mah seminar, and I'm probably going to write a post about it when I get around to it, but I wanted to finally get around to posting about Pinky's swim lesson. Complete with photos!

Dogs can pretty much swim on their own; if they find themselves in water they figure out how to keep their heads above water and move themselves toward the shore. But until they try it, a lot of dogs don't know that they know how to swim, and many will avoid getting into the water if they can help it. Some will take the plunge if they see other dogs or people having fun in the water, but Pinky's not one of those. She doesn't even like stepping into a puddle.

When Lucy and Mr. Gomez were pups, we "taught" them to swim, by which I mean we helped them discover they could do it with little swimming lessons. It's pretty simple--you find a place where you can go into the water with your dog (we lived in Chicago at the time so chose a beach on Lake Michigan), then you carry the dog into water and let her swim back to shore by your side while you praise and encourage her. It worked beautifully, and now both dogs really enjoy taking a dip. Mr. Gomez, who has a rather obsessive personality, is nuts about swimming (especially if there is a ball to fetch). He's really the most awesome swimming dog I've ever seen--very fast and smooth, like a great big otter. Lucy's pretty good, too.

Pinky was past due for a swim lesson, so last weekend we headed out to a local swimming hole. Here I am carrying her in:

She's swimming! But she doesn't look like she's having a lot of fun:

All wet!

I did the carry-and-swim about 6 times. At one point, Pinky willingly got in and swam when I tossed a ball, but mostly she just hung out on the bank and watched me, Lucy and Mr. Gomez having a good time. We're going back today for another go.

And now for a few gratuitous photos:

Lucy and me:

Lucy gets the ball:

The two cutest little dogs in the world:

A damn fine dog:

Pinky likes contacts

2008-06-17T06:45:00.003-04:00

I took Pinky to my friend's Sue's house to meet Sue's Foster dog, Elvis (who needs a home, y'all). We'll be going to a Stuart Mah seminar this week, and I'll be leaving Pinky with Sue's pack and a petsitter. We wanted to make sure she and Elvis were pals first.

Pinky thought Elvis was just fine, but she was initially way more interested in Sue's contact trainer (Sue is teaching Sylvia Trkman-style running contacts to her young border collie). Pinky, apparently remembering how rewarding it can be to walk on a board, immediately started going up and down the ramp:

I was really glad to see that Pinky seemed to choose doing agility stuff over playing with another dog. I mean, I want her to like other dogs, but I don't want her to prefer them over working with me.

But we have a bit of work to do on our contact criteria. Here she is doing a "sitting contact" (while Elvis catches a tossed treat next to her), which probably isn't what I'll want her to do in a trial:

Also, I took Pinky for a swimming lesson on Sunday. I have photos. I'll post them whenever I have a few free minutes. I am packing up to move at the end of June, so of course it's not the best time to be going out of town for a Stuart Mah seminar. Whatever.

Bad Roomba!

2008-06-12T09:11:00.003-04:00

Wow, BoingBoing has been a fount of doggie info today ... that's where I found a link to this Wall Street Journal article about tensions between pets and robots. It's pretty funny, and be sure to watch the videos. I loved the advice given to people whose dogs feel threatened by a Roomba: scold the Roomba in front of the dog! I guess I've done sillier things. A slice of meat on the Roomba also seems to help achieve détente.

Dogs that know when their owners are coming home, redux

2008-06-12T08:30:00.002-04:00

Via BoingBoing I read about a new study to replicate Rupert Sheldrake's experiments into why some dogs appear to know when their owner is coming home. Although I'm skeptical about the hypothesis that there's telepathy going on, I find the experiments quite interesting. I'd participate myself if I weren't so incredibly lazy.

Agility For Dummies

2008-06-06T07:02:00.002-04:00

I often bore normal people to tears at parties and such with all my talk about dogs and and agility, but every once and a while I meet someone who's genuinely interested and starts asking me about how to go about training their dog to do agility. Blah, blah, blah, I usually say ... but now I can save my jawbone and just tell them to head on over to YouTube for this little gem, which tells you pretty much all you need to know:

Jonesing for a pic of my cute puppy?

2008-06-02T11:53:00.002-04:00

In case you're wondering Pinky's still adorable.

Oh yeah, and I havent run out of videos yet. Maybe you wish I would ...

This one here was Mr. Gomez' third and final Advanced Jumpers Q. If I were still competing with him, we would be in Masters Jumpers now, which would probably be a complete disaster because he was expert at the art of refusing obstacles.

Mr. Gomez USDAA Jumpers Dec. 2007 from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

This one is a Standard run with Lucy from last December. It wasn't one of the smoothest or fastest runs, but maybe we could have qualified if it weren't for that dang off-course tire near the end.

Lucy USDAA Masters Standard Dec. 2007 from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

Lucy gets the thumbs-up

2008-05-29T11:07:00.003-04:00

I'm really happy to report that Dr. Sherman at VetHab found no physical concerns in his examination of Lucy. He said that she is in great shape for a 10-year-old dog. So I still don't know why she was refusing the teeter, but I feel a huge sense of relief that it's probably not physical. (She didn't refuse the teeter a single time this weekend, leading me to believe that it's something about unfamiliar teeters she doesn't trust). I will continue to limit her runs and still plan to move her to Performance after her ADCH (I already enter her in NADAC Veteran's class), but at least I know that she's sound enough to stay in Championship until I manage to get those last two Gamblers Qs.

Dr. Sherman did tell me I need to expand my pre-run warm-up routine to include a few minutes of walk/trot/canter/gallop in addition to the stuff I already do, and I need to make sure I do it no more than ten minutes before a run. I've already been feeding Lucy joint supplements for years (glucosamine/chondroitin, MSM, fish oil and vitamin E), and he said to keep it up. In reference to Pinky, I asked him at what age he recommends starting a pup on supplements and he said 4 years or after the first incident/problem.

He also told me that if Lucy has another bout of "mystery lameness" like she had a couple months ago to call him immediately and they will fit us in as soon as possible.

Sunday's Jumpers and Standard runs on video

2008-05-27T20:42:00.003-04:00

My friend Barb posted video she took of our Sunday Jumpers and Standard runs.

The Standard run was the one where I thought we had qualified only to find out we were 1.22 seconds over time. From the video I can see that maybe she wasn't running quite as fast she could have been, and there were a few other places where we lost a little time: a pause on top of the A-frame, pokey weaves, bit of delay as I RFP'd her before the dogwalk (had to avoid the off-course tunnel!), and a wide turn where I front-crossed after the fourth-to-last jump. Still, I think the yardage may have been figured a bit tight on this course.

The Jumpers run was qualifying. Not blazingly fast, but fast enough and clean. That's all that counts. Plus Lucy is darn cute.

A Standard Q, another Super Q, and more video

2008-05-27T11:13:00.004-04:00

Monday was a good day at the USDAA trial. We started the day with a really awesome Standard run--clean and well under time. I never seem to get these kinds of runs on video; I end up getting to see my embarrassing mistakes but not my triumphs. I would love to see if this one looked as good as it felt. I got lots of "Great Run!" comments from fellow competitors afterward, so my guess is it looked pretty good. This leaves us lacking only those two darn Gamblers Qs for the ADCH.

Our Pairs run went really well, except that Lucy leapt the dogwalk contact. The score sheet showed another five faults, but I don't know what they were or which of us was responsible. I don't really care, though. It was a fun run and I don't really need the Q for anything.

We went on to get yet another Snooker Super Q. I wasn't actually trying for it, and in fact I was hoping my friend Barb would get it, but it so happened that the easiest path through this course was a 1-7/1-7/1-7 opening, and all of the 16" and 12" teams did the same thing. Lucy and I just went a tiny bit faster, and we made it all the way through the closing (by a nose!) while everyone else got the horn part way through #7. It's funny that when I first started USDAA, Snooker always filled me with dread, probably because I didn't really understand the strategy. Now I love it, and several of the Starters handlers I train with it have actually come up to me saying something like "I hear you're a Snooker expert, and I need help planning my course." That makes me chuckle because they obviously haven't seen all the Snooker runs where we got whistled off after the third or fourth obstacle.

No one would ever confuse me with a Gamblers expert, but I think I need to become one if Lucy and I are going to finish the ADCH before she's too old to run Championship. I'm already getting concerned that she can't do quite as much agility in a day as she did just a year ago, and in fact I didn't enter the tournament events this weekend just because I wanted to limit her runs. On Monday after our third run she seemed a little stiff, slow and tired, so I decided to pull her from Jumpers. I figured I'd feel horrible if I let her get injured for a Q I don't particularly need.

Tomorrow we're going to get checked out at VetHab (it was supposed to be last week but then I had a work conflict with the appointment), and I'm hoping he says she's in fabulous shape for a 10-year-old sport dog. I still plan to start taking it easier with her at trials, and I'll probably move her to Performance after getting the ADCH just for the lower jump heights.

And speaking of getting whistled off Snooker courses, here's a video of a run with Mr. Gomez last December in which nothing really went the way I planned. In the opening, he ended up taking a jump that was part of #6 when I wanted him to take a tunnel that was part of #7. I was able to salvage that and get him over the other part of #6, but then I was out of position and had to sort of make up a new strategy as I went along. Then in the closing he decided to take the #7 tunnel instead of the correct #6 jump. D'oh!

Mr. Gomez USDAA Advanced Snooker Dec. 2007 from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

Still no progress toward the ADCH ... and a couple more videos

2008-05-25T19:28:00.004-04:00

I had been full of hope this morning that we would manage to knock out one and maybe even two of the three remaining legs we need for our ADCH but, alas, it was not to be. We did start the day right with a nice Jumpers Q, which we followed up with a Pairs Q. It was our partners' first time in Masters Pairs, and the guy really wanted a Q. So I told him we would do our part to make sure he got it. And we did. The only real challenge on either half of the course was a difficult weave pole entry, but our class two weeks ago was devoted to that very problem, and it turned out to be not so much of a problem for us.

Our Standard run felt great--squeaky clean and (I thought) reasonably fast. I was sure we had Q'd. But when I checked the results, we had gotten first place in the 16" class, but we were 1.22 seconds over time. It just didn't seem right. There's a possibility Lucy ran a little wide in a few spots, but it felt like she was turning tightly enough. Only two dogs out of the entire Masters class qualified on that course, and time was an issue for a lot of people, so there was speculation that perhaps the judge wheeled the course incorrectly, leaving out a jump at some point. Oh well, there's nothing to be done about it; as folks like to say, "The agility gods giveth and the agility gods taketh away."

I had huge hopes for our Gamblers run because the gamble looked like one we could actually get. But Lucy, instead of taking the easy and correct end of a tunnel going under an A-frame, actually swerved right and went around the A-frame to the much more difficult, but incorrect, entrance. I couldn't have gotten her to do that if I had tried, but nonetheless I'm sure it was something I did. In fact, I know that as soon as I thought she was committed to the correct entrance, I made a move to get in position for the next part of the gamble. I think she saw my motion out of the corner of her eye and she moved accordingly. Oh well. She was trying to do the right thing.

Maybe we'll get that Standard Q tomorrow. In the meantime, here are a couple more videos. The first one is a happy one--the DAM team run that pushed "Will Work For Food" up from 11th place to a 7th place (qualifying) finish a couple of weeks ago.

"Will Work For Food" USDAA DAM Team Relay May 2008 from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

The second is a Steeplechase run from last December. A fumbled weave cost us too much time and we didn't Q, but otherwise it was a nice little run.

Lucy USDAA Steeplechase Dec. 2007 from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

A decent day at USDAA and a couple more agility videos ...

2008-05-24T21:15:00.004-04:00

I had a reasonably good day today at the USDAA trial. Lucy and I only ran three courses because I had decided to take it easy and not enter Grand Prix. Our Gamblers run was great except for the part where we didn't get the gamble. Our Standard run would have been flawless except for one little popped weave pole. I decided not to fix it because we would have NQ'd anyway and Lucy gets demotivated sometimes when I restart her weaves; aside from being eliminated we had a super run. Then we managed to squeak out our fourth Snooker Super Q, simply because I managed to get us across the finish line slightly faster than other dogs who scored the same.

Now, as threatened previously, I'm posting a couple more videos from previous events.

The first one is Mr. Gomez doing an Advanced Gamblers run more than a year ago. If this had been Masters we would have NQ'd because we had two refusals on the three-obstacle gamble, but as it was Advanced we actually Q'd because I eventually managed to get him over the darn jumps before the finish horn sounded.

Mr. Gomez USDAA Gamblers May '07 from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

The second one is Mr. Gomez on an Advanced Standard run from last December. He didn't finish his weaves and I generally don't make more than two tries, so we would have NQ'd, but then he also took an off-course jump so we were eliminated. Still, in light of the fact that he's a Very Special Dog, I considered it a pretty good run. I love the commentary by my friend Cindy when she notes that Gomey is like her youngest dog: "This is the dog I have. I have seen the future and it's not pretty!"

Mr. Gomez USDAA Advanced Standard Dec. 2007 from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

Dog agility video overload!

2008-05-23T21:20:00.003-04:00

I'll be spending the holiday weekend doing three full days of USDAA agility with Lucy. There's always that chance we'll get the two Gamblers and one Standard Q we need for the ADCH. Really. It could happen.

Anyway, some friends of mine occasionally took video of me running Lucy and Mr. Gomez at various trials over the past year, and yesterday they gave me a disk jam packed with action. So over the next week I'll be posting way more video than anyone ever wanted to see of me running my dogs in agility.

The first one is a NADAC Touch & Go course, and there's a lesson here: too much RFP pulls a dog off of BOTH obstacles in a discrimination. Watch and learn:

Lucy NADAC Touch & Go (or: Too Much RFP!) from bunchofpants on Vimeo.

Spay/neuter questions hit the mainstream press

2008-05-20T09:50:00.001-04:00

Folks with performance/working dogs have been discussing for years the wisdom of early spay/neuter in regard to the health and structural soundness of dogs (I recently weighed my options for Pinky and decided to wait). Now an an article at MSNBC raises some of the questions as many states and municipalities consider mandatory spay/neuter laws. (Thanks to Pet Connection for the link).

There are many good reasons to spay or neuter, but I think mandatory spay/neuter laws have far more downside than upside (that is, supposedly our shelters wouldn't be so full with these laws). Diane Blackman at DogPlay has a fairly comprehensive list of arguments against such laws. I personally think that the administrative costs involved with enforcing such laws would be much better spent to make it easier and cheaper for the average pet owner to spay/neuter than on the sisyphean task of enforcing laws that have been shown to be less-than effective in the long run (see this Animal Law Coalition paper, for example).

As for Pinky, I do actually plan to spay her, if for no other reason than I can't see myself dealing with the required vigilance and mess of heat cycles twice a year for something like the next 15 years (or more, I hope!). I have no interest in breeding dogs, even though I think Pinky is one awesome little dog.

I've linked to these articles before, but what the heck, I'll link to them again. So for more about the health implications of spay/neuter, see:
Early Spay-Neuter Considerations for the Canine Athlete
Long-Term Health Risks and Benefits Associated with Spay/Neuter in Dogs
Determining the optimal age for gonadectomy of dogs and cats

Contact questions

2008-05-16T09:50:00.005-04:00

This post at the Team Fernadezlopez blog was of great interest to me, because I'm currently waffling back and forth on the question of what kind of contacts I should teach Pinky. With Lucy and Mr. Gomez I just accepted that I should strive for 2o2o (for non-agility folks, that means "two on, two off," which is how we describe the contact criterion where the dog stops with its back paws on the contact and its front paws off). I think it's probably easiest way for a brand-new handler to train and enforce some consistency.

But I have a few problems with the 2o2o. The biggest is that in order to make them reliable in a trial one must be prepared to clearly mark their absence as incorrect even if the dog actually touched the contact enough to satisfy the judge. That means you have to do something that could potentially interrupt what might have been a qualifying run just because the dog didn't stop and hold at the bottom of a contact. Some people go so far as to end a run and carry the dog off the field if he doesn't stop, others just use a verbal mark or pause. If you don't consistently mark an incorrect performance, what happens is that a dog can learn two ways of doing contacts: one for practice and another for trials. That's what my dogs did (my own damn fault, of course). Because I wasn't the greatest contact trainer, I ended up with leaping contacts in trials (and eventually in practice, too) for a while. Through a lot of re-training and practice, Lucy and I have worked out a "moving contact" compromise wherein I signal her to slow down and shorten her stride enough to get a foot or two on the yellow before commencing her leap.

This isn't a great system, of course. For starters, it's really hard to front cross her coming off the A-frame, and that's occasionally been a bit inconvenient. But the worst part is that even though I've gotten to where I can signal the slowdown from about 15 feet away, I'm still stuck babysitting her contacts all the time. If I were to keep running forward or turn away slightly, odds are she would either leap the contact or come off the side. This has been a big disadvantage to me many times on the Masters Level courses, especially in Gamblers.

But even if I had done all the necessary work to get reliable 2o2o contacts, I sort of doubt they would be independent of any action by me. I rarely ever see a dog that will reliably stop in 2o2o and await the release no matter where the handler is or what she is doing. Getting a 2o2o that doesn't require at least a little "babysitting," takes months of repetitions and reinforcement ... as do most methods of teaching running contacts (like Sylvia Trkman's, for example). So if I'm going to put in all that work, why not use it to at least have FAST independent contacts?

I'm really interested to know what other people think about the pros and cons of running contacts, so if you have an opinion, please comment.

Third time's a charm and the trouble with teeters

2008-05-13T14:32:00.003-04:00

I'm quite happy to announce that, were I the type of person who puts her dogs' names and titles in the signature of her emails, I would now have two more letters to put next to Lucy's name: TM. Last weekend at the Blue Ridge Agility Club USDAA trial we finally got the second DAM team leg we needed to complete the Tournament Master title. It was our third try for that second leg, and we made it by the skin of our teeth. In fact, I was flabbergasted when I heard our team name ("Will Work For Food") announced as the 7th place finisher (the lowest placement that qualified,) because up until the team relay we had been floundering down around 11th place. But all three of us rocked the relay course, which constitutes a huge portion of the points, while many other higher-ranked teams sustained one or more eliminations. So I guess the moral of this story is not to give up or get discouraged or something or other.

Lucy ran really well for me all weekend, and we had some really nice runs, two of which actually qualified: one in Masters Pairs (our fifth, which means we got that title as well), and one in Masters Standard. Those knocked out two of the five legs we need for the ADCH, which means now all we need in one more Standard and two Gamblers. I think ... I need to double-check these things because I've gotten it wrong in the past

Two of our runs were really awesome except for one problem: Lucy was shying away from the teeter. The first time was in Snooker on Saturday, when she hopped off the teeter in the opening. I was able to get her to complete it, but when we came around to it in the closing, she hopped off again and since in the closing that becomes a refusal, our run ended two points short. She ran the teeter correctly in Standard later Saturday and again Sunday morning, but then during the Grand Prix she ran right past it. I circled her around and got her on it, but then she jumped right off again. Knowing I wasn't going to fix whatever it was right there at the trial, I just decided to keep going, and she really smoked the rest of our course. If it hadn't been for the teeter I would have counted that as one of our best runs ever.

So now I'm wondering: whats up with Lucy's teeter? She had some issues at another trial last month, but in practice and trials at our "home" field she's been fine. So I was thinking that perhaps there's something about "away" teeters that feels or looks different to her, making her a little spooked by them. But then after I got home from the trial I read this interview with Lis' Kristoff at the USDAA site (if you haven't read it already, be warned: it's sort of a tear-jerker), and she mentioned that her dog Diva, who had knee problems, had some issues from the jarring of the teeter. So now I'm wondering if perhaps the teeter is sometimes painful for Lucy. The times she's had problems with it have been on packed dirt and sand, which are probably a little less shock-absorbing than our grassy training field.

So I made an appointment for Lucy to get an evaluation by Dr. John Sherman at VetHab. I'm hoping that it will rule out my hypothesis because he'll say "Oh, she's in fine shape," but considering that she just turned 10 years old, that might not be the case. Whatever it is I won't find out for another week because he can't see her until next Wednesday.

In Pinky news, she has gone into heat. I hope that as I write this her little hormones are sending cease and desist signals to her growth plates. I made great strides in getting her to hang out next to the measuring wicket over the weekend, but I didn't want to undo all my hard work by actually bringing the wicket arm all the way down to her withers. So the only thing I can say at this point is that she's definitely under 17 inches tall ... she may actually be under 16, but I can't say for sure. She looks shorter than a friend's dog who measures exactly 16 inches, so I'm still holding out hope that I'll end up with a 16" jumper.

It's called a leash ...

2008-05-06T09:58:00.010-04:00

I love a chance to let my dogs do a little off-leash roaming. It can be fun for them to get to sniff around and maybe chase a small critter or two without me telling them "leave it" or "let's go" constantly. But I try to be very aware of when it's appropriate for them to be off leash and when it's not. It goes without saying that I don't let them roam near vehicle traffic, but the number one guideline in my mind is: Will having my dog off-leash be inconsiderate to anyone else in the area? Even though my dogs have really good recall and I always carry treats and reward them for coming back to me, I never want to take the chance that one of my dogs will have an interaction that's not welcomed by another person or dog. So if we're on a quiet, secluded trail, I'll let them off leash but be prepared to call them to me and hook them up when I see or hear someone else. If we're on a busy path, I just keep them on-leash to be considerate of other people, especially those with dogs.

Unfortunately, some people are oblivious to the needs of other people. I'm not sure what they think--maybe they think their dogs are a free spirits and need to run through he world unencumbered. Maybe they never bothered to teach their dogs to behave on a leash so it's easier to walk without one. Maybe they think their dogs are so special that every other person and dog in the world will welcome them with open arms. The funny thing is ... OK, its not so funny, these people are often the last people in the world who should be out in public with their unleashed dogs--they usually have no control over them whatsoever.

Or worse, they don't think they need to control the dog. I wish I had money for everytime I've had a dog racing toward me and my dogs, and the owner calls "He's friendly!" So I call out "Mine aren't!" This is an exaggeration. Pinky is actually fine with other dogs (so far ... I'm well aware that this could change after just one bad incident), but Lucy can have some issues. Under most circumstances she'd rather mind her business and doesn't pay much attention to other dogs. But she has rules. She dislikes dogs that are overly forward and insist on face-to-face greeting before proper bum-sniffing has been completed. She dislikes dogs who stare at her too intensely. She's wary of bigger dogs in general, especially if the dog at all resembles a Rhodesian ridgeback. None of these problems is insurmountable, and with proper introductions she will eventually get along with anyone, but without proper introductions she can be a snarky little bitch. Basically, she postures big, and even though I know she will stop short of actual contact with the other dog, I can never predict the response of the other dogs. Most dogs just act like "Oh, well I guess I'll just leave you alone then." But what about the one dog who will say "Oh no you didn't just grouch in my face ..." and decide to escalate?

Anyway, the reason I'm thinking of this is that we had another incident Sunday. I live a couple of blocks from a nice walking path around Duke University's East Campus, which is very popular and I would never think of walking the dogs off-leash there. We were halfway around the path and I saw a guy with a golden retriever who looked a little high-energy. I thought the guy had the dog on a flexi-lead, so I veered off the path to allow some distance between us. It wasn't until I realized the dog was running toward us at full speed that he wasn't on a leash at all. I yelled "get your dog!!" to the guy, and he started calling the dog but of course the dog had gone selectively deaf and had his eyes on Lucy. I have no doubts that he only wanted to say hello, but Lucy doesn't care about a dog's intentions. I kept yelling at the guy to get his dog, but of course he couldn't.

Thankfully, Lucy's snark was relatively mild, but enough to let the golden know she didn't want to meet. He backed off and by that time the owner had caught up, and was scolding Bruno: "You know you're not supposed to do that!" Uh, no dude, I don't think he really knows because it doesn't appear that you've taught him. My guess is that the dog gets to be off-leash a lot, and he's learned that he's pretty much free as a bird do do as he pleases. No matter how much he gets yelled at after the fact, he's already been rewarded by getting to take off running whenever he feels like it. In fact, scolding him now is teaching him that it's more fun to run away from his person than to go back or let his person catch up.

Which brings me to another point about a leash: it's a great tool for teaching a dog "you're with me." If a dog can't learn to curb its impulses (running up to people or other dogs, chasing cats and squirrels, following a delicious scent trail) while on the leash, there's no chance of teaching him when he's off. The acts of seeking and pursuing are innately rewarding to most dogs. Unless you've already conditioned another reward (i.e., turning around and coming back to me = delicious treats), letting your dog off leash is really a way to build bad habits by getting to engage in the self-rewarding behavior of running off. If you condition a recall, however, and richly reward it every time, you may eventually be able to call your dog off something as fabulous as a squirrel or rabbit.* (I wrote a post on training recall a while back, FYI). (Also, Steve at Agility Nerd recently posted about a similar experience his partner had with a dog "greeting.")

Unfortunately, the people who need to know this stuff probably aren't the ones who read my blog ;-)

*Results may vary. I have been both successful and unsuccessful in calling Lucy off of critters in mid-chase.

UPDATE: Elayne has her own two bits to add to this discussion!

Britain's Got Talent=way better than American Idol!

2008-04-25T09:29:00.003-04:00

What bugs me a little is that they go on and on about how talented the dog is but neglect to notice what a great trainer the girl is. It takes a lot of time and patience to train all of these things, even with a border collie!

Dogplay.com has a good intro article about getting started in canine freestyle, as well as a page of links for more info.

Pinky flashback

2008-04-16T15:34:00.001-04:00

PA081628_x
Originally uploaded by Mr. Gomez

I just wanted to post this picture of Pinky, taken the day she first showed up at my house last October. She was about six weeks old. The boy holding her is Carlos, who had gotten her from a guy giving away puppies. He brought her to us when his parents said he couldn't keep her. (Also pictured are Carlos' friend Lupe on the left, and my neighbor Melissa with her daughter Nina.)

Pinky is a big girl now

2008-04-15T15:52:00.000-04:00

From that photo it looks like Pinky is a lot bigger than Lucy, but really it's not that much (perspective, y'know--Pinky's in the foreground). But she is indeed a teensy bit taller. Which means she's officially in the danger zone--it's very possible that she could get over 16". She's eight months old, and it's clear she's going to be medium-sized, so I'm hoping she'll stop growing any day now. I was trying to measure her this weekend, but she's really spooked by the wicket and it's hard to get her to stand up under it. So I'm not positive of her true height at this point. I just keep saying "Don't grow big, Pinky, don't grow big!"

At any rate, people love to try to guess what her mix could be. A lot of people insist that she has some smooth-coat border collie in her. Could be ... if so it's not so dominant in her behavior. I think that her personality is a lot more terrier. What do you think she is? Here are three photos I took the other day, trying to capture her at various angles (click the photos to see them larger):

I think she's probably a three-or four-way mix and there's not really any way to know for sure ... except maybe a DNA test. But in a way it's sort of good not knowing--I really have no preconceived notions about how she is supposed to behave. Still, it would be fun to have something to say other than "no idea" when people ask "what is she?" If you make up a breed, a lot of people will say "Oh really?" and just accept that you're serious. I met a guy who would say his dog was a "Wizenheimer" whenever people asked, and he said only a few people ever got it. Maybe I'll say Pinky's a Smooth-Coated Andean Shepherd, a breed developed by indigenous people on the western slopes of the Andes to herd guinea pigs.

Meh, it could have been better ...

2008-04-14T13:55:00.006-04:00

My USDAA agility weekend was not so hot. On Friday our DAM team didn't Q, although we didn't completely suck. Lucy and I did passably well in most classes (we E'd in Standard), but our very young teammate dogs had a few oopses. I expected them both to E a few times, and I had been hoping I could run Lucy strong enough to make up for it. But I just didn't have a great day because I was feeling a bit weak and fatigued. When my day is not great, Lucy's isn't either. Her mistakes are really my mistakes. I went home Friday thinking that maybe I should just sleep late on Saturday and then take the dogs to a park.

Instead, I got up and went back out for more agility. I still wasn't feeling great, and consequently we had bad runs.

Sunday morning, I again considered skipping the trial, but then I realized that I actually felt pretty darn good. So I decided I would just leave the trial the moment I felt at all tired or stupid. We didn't Q in everything (just Jumpers and Snooker), but we had five really decent runs. I guess I do have a brag of sorts, although it seems too amazing to be true: little Lucy posted a jumpers time of 22.36 (on a 141 yard course). What's really flabbergasting is that I looked at all of the Masters dogs' times, and no one posted anything faster. Now Lucy's run was pretty darn fast and her turns were tight (and I saw a lot of wide turning and a few slips in the dewy grass by the bigger dogs), but I really have a hard time believing she was THAT fast! Her previous fastest Jumpers time (on a 140 yard course) was 27.60. So either Lucy was on fire Sunday morning and beat the feathers off a bunch of border collies, or the electronic timer made a mistake. I hope it was the former!

NADAC mudgility

2008-04-11T06:55:00.000-04:00

I started this post on Monday, but I've been so busy I didn't finish until Friday ... maybe by next Friday I will have written about this weekend's USDAA trial. I'll announce in advance that we got a DAM team Q to finish our Tournament Master title in the hopes that positive thinking will pay off ...

I ran Lucy in a NADAC trial last weekend. I had been grumpy and tired all week, and I had thought on Friday that if the weather was crummy on Saturday I'd just stay home. But of course I couldn't. Even though we've had record rainfall lately and they were calling for terrible, furious storms on Saturday, I got up early and schlepped my gear and dogs out to the trial. It was rainy and hella muddy, but the terrible furious storms never materialized. I had on all my waterproof gear (including contact lenses instead of glasses--glasses don't work so well in the rain) and I managed to have a great time even though the field was a foot-sucking quagmire that was very hard to run in.

I qualified in some stuff and not in others ... I don't really remember what exactly, except one of the Qs was in Chances, which means we'll finally move up to Elite in that. We don't have such a good record in NADAC Chances, and I really didn't think we'd get this one because it involved turning Lucy away from me and then out pretty far onto a tunnel, after which she had to do a dogwalk and a jump while I remained what felt like a few miles away (OK, it was more like 18 feet or so). I figured that even if she made the tunnel, she was going to come off the side of the dogwalk before she hit the contact, because that's what she often does when I'm too far away. So I figured I would just run the course as if I knew my dog would do her part correctly if I did mine. It worked. She looked like one of those dogs who always gets the distance challenge. It was sweet.

And even thought I've dissed Hoopers before, I decided to try the "new" Hoopers, which is sort of like a strategy game. But not really a strategy game because you don't accumulate points for doing some things over others, so there's not a lot of incentive for going going beyond the easiest possible thing you've gotta do to Q. So I guess the strategy is "what's our safest bet here?" Unless you want to try to get a 15-point Q, in which case there's a distance line on one of the tests, but I don't do enough NADAC to understand the advantage of a 15-point Q. Does it get you your NATCH sooner or something? I dunno, and I don't really care. I just wanted to be able to say first-hand whether the "new" Hoopers is fun or lame.

Since NADAC doesn't have any description of the Hoopers rules on their website (probably so they can change the rules a few more times), I'll try to describe it here: There is a series of "tests," which I think (but don't quote me) must include a serpentine, a pinwheel and a crossing pattern (or "x-box," as one person called it), and may include others (one of the courses this weekend had a little threadle test.) Then there is a set of "non-test" hoops in a row along one side of the course. So you do three non-test hoops, and then a test, then three non-tests, then a test. At the novice level you only have to do two tests, at Open three and at Elite ... well I don't know because I actually wasn't paying complete attention during the briefing. If you screw up a test, you get something like three tries to get it right, after which you ... well sorry, I wasn't paying complete attention. I think you go do some non-test hoops or something. Then there is the bonus distance challenge on one of the test, but don't worry about it because you're not going to get it, unless your dog can distinguish between two hoops right next to each other about 8 feet from you and decide that the farther one really is the "out" hoop. Lucy couldn't (I only tried it on one of my runs).

So was it fun or lame? A little of both. I always like any game where you get to plan your own route so that part was fun, especially because they don't design the course to make anything convenient, so you have to invent some flow. But I think it would be a lot more fun if there was an incentive to do the more difficult tests, sort of like there is in USDAA Snooker, where you have to accumulate a certain number of points (and eventually, when you get to Masters, you have to actually beat just about everyone elseto get a Super Q). As it is, there would have been no reason for me to pick the harder tests other than the fact that the easy ones would have bored me. I did earn a special commendation from the judge on Saturday for being the only one to try the two hardest tests.

Also, even though NADAC calls the hoop a "ground speed obstacle," it's really not an obstacle. It's more like a target, something you need to point your dog toward, but except for maybe the miniest of mini dogs there is nothing obstacular (OK, probably not an actual word) about it. There's nothing to fault, except for maybe not going through the hoop or "back-hooping" it. I think it might be more fun to do hoopers with a young dog as a way of practicing some handling without much stress over obstacle performance. With an experienced dog it's not all that exciting.

As I mentioned above, I'll be doing a USDAA trial this weekend. Today is DAM team. My team is sort of a last-minute thing because my original team fell through, and I have no idea what to expect. At any rate, I will endeavor not to let my team come in dead last again. The charm of that wears off rather quickly.

I love it when people hate on Jon Katz ...

2008-03-24T14:02:00.002-04:00

After reading some of his columns in Slate, I have never been able to bring myself to actually read one of Jon Katz's books, because his columns have made me think he must be a supercilious imbecile. Pretty much everyone I know who does any sort of dog training agrees with me, and I don't have enough spare time to read his books to confirm or deny. So thanks to Luisa at Lassie Get Help for this post, affirming my gut instinct that I can put off reading Jon Katz until I'm stuck in a body cast or something and have run completely out of other things to read.

Update-a-rama ...

2008-03-17T14:31:00.004-04:00

I haven't been blogging a lot because I'm obsessed with houses: a) selling one, which involves lots of constant vacuuming up dog hair and snippets of chewed toys, wiping muddy paws and paw prints and picking up dogs toys and beds (only to put them back out later when the coast in clear; and b) buying one, which is anxiety-inducing because I can't afford anything decent, so my mind is engrossed in mulling over all the compromises I will have to make.

Anywho, the dogs ...

First Lucy: She's no longer lame. I have no idea what it was. We're going to the doggie chiropractor this week--if Lucy jammed a toe or something she might find it.

Also, I could have entered a local NADAC trial last weekend, but I've been so busy and exhausted I decided to skip it. I'm glad I didn't enter, because I would have been worried about Lucy's lameness returning in the middle of the trial, and then I would have felt awful. So instead she got to go to the park many times (every time I have to vacate the house for a showing, the dogs and I go to a park for a while) and we both took it easy.

Pinky: Still appears to be under 16 inches tall, but she now weighs slightly more than Lucy. She's a little rock--skinny as a rail but very muscular. After a couple of months of very sporadic training due to my life circumstances, I'm getting myself back into the mode of teaching her some foundation skills. A few friends and I all have young dogs, and we've started getting together once a week to help each other with foundation training. Well, we've only actually met once, but we plan for it to be a weekly thing. I really like training with others, because it gives me some direction. Left to myself, I have a hard time deciding what to teach or try next. I've never trained an agility dog from puppyhood before (Lucy and Mr. Gomez were both 6 years old when I started them), and there are endless possibilities. It's fun and intimidating.

I've decided to teach running contacts, because the two-on-two-off thing just never worked out so well for me, and I hate it. Lucky for me several of my friends went to a local Sylvia Trkman seminar and are going to teach their dogs using her methods. So I'll just let them help me train Pinky ;-) I missed Sylvia's seminar because 1) busy getting the house ready to sell; 2) poor; and 3) I want people I know to try out the person first, and if they report back favorably then I'll spend my money on them. So far I've heard mostly good things about Sylvia, so If I get another chance I'll take one of her seminars. Until then I'll just siphon her knowledge second-hand from my friends.

Anyway, what appeals to me about Sylvia's method is that aside from taking a lot of time, repetitions and patience, it's fairly simple. I don't mind spending a lot of time on something (I spent what seemed like ages running Lucy and Mr. G. through weave channels before starting to close them), but I hate really complicated methods. The way Sylvia trains, it's really doing the same thing over and over--she runs her dogs full speed across a board, and then gradually increasing the angle as the dog progresses.

I'm hoping that very soon I will have lots more time to train my dogs and write blog entries about it.

Mystery malady

2008-03-09T21:37:00.002-04:00

Lucy came up lame last night, and I have no idea what happened. We had done some agility practice and then a little off-leash running around, and she was fine. We came home, she had dinner, went outside ... still fine. Then she relaxed on one of her cushy beds for about and hour or so while I checked e-mail, and I decided Pinky should go out again. Lucy got up to come with us and she was limping severely--she didn't want to put her rear right foot on the ground. I checked for the obvious stuff--torn pads, thorns, anything stuck between her pads--and there was nothing. I gently felt her feet and legs to see if one particular spot made her wince--still nothing. Nothing felt swollen or out of place (not that I really know the proper places of all a dog's foot innards, but the hurt leg felt just like the other one).

Mr. Gomez came up lame a lot. Sometimes it was a torn pad, sometimes it was who knows what--he does everything with such an overabundance of enthusiasm that he's always hurting something. It got to the point with him that I would just automatically decide to wait and see if he was still limping in the morning before I took him in to be checked, because it almost always was temporary. Buy Lucy is different--she's very careful and doesn't fling herself around the way Gomey does, so she's hardly ever lame. When she is it's usually been a thorn, something stuck between her pads, or a bee sting. So I didn't even think twice before calling the emergency vet. Right before I took her in, I decided to let her hobble outside to take a whiz, and as soon as she got out the door she shot across the yard chasing a squirrel. Hmmm ... can it be that bad if she's rocketing after squirrels? But as soon as the squirrel was gone, she was back to limping severely . So even though the pain wasn't bad enough to keep her from chasing a squirrel, I was still really worried. So I took her in anyway.

But them two hours later, when I was trying to keep from falling asleep in the waiting room (I'd had a long a tiring day), I decided that maybe I'd rather just monitor her and then bring her back this morning if she was still limping. But she wasn't--we got up this morning and she was fine. We went to a park where she likes to hunt voles, and she was fine. We went to another park later (there was an open house at my place today and I had to be gone) and she was still fine ... until we got home and she got out of the car. She was limping again. But now, a few hours later, she's not limping anymore.

So now I guess I'll just run her into the vet tomorrow and have them look at it. My bet is that they will find nothing, but it will make me feel better. At least a vet has a better idea of what to feel for than I do. I'll also call the doggie chiropractor, because I'm thinking maybe she jammed a toe or something, and the chiropractor will be able to feel it. I hope it's nothing worse than that.

Getting bigger ...

2008-03-03T10:34:00.002-05:00

my girls
Originally uploaded by bunchofpants

The nail-biting has officially commenced ... Pinky has reached 15" at the shoulders and she's only six months old. Yikes. There are two things buoying my hopes: 1) Smaller dogs reach their adult height at an earlier age than bigger dogs. Lucy was very close to her full height at 6 months, and the rest of her growth was mostly filling out--her chest expanded a bit so she didn't look so gangly; and 2) Pinky's growth has definitely leveled off over the past two months. I now find myself wishing she would hurry up and go into heat so her growth plates will close sooner rather than later (Lucy had her first heat right at 6 months).

I know it won't be the end of the world if Pinky exceeds 16" because she is incredibly athletic and I think she will easily jump 22" (Lucy has no problem clearing 22" ... she actually went over a 26" triple once). I just like being in the 16" height class. It's not dominated by border collies. In fact, around here there is no single breed that dominates. The shelties are always very good, and there's that one mini--er, I mean very, very small--aussie that completely kicks butt, but I feel like Lucy can compete with all of them and I'm confident Pinky would be able to as well.

But border collies are the intimidators of agility--they seem unbeatable sometimes. Now I know perfectly well that they aren't, because the very speed and alacrity that makes them win spectacularly also very often sends them hurtling off course or causes them to obliterate jumps, miss up-contacts, etc. And who's to say that Pinky won't have speed and alacrity? She's got plenty of enthusiasm and loves to play and learn new stuff (she thinks tunnels are awesome!), so maybe I'll have the kind of nutso dog who can't be beat when she stays on course and keeps her bars up. I'd just rather she do it in the 16" class against the shelties and very tiny aussies ;-)

MAD dog Lucy!!

2008-02-24T21:27:00.002-05:00

I had a great agility weekend at a USDAA trial on my home turf at PBH. The best part: we finally got that Standard Q we needed for Lucy's Masters Agility Dog title. W00t! The run wasn't perfect--there was a hair-raising dogwalk down contact and an almost-refusal involved, but we got the job done.

Other highlights:

Another Snooker Super Q! This makes three, which is the magic number, so I don't ever need to stress about Super Q's ever again (unless I decide to bother pursuing titles when I move Lucy into Performance). It also got us our Snooker Master title. Everyone tells me that once they stopped worrying about Super Qs they started getting them left and right. As with our first SQ, we got this one by a few hundredths of a second, so my advice remains that when the buzzer sounds, run like hell for the finish line to stop that clock!

A Steeplechase Q and second-place finish. That won us $11.09. I think I'll spend it on bully sticks.

A Grand Prix Q. We're getting pretty good at that one. Since it's basically just a Standard course with no table, I'm mystified at how we can do so well in Grand Prix and so badly in Standard. I'm sure it's a mental problem on my part.

A Gamblers Q. Next to Standard this is probably the hardest class for us. I usually mess up the opening so much that I end up flopping and flailing at the gamble line and Lucy is thoroughly confused. Not this time. I don't know what my trick was--maybe I did well because it was the last run of the weekend and I was too exhausted to stress out about it.

A Pairs Q. I don't get terribly excited about these, and in fact if money is tight or I don't feel like entering every event at a trial this is the first one I ditch. But we still needed 2 Qs in Pairs toward our ADCh, so this knocked one off.

But the best part of the weekend was that Lucy seemed happy to be running with me the whole time and I didn't do anything to stress her out (or seriously confuse her). There was one "lowlight" of the weekend, and that was when I got a refusal on the first jump of a Jumpers run. It was due to a really stupid oversight on my part--I didn't pay close enough attention to how I was setting her up on the start line, which made her assume that the second jump was really where I wanted to go. The really sad part is that the rest of the run was fabulous. Oh well, live and learn.

Now the countdown toward the ADCh begins in earnest: we need two Standard Qs, two Gamblers and one one Pairs. And we still need a DAM team Q for the Tournament Master title. I have a team lined up--a couple who have two good little mini poodles agreed to run with me in April (and they each need one more DAM for the TM as well). We'll have two 16" dogs and one 12". I think we should call the team "Small Dogs Rule, Big Dogs Drool."

The dogs and their car

2008-02-18T08:52:00.001-05:00

all dogged up
Originally uploaded by bunchofpants

I've had both dogs in the new Honda Fit a few times, and I'm quite happy with the space. I've decided to put the crates toward the rear, which leaves me plenty of space forward of them for trial gear. I could even fit in another crate if I wanted and still have a little room to spare--not that I'm planning the acquisition of another dog, but it's still good to know.

There are cargo tie-down rings that I will use to anchor the crates with bungees in the future. In the photo above they're not anchored--I was just taking the dogs to a nearby park, but I realized after I set out that if I had to slam on the brakes both crates would slide forward with no gear in the way to stop them.

I could probably free up some more space by putting both dogs in one crate--they would both fit in Lucy's wire crate, or I could use the bigger one that I used for Gomey. Lucy has shared a crate with a friend's dog before, but in general I think she prefers solitude. Perhaps when Pinky gets older and more settled it will work, but right now I think she would pester Lucy too much. I'm still considering other options for space arrangement, like using a removable platform for the crates or getting some 3-door crates and moving them forward.

So far, I'm loving the new dogmobile!

New Dogmobile!

2008-02-13T07:23:00.002-05:00

The car that died on Saturday night is really dead--it needs a new engine. If it were otherwise sound I'd probably go ahead and put the money into it, but it's not otherwise sound: the suspension is shot, the transmission is dodgy and it's starting to have one little problem after another. So I've replaced it with a brand-new Honda Fit. It's a small car, but I have small dogs, and it's got an amazing amount of room inside when the seats are folded down. I'm hoping this means years of worry-free dog travel ahead!

Agility mission accomplished!

2008-02-11T14:10:00.000-05:00

My agility weekend was a success, in that I achieved my goal of keeping Lucy happy and having fun no matter what. We also ended up with a few Qs, although not that one lousy Masters Standard Q that would have given us the MAD title. I know a few people who have been chasing that one for years, so I'm not going to feel too badly because I've only been trying for a few months.

Before I go into the (potentially boring) wrap up of the weekend, I want to mention something else that happened which made me really thankful to agility (and dogsports in general) for introducing me to some of the most wonderful, helpful and supportive friends I've ever had. On my way home from the trial Saturday night, my car died in Wake Forest, NC, 22 miles from home. Fortunately it was in a parking lot (I had stopped to pick up food as my cupboards were bare) and not along the side of the road. I have AAA, so I wasn't worried about the tow, but I really wanted to get the dogs out of the car. A friend once broke down with her dogs in the car, and the only option available to her was to leave the dogs in the car as it rode on the flatbed, but I knew this would be scary and stressful for them. Who could I call? My soon-to-be-ex husband would have helped me, but he was out of town, and the first people I thought of were agility friends. Sure enough, one of them (who hadn't been trialing all day) came right out, loaded dogs, crates and me into her car and drove us all to my house. Then another agility friend said she had plenty of room in her minivan to take us all to the trial with her the next day. I probably could have found a non-agility person willing and able to help me if I'd made enough calls, but I knew my agility friends would be there for me, and they were.

Anyway, our first run on Saturday was Jumpers, and it went like a dream. It was the kind of run I imagine when I'm trying to put myself in the winning mindset. It made me feel like I was capable of competing with the best of the best (don't worry, I won't get too cocky--there were other runs that reminded me of how much work I need to do). I did everything correctly, so of course Lucy followed suit. Plus she was fast--I love Jumpers first thing in the morning. Snooker was OK--we did a great opening but I made a misstep in the closing that sent Lucy off course. Saturday's Gamblers run was my worst of the weekend--I was slightly off in just about everything I did, and I could tell I was just confusing Lucy too much. She slowed down a lot and stayed completely in handler focus, so by the time we got to the gamble I just couldn't send her out far enough.

Then came Standard, and I got snagged by something I didn't see coming: we were in a sand ring, and all the previous dogs had made little troughs around the weaves on their way through. When Lucy hit them, the uneven ground made it hard for her little legs to maintain her pacing and rhythm, so she popped out halfway through. Otherwise the run was sooo nice (except that she didn't lie down quickly enough on the table). But I didn't let that ruin my day, so when Grand Prix came around not only did we manage to Q, but we finished in first place and earned our first-ever "bye" voucher (for those not familiar with USDAA, a bye allows a team to advance directly into the finals at regionals). That alone was worth the entire weekend's entry fees! The last run of the day was Steeplechase, and I was worried about getting Lucy going fast enough when she was probably a little tired. But that turned out to be the wrong problem--it was the weave troughs again! The judge recognized the problem and immediately after our run had the ring crew bring out a rake and smooth the sand, but too late for us. From now on when I run in that ring, I'm going to ask that the sand around the weaves be raked before our run. Because if it hadn't been for that problem costing us so much time I'm positive we would have Q'd.

Sunday morning started with Jumpers again, and again we had an amazing (and really fast!) run. I need to start getting people to video us again, because I'd really love to see that run again any time I need a confidence boost. That Q means we now only need one more Jumpers Q to get our Jumpers Champion title (which I bet we get before we get the MAD). Next up was Snooker, and again we had a good opening but I blew it in the closing. I think I need to pay closer attention to the closing sequence when I'm walking--I spend so much time worrying about making it through the opening that I don't properly see the closing pitfalls. Gamblers was lovely until the gamble, when I sort of flailed about too much and a crucial moment and completely confused Lucy. Then came Standard, and Lucy was running a bit slow--I'm sure she was tired--and then would not lie down on the table. The command I use is "splat," and I said it four times before finally saying "Please splat!" That did the trick. Lucy wants me to be polite ;-) At any rate, we were 10 seconds over time.

I guess I'll try again in two weeks ...

Kicking off a new agility year

2008-02-07T10:20:00.000-05:00

I've not been a diligent dog-blogger lately, as life events have intervened. I won't go into detail (I have another blog for that sort of thing), but I'll just mention that my husband and I have separated and I'm insanely busy trying to prepare our house to sell (and looking for another house that I can afford solo). As far as my dog life is concerned, the biggest change is that my husband has custody of Mr. Gomez. I have visitation rights and I'm still allowed to do agility with him but the logistics of getting him for weekly classes just isn't working out right now. So I'm back down to one current agility dog.

I've also been too busy and stressed to do more than attend my weekly classes with Lucy, so I feel like we're a little out of practice. Nonetheless I decided to enter the first local USDAA trial of the year this weekend simply because I refuse to give up my favorite activity even though I don't really have time for it. I have one goal: have fun and don't stress out my dog. I know it's easier said than done, but I really, really don't want to focus on the Qs. I want to laugh off my mistakes, forgive myself for them and then forget them. And I want to be happy with Lucy just for running the course with me, whether it's the correct course or not.

I'm also looking forward to getting Pinky out an about at another trial. By the time she's ready to compete I want her to think of the trial environment as just another fun place we go so that she's completely relaxed. I also want to work some attention around people and other dogs. When she was a lot younger she was a bit timid with people and a little frightened by other puppies, so I socialized the heck out of her. Now I'm having the opposite problem--she's exuberantly outgoing! I love that she loves everyone she meets, human or canine, but I need her main focus to be me. So a trial environment is a great opportunity to work on that.

Oh, and in the "How big is Pinky going to get" department, I am pleased to report that she's still little and her growth has started to level off a bit. She'll be six months old next week, and she's still an inch shorter than Lucy and under 20 lbs. (18.7 to be exact). So I may yet get my wish of stying in the 16" height class. Here's her growth chart to date:

Another AKC dog owner survey

2008-01-22T08:18:00.000-05:00

The American Kennel Club, desperate to boost their revenues, is considering starting a new club for mutts (possibly named the All American Dog Club), so they can collect registration fees from even more dog owners. The club would give members access to a website that would include "fun features" like forums, contests, games and advice (the kind of stuff that's already available all over the web) a free initial vet visit, and a free trial period of pet insurance (so they can then sell you some of that, too!). In addition, the AKC says members would be able to earn Canine Good Citizenship certificates (already available to all dogs, whether registered with the AKC or not) and compete in AKC Rally-O and Agility.

They are currently running a survey of pet owners to gauge support for their desperate venture. You can take the survey here. I took the survey and told them I don't want to join their club, thanks anyway, and that the AKC could disappear from the planet and dogs would be better off. It was interesting to note that in the little space where they ask you to explain why you chose a mixed-breed dog, they only give you space to write a very short sentence, so no long rants about what genetic nighmares many pure breeds have become thanks to rampant inbreeding (to "better" the breed!) and the AKC's closed-registry policies that have reduced gene pools to shallow puddles. Also, on one mandatory question about how I think their new mutt club would benefit me, they didn't include a "none of the above" answer, so I was forced to lie and claim some benefit just to continue the survey. Great way to hear no evil, AKC!

Flyball Weekend

2008-01-20T19:29:00.000-05:00

Lucy and I played flyball this weekend, running on a veterans team. (It was called the "Geritol Jumpers," not to be confused with the "Galloping Geezers," our other veterans team. I actually did get them confused a few times because they both start with "G".) We didn't even place, but I don't mind.

The real fun of the weekend was getting Pinky accustomed to the flyball environment. Indoor tournaments are very loud and chaotic, with tons of barking and frequent loud whistling by the judges. Some dogs have a hard time getting used to it, so I decided to start Pinky off early. I took her into the building before the racing started, so her first introduction to it was as a fairly normal place. She met a few other dogs and puppies and got oohed and awed over by people (she's a real charmer, helped by the fact that she's darn cute.) I did lots of rewarding attention-to-name exercises the whole time, lest she think any of the environment's charms were greater than mine.

Later we went in while racing was going on, and she was a bit nervous at first. I think the whistles really startled her. I didn't stay in long the first time because I didn't want to overwhelm her. The next time I found a spot near the wall where she could see the racing and the people and dogs walking by, but we also had room to play a little. I had brought her awesome fox toy, which she loves, hoping it would help keep her from paying too much attention to everything going on. It sort of worked--she was interested in the racing, and wanted to greet every one who went by, but I was usually able to get her playing with me again pretty quickly. I let her greet people who showed an interest in her and any dogs who were allowed to greet her, but focused her back on me right afterward with either the toy or the treats. By the end of the weekend she was completely relaxed and happy in the flyball environment. And she's one tired puppy right now.

How soon to spay?

2007-12-28T10:28:00.000-05:00

This recent post at Doolittler is quite timely for me, as I'm trying to decide when to spay Pinky. Most vets and animal welfare folks will say sterilize at six months, no question, period. In fact, there are some who advocate sterilization at early as 6 to 7 weeks of age. When Lucy and Mr. Gomez were pups, I didn't question any of this and had them altered promptly. (Well, more or less. Literally the day after I made Lucy's appointment at 6 months, she went into heat and I had to postpone the spay. Then after she came out of heat, there was a horrible rat-poison-eating incident, and we had to delay her surgery again until her bloodwork came back normal, so she was almost a year old by the time she was spayed. Still, I had intended to do it at six months).

Over the past few years I've heard of increasing evidence challenging the accepted view that early sterilization confers only benefits and no drawbacks. Chris Zink, a well-known canine sports vet, questions the 6-month rule and advocates that canine athletes not be sterilized before 14 months of age. Also, a lit review cited by Doolittler indicates that sterilization health risks may outweigh benefits, particularly for females. It's enough to make me think ... unfortunately I need to do more than think, I need to decide something.

There's no question that I will spay Pinky at some point. But right now the only two reasons I can think of to do it now rather than waiting are 1) Young dogs generally recover more quickly from the surgery and anaesthesia; and 2) Dealing with a dog in heat is not really my idea of a good time, and I definitely don't want any "oops" litters. Right now it's looking like I may follow Chris Zink's advice and wait.

Everybody wants to be a dog trainer ...

2007-12-27T10:17:00.000-05:00

Today in the New York Times (which has been full of dog stories lately): A Chorus of Dog Whisperers. I learned as soon as I started apprenticing as a puppy-class teacher that dealing with humans is the hardest part of dog training. I'll keep my day job, thanks.

Fun with CPE

2007-12-18T09:56:00.000-05:00

I entered Lucy in our first CPE trial over the weekend. We entered every class, and it's weird to report that we qualified in every single run ... but not so weird when you factor in that the CPE courses are easier than USDAA and even NADAC, and CPE has extremely forgiving rules. For example, I was astonished that we even Q'd on the run where Lucy went off course (I was a lazy handler and didn't pick up eye-contact after a tunnel, so she decided she got to pick where to go next). That just felt like cheating to me, but apparently they get a little more strict the higher you go.

I entered her at Level 3, which is the highest CPE lets you start at. I sort of wish they'd let you enter higher, but it's better than having to start at the very bottom if you're confident you can do the courses. It was a good opportunity for me to try little things I might not have in USDAA, where I care more about actually getting Qs. And hey, if an off-course is no big deal, why not try risker move X instead of safer move Y? In CPE, I could even still get the Q! So it was a lot of fun even though the courses weren't so challenging.

I think CPE is an awesome venue for new handlers--I wish there had been a trial or two around here a few years ago. Their lenience about faults at the lower levels seems like it would be a little liberating and help nervous new handlers build some confidence. Plus it's a great venue for starting a new dog, because they allow so much training in the ring. And the general atmosphere at the trial was very relaxed and laid back.

Although I'm not planning to seriously pursue CPE titles on Lucy, I think I'll enter more of their trials if they're local. The club that put this one on is planning to host more, so maybe they will catch on around here. Besides, one of the club members pestered me all weekend to join and I finally gave in, so I guess I'll be helping put on the CPE trials in the future. I may as well enter them!

In other news, Pinky is doing really well, but I can't wait for those adult teeth to come in because the puppy razors are tearing my hands to shreds! We've pretty much conquered the play biting problem, but she accidentally gets me when going for a toy all the time! I just try to suck up the pain and marvel at what awesome toy-and-tug drive she's got. I must say that the real raccoon tails they sell at Clean Run are like crack. A friend gave me one and Pinky and Lucy both love it. Mr. Gomez is afraid of it, but I expected that.

I'm progressing from basic puppy training (how to live with humans, simple obedience, recall, bite inhibition, playing with humans and dogs) to some easy agility foundation work like moving with me, tunnels, walking a plank to a two-on-two-off contact, walking a ladder, downing on a low table and training the wobble board. She is awesome. I still haven't had time to go buy her a skateboard, but I will get to it, and I'm going to set up a small weave channel and get her started on that.

One issue I'm still having trouble with is stealing and hoarding objects. I'm trying to play trading games and rewarding her for giving things up, but it's hard because when she knows I want something, she tries extra hard not to let me get close. So it's one thing to shove a handful of cheese under her nose and say "drop it,"but quite another when you can't get the cheese close enough to her nose because she's executing evasive maneuvers. Last week Lucy had apparently killed another rat in the yard (go little terrier mix!) and I didn't realize it until Pinky found the corpse. What could I offer that would trump a dead rat? I finally managed to interest her in a handful of food, but it took several minutes. I think it's really a recall problem and I need to really drill that more than anything. But I'm so accustomed to having dogs that heed the "leave it/drop it" commands that I guess I've forgotten what was involved in achieving that. A lot of work, obviously ...

Puppy Daze

2007-12-06T11:13:00.000-05:00

First some good news: the little results mix-up I mentioned yesterday is all fixed. It was just a typo, which is was I was hoping. I got the following note today from Tev, the wonderfully patient (and probably overworked) person who handles the posting of event results for USDAA:

Lisa,

Take a breath, it’ll be fine, Lucy has her SQ. You silly goose, it was simply a slip of the finger. J Tucker’s number is 500505 and the data entry person made a mistake which is very easy to do. The thing to do is look at the dog’s number that is listed in place of yours and that should show you where the mistake was. We appreciate you letting us know though because we can use as many eyes as possible to check the data that’s entered.

Yeah, I know I'm a silly goose, but when your dog is 9 years old and your time to earn Super Qs is limited, you get a little stressy when they seem to disappear.

On the puppy front, Pinky is really doing well but ... good grief, whatever possessed me to get a puppy? OK, I didn't "get" her so much as she appeared in my life and I let her stay, but still ... I was fully aware of how labor-intensive puppies can be and determined to resist, and yet I succumbed to a cute face and sweet temperament. What a sucker I am! What a cutie Pinky is!

I'm a little obsessed with her growth rate, because back when I thought my next dog would be acquired fully-grown, I had been determined that he or she would be under 16". I like running a little dog. Now that I have a puppy, the whole question is up in the air ... will we end up in the very crowded 22" height class with all the border collies? Well, there's nothing I can do about it if we do--I'll just have to motivate her to be fast and be a great handler to make sure we stay competitive ... which I was going to try to do anyway. But based on Pinky's growth, there seems to be a very good chance she'll end up somewhere around Lucy's size. I'm being really geeky and charting it (click the chart to see it larger):

Currently, she's very close to the the size Lucy was at 14 weeks, although Lucy was a little leggier. I had to do a little googling to find some basis for comparing Pinky's growth rate with known breeds. The mixedbreeddog.info site has a chart that puts Pinky's growth trajectory slightly above "small" but far below "medium." Another chart (from an actual scientific thingie), indicates that Pinky's growth rate is comparable to that of a Cocker Spaniel ... which range from slightly under to slightly over 16". Oh the suspense is killing me!

I've been mostly using weight to track Pinky's growth rate simply because it's easier to measure frequently. I'm trying to teach her to stand still and straight so someday she can be measured with a real wicket, and until then all I can do is get a rough height on her, give or take a quarter of an inch. Right now she's a little over 11 inches. She seems to be growing about an inch every two weeks since I first measured her at 9 weeks. I hope that slows a little, because at that rate she'll hit 16" before she's six months old. If that happens I'll just have to motivate her to be fast as hell so we can kick some border collie butt!

Another USDAA scoring mixup ...

2007-12-05T15:22:00.000-05:00

I hear people at trials say "Oh, I'm not anal retentive enough to write down all my results at every trial." Fine, call me anal retentive, but ever since two of my Starters Qs sort of disappeared on me, I not only write down my results, but I then enter my Qs in a spreadsheet and then obsessively double-check my results when they appear on the USDAA site (for which I have to pay--it's weird that they charge me to keep them honest, but whatever) or in the NADAC Yahoo group files (that one's free).

So I'm starting to feel like I give off some sort of magnetic force that screws up results wherever I go. It started with those two starters Qs, and then a few weeks ago I discovered that some of Mr. Gomez's results had been attributed to Lucy (that's been fixed!) Then there was this weekend's Snooker Q that almost wasn't, which was topped by a Gamblers Q that had somehow become an NQ in the trial results that were e-mailed out Sunday night (that was a computer glitch that affected lots of results and it was quickly fixed by the trial secretary).

So now imagine my panic today when I went to the USDAA Subscriber Services area to check some other recently posted results, only to find that Lucy's and my first Snooker Super Q/First Place, earned back in September, was nowhere to be found in her results detail. When I went to the event results to see who had been credited with the SQ, it said Blake Stafford and his sheltie, Tucker. Now had Blake Stafford actually attended that trial, there's a good chance that he and his sheltie could have won that Super Q instead of Lucy and I. But since neither he nor his sheltie were there at all, I'm perplexed as to how they walked off with our Super Q. I mean, I know he's a really great handler and all that, but ... anyway, I'm becoming pals with the USDAA staffer who handles these things (if by "pal" one means "a pain in the ass") and I'm sure it will be straightened out somehow. I hope.

Meanwhile, I've taught Pinky to walk along a board on the ground, go through a tunnel and lie down on a very low table. I'm going to go get her a skateboard this weekend. Seriously.

Congratulations Amanda and Weaver!

2007-12-03T13:07:00.000-05:00

My agility buddy (and Odd Dogs DAM teammate) Amanda Stipe and her Foxhound Weaver got five perfect 100 scores to take 5th place overall in the 20-inch class at the AKC Invitational agility tournament. Way to go Amanda and Weaver!

Also, I had a fun weekend doing USDAA at the Blue Ridge Agility Club trial in Fletcher, NC. I had a couple of exciting successes with Lucy, but first the bad news: our DAM team came in dead last. All three of us contributed our share to the failure, but I was really disheartened that Lucy and I did so poorly. I blame it on my mental management--I'd had a stressful week and I wasn't feeling up to snuff on Friday, so I really don't think I was being sharp at all. Too bad it had to happen on a day when my bad performance helped pull down my team.

I spent most of Friday evening trying to get myself in a more positive frame of mind so I didn't blow the whole weekend (and I made sure I got a really good night's sleep). It paid off on Saturday morning when first Gomey and I got a Gamblers Q and then Lucy and I managed to squeak out a Snooker Super Q! Since the Blue Ridge trial attracts some of the top dogs and handlers in the South, I'm particularly proud of this one because we had to do better than some really awesome teams. Even though there were enough dogs in the class for three super Qs, it was still a big (and very pleasant) surprise.

I must say a word here for checking your results carefully, because we almost missed out on the "Super" part of the Q due to a scribe error--my final point tally didn't add up. So I went to the secretary and sure enough, the scribe sheet showed only 3 red+obstacle combos when we had actually done 4. The difference was only 3 points, but it tied us with the lowest SQ winner, and our time was faster than hers (always, always RUN for the finish line and stop that clock!). The judge clearly remembered my run (because it almost wasn't a Q at all but I managed to dramatically save myself from my own stupidity) and corrected the scribe sheet. Unfortunately I had to go tell another competitor, whom I had just congratulated on her Super Q, that I had yanked it out from under her. She was a gracious good sport about it and we decided we'd have a re-match at a future trial.

Lucy and I also earned a Gamblers Q on Saturday, and that was it, but I'm really happy about the rest of our runs despite whatever little thing NQ'd (or E'd!) us. We missed the qualifying cutoff in the Steeplechase by .28 seconds, mostly because she missed one of the weave entries and I had to re-start her (plus she just wasn't going her fastest, probably because the class was at the end of the day). Her Grand Prix run on Sunday was just beautiful ... except for the little off-course tire she did ... but she was fast, happy and really responsive to my handling (which is why I'm sure it was something I did that sent her off course!)

Gomey was a wild boy. In addition to his Gamblers Q on Saturday we got a Jumpers Q on Sunday, but all weekend running him felt like roping a rodeo calf. He was fast and he was happy, but he really, really wanted to make up his own course. So I spent most of my time reining him back to MY course ... with only moderate success! Still, he made me smile so much that I can't possibly care about whether or not we Q'd. I think we were very entertaining for the spectators, and every time I caught a glimpse of the judge's face she had a big smile, so I'm happy we were spreading joy in the arena. There are worse ways to spend a weekend.

A friend of mine got video of some of our runs, so I may be able to post them sometime soon. The Gomey videos are bound to be a real hoot.

She's certainly feisty enough ...

2007-11-20T10:34:00.000-05:00

Everywhere I take Pinky people ask, "What is she?" I always want to say "She's a dog, duh," but I can't bring myself to be rude to people (darn my upbringing!). I just say I have no idea and then politely endure people's speculation. I wish I had a dollar for every time people said "I bet she has Lab in her," because so many people say it, although I'm pretty darn there's no lab whatsoever in this pup. People just want her to fit into their taxonomy of known dog breeds, and everyone knows "lab." It's starting to look like terrier is definitely the dominant component of Pinky's mix. She's likely going to be compact: At 12 weeks she weighs 9.6 lbs (contrast that to the 20-25 lbs. a lab would weigh at 12 weeks).

Although assigning a label to Pinky doesn't concern me too much, a couple of weeks ago I began to suspect that maybe Pinky does fit a category: she's starting to seem a lot like a feist. They're very common here in NC (and throughout the South), they show up a lot in shelters and rescues, and it's not unheard of them for people to give them away (an agility friend's boyfriend got a great little "free to good home" feist puppy a few months ago). I believe my mom's little dog, Edy, who had been found wandering the streets of Eden, NC, is a feist or feist mix.

It's sort of hard to say Pinky "looks" like a feist because there is a huge variation in feist looks--most people breed them to hunt squirrels or raccoons, not to win beauty contests, so who really cares exactly how the ears are set or how wide the muzzle is? The breed is UKC recognized, however, just in case someone is itching to prance one around the ring, but the standard is very broad: all colors are acceptable, height ranges between 10 to 18 inches and weight ranges between 12 and 30 pounds. I've recently spent way too much time online looking at photos of feists and feist puppies, comparing and contrasting Pinky to the pups in the pictures. Along the way I hit on the mother lode of feist photos: Galla Creek Feist--Squirrel Hunting Dog Photo Gallery. I see lots of resemblance (coloring notwithstanding) between Pinky and pups like Snap, Jessie, Lil Bit (especially here ) and Mississippi Saddie Bell, among others.

I've always liked the feists I've met (and I absolutely love the name "feist"!), and I had often considered looking for a feist when I was "ready" for my next dog (back when I actually thought I was going to "plan" my next dog acquisition as opposed to having it be something that just happened. Ha!). So maybe thinking Pinky is a feist is really just wishful thinking or my imagination running away with me. And now I'm wondering, if she ends up being feistlike as an adult, should I just say that's what she is? I know someone who has her Missisippi shelter dog registered in agility as a feist because, hey, it looks like a feist! It's not like NAFA, USDAA, NADAC, etc. want proof. Or should I go ahead and register her with the various venues as a mixed-breed, in the hopes that whatever greatness we managed to achieve in the future will be a testament to the fact that MUTTS RULE? (For the record I should note that in the eyes of the hard-core AKC stiffs a feist IS just a mutt ... unless someday they figure they can make some much needed cash off of feist registrations, of course, in which case the feist will suddenly become a noble and venerable old breed with a proud history.)

Anyway, what I'm really hoping is that Pinky will end up being under 16", because I don't want to play with the Border Collies in USDAA. At 12 weeks she's 10" tall, which seems to be putting her around medium-sized sheltie range, according to these charts.

Feel better about your agility handling!

2007-11-18T12:40:00.000-05:00

Watch lots of competitors at the 2007 FCI Agility World Championships send their dogs off course in the Smooth Moves Agility "Bloopers" video. While I watched I was thinking to myself, "Hey, even the world-class competitors sometimes bend over when they should stand up straight!" Not that it will make me feel like less of a dork next time I do it ...

Odds & Ends: A puppy in a coat, NADAC fun, Gomey video

2007-11-12T14:47:00.000-05:00

I took Pinky to a NADAC trial Saturday, all decked out in a homemade sweater. (Pink, of course!) I made it out of the sleeve of a fleece pullover. It worked well enough, although she still shivered a bit if I didn't keep her moving. I thought it was darn cute. The outing was good for Pinky--she can be a little tentative in new situations, but she really started to relax after a little while and seemed to be having a great time. I've got to admit it's really fun to have people ooh and ahh over my cute puppy! (For more Puppy cuteness, check out this great shot of Pinky that Mark took.)

As for the trial itself, Lucy rocked it. Running her just felt terrific, and we got 10 out of 12 Qs. One of our Tunnelers runs was a minor heartbreak as our only fault was going .02 seconds over time, and it was all because I pulled away from a tunnel entrance too early and Lucy came with me. It was a small mistake, but at the Elite level the times are so tight that even a small thing will put you over.

Gomey only ran on Sunday, and ended up with just one Q (Jumpers). He was leaping contacts left and right, and we had a few off-courses as well. In our Regular run we racked up 75 course faults ... I don't even remember what they all were. Still, he had better focus than we usually have on our home turf at PBH.

I rarely get videos of our runs anymore because I get tired of figuring out which of my friends aren't busy with their own dogs right when I'm about to run and asking them to video us, but two weeks ago at the ASCA trial someone got a few of Gomey's runs for me. Here's one:

And in other agility news: Apparently AMBOR closed up shop abruptly last week, with no announcement or fanfare. According to Sharon Nelson of NADAC (which has owned AMBOR for more than a year), the person who had been running AMBOR just decided she didn't want to do it anymore. According to Sharon, all that is necessary to keep it going is for someone to step up and take over the duties, as she has no interest in maintaining it herself. (I never bothered to register with AMBOR myself.)

Uh oh ... I'm going to be one of those people who puts a sweater on her dog ...

2007-11-08T10:35:00.000-05:00

I have a coat for Lucy but she hates it. I've only made her wear it when it's really cold, and only because I can't stand to watch her shiver. She'd rather shiver, I think.

But it looks like Pinky Laverne is going to be a short-haired dog, and if I ever want her to wear a coat I should get her accustomed to it now. I'll have a great opportunity on Saturday because she'll be spending the day at a NADAC trial with Lucy and I and I think it's going to be really chilly, at least in the morning.

Still, I hate to go out and buy her a little coat when she will just outgrow it very quickly, so I think I'll see if this tip from the Make blog works: How to make a dog sweater from a sock. Pinky weighed in at a whopping 7.3 lbs. Tuesday (she's about 10 weeks now), so I may have to steal a big sock from Mark to make sure it fits. I'll post the results here, of course!

USDAA: Something for everyone (to gripe about)

2007-11-07T14:20:00.000-05:00

A lot of people are upset with USDAA lately because they were a bit tardy in posting the Nationals results on their web site. There have also been many complaints on the USDAA e-mail list that the formula for awarding Top Ten points and Snooker Super Qs is unfair to small dogs because it's based on the number of dogs in a class and the mini classes are often very small (I disagree that it's unfair but I don't feel like going into it right now). But I have a grouse that's a lot closer to home: I was checking some recently posted results for a trial in September, and they attributed most of Mr. Gomez's results from that trial to Lucy!

I was flabbergasted--how can it make sense to have a dog entered in 16" Championship classes at the Masters level and also running in 22" Performance I and II classes at the very same trial? Is anyone paying attention? But wait, that's not all--in one class, PI Relay, they have Mr. Gomez and Lucy as partners! Yes, I apparently ran my dogs together in a relay! (OK, so I could have conceivably gotten another handler to run one of them and pulled it off, but still ...)

This isn't the first time USDAA has screwed up our results--they "lost" two of Lucy's Qs a couple of years ago. In all fairness to USDAA, I'm quite willing to believe that the host club screwed up all the results and someone at USDAA just entered the data without questioning it. But I'm a little concerned that my e-mail to USDAA requesting that they fix the errors has gone gone unacknowledged. I understand that they are busy with the Nationals aftermath, but couldn't they at least send some sort of form e-mail acknowledging receipt of my e-mail and promising to follow up? How long should I wait before sending another e-mail asking them to fix the errors? This means a lot more to me than how long it took them to post the results for Nationals--I couldn't care less about that.

Gratuitous Gomey blogging ...

2007-11-07T10:04:00.001-05:00

PB045781_x
Originally uploaded by Mr. Gomez

I have nothing useful to say; I just wanted to post this great photo of Mr. Gomez that Mark took. Here's another. And another.

Baby steps for puppy

2007-11-06T10:30:00.000-05:00

Pinky Laverne went to her first Puppy Primer class last night. She's way smaller and younger than the other puppies and they frighten her a bit. So far her only real socialization has been playing with a few adult dogs because they don't barrel toward her like gangbusters they way puppies do. She's only about 10 weeks old, and last week she weighed 6.1 lbs. (she's due for another weigh-in tonight). I'd really love to find her some appropriately sized puppy playmates.

She's also a bit afraid of humans sometimes. We did an exercise in class where each of us went in turn to the other people's puppies and fed them treats while handling their paws, ears and tails (to accustom them to human handling and help them accept things like vets and groomers). Pinky was reluctant to be close enough to the people for the handling part, so we just had people feed her treats. It's weird because sometimes she'll run right up to people and other times she's afraid. I think being in the class environment with all that puppy energy for the first time was stressful for her. She will probably improve over the next few weeks. I think that when we're done with this session I'll repeat Puppy Primer again instead of moving her up to Senior Puppy right away in the hopes that next time around, being older and a bit bigger, Pinky will be able to actually interact with the other pups.

As far as her general training, we're taking baby steps. Potty training is going really well because we have established a system and a schedule and we (the humans) have been diligent about sticking to it. We've had only a few accidents and they were all human error. Pinky seems to be trying her best to accommodate our desire that she do her business outdoors. I think she shares that goal.

I'm doing a lot more "play training" than anything else--encouraging her to play tug, having her fetch a ball and return to a game of tug (foundation for flyball!), and getting her to bite toys instead of hands. As far as control behaviors, we're doing attention to name, sit and down, but I'm taking it slowly and patiently because she's only 10 weeks old and has a rather short attention span.

Lucy and Mr. Gomez aren't exactly thrilled with the new addition, but they're slowly accepting her. She's never allowed unsupervised access to them, and so far all the time they spend together is limited to short sessions in the backyard, where the dogs have some room to escape from the pestering little midget. We're trying to keep all the interactions between the dogs as positive as possible, both to help the dogs accept Pinky and so that she doesn't learn grouchiness from them. Lucy is much more accepting than Mr. Gomez, who is just a big old grump sometimes. We call him the "fun police" because he can't stand it when someone besides himself is having a good time.

So I know it sounds like I've really decided for reals to keep Pinky, and I think that's probably true, but I'm leaving the "official" decision until she's been through puppy primer. I figure that will let me really get an idea of how she will fit the family and my dog-sport goals, but she'll still be at a cute and very adoptable age (with the bonus of having gotten lots of training) if it seems like it's not going to work. But so far everything seems to feel right.

The one big question that can't be really answered right now is her adult size. We have no idea what's in her mix, so we can only guess based on her growth rate so far. I've been trying to find as much information as possible about growth rates of various breeds so I can make a comparison. Right now I'm guessing she's on track to be about cocker spaniel size, which would be great.

When dogs attack .. or no good deed goes unpunished

2007-11-04T15:27:00.000-05:00

Ugh, what an awful morning I had today. I was driving to the grocery store when I saw a big brown dog running full-speed across an intersection ahead of me with no owner in sight. My instinct was to go after him and see if I could catch up to him and look for tags. I turned onto the street he was on, and immediately saw why the dog had been going so fast--it was on the attack. A woman was screaming "Get off my dog! Get off my dog!" while the brown dog attempted to maul her akita. I pulled over and jumped out of my car as a guy with a wide-eyed confused look on his face came out of the closest house.

All I knew to do was to avoid putting my hands anywhere near the dogs' mouths. Even a dog that's not human-aggressive is likely to bite--hard--at whatever is close during a fight. The only thing I could think of is something Val Olszyk once mentioned about breaking up dogfights: If there's a tail, use it. So I grabbed the attacking dog's tail, and pulled. The neighbor guy saw what I was up to and also grabbed the tail, so I told him to hold it while I grabbed the dog's rear haunches and pulled. We managed to pull him off the other dog, and I told the guy to keep hold of the tail while I reached into my car and got a slip lead (handy things, slip-leads). Unfortunately, the dog turned and snapped at him so he dropped the tail and it launched another attack on the akita.

At this point the woman started screaming, in a really nasty tone, at us "Get this dog off my dog NOW! It's going to kill him! Get him off!" I wanted to yell back "What the *%&@ do you think I'm doing here, lady?" I mean, why be bitchy to people who are trying to help you? We were putting ourselves at personal risk to help this woman, and she was being really nasty. Seriously, if I hadn't been thinking of her poor dog, I would have saved myself a lot of risk (and, as it turned out, about an hour of my time) by getting back in my car and driving off. OK, I know I couldn't have actually done that, but she really pissed me off.

At any rate, we successfully separated the dogs and I got a slip-lead around the brown dog's neck. I told the neighbor guy to hold it tight while I got my cell phone and called 911 for animal control. While I was calling, the woman with the dog left, staring over her shoulder at us--actually it looked more like glaring than staring--but saying nothing. I wanted to say "Oh, and you're welcome, by the way ... saving your dog's life was nothing, really!" but I was busy talking to the dispatcher.

So the dispatcher said they'd send animal control right out. Ha, I thought, Durham Animal Control never gets "right out" anywhere. I figured I'd be lucky if they showed up at all. After I got off the phone a guy pulls up in his car and said "So what just happened here?"

"This dog just attacked some lady's dog," I said. "She left. I've called 911 and they're sending Animal Control--the dog's got no collar or tags."

"Oh, it's not your dog?" he said.

"No, I just stopped to help," I said.

"Oh--that was my girlfriend whose dog was attacked," he said, and it dawned on me that she must have thought it was my dog, which might explain why she was such a bitch to me. She never bothered to ask, though, did she?

Anyway, boyfriend dude left (probably the prospect of waiting and waiting for Durham Animal Control didn't appeal to him, either). After a half-hour, during which the nice and helpful neighbor guy waited with me even though he was late to meet a friend), I called 911 again. They said an officer was on his way. I didn't really believe them, but I told the neighbor guy that he should go meet his friend and I'd just hang out in his yard.

At this point, the dog was nice and calm, and behaving like a real sweetheart. It was obvious he was someone's pet because he looked well-taken care of (except that he was obviously overfed, but I rarely see a pet dog that isn't.) I tried to guess his mix--he looked part bull mastiff, but they aren't actually all that common so it must have been something else. His head was shaped like a Rottweiler's, but he had the coloring of a fawn boxer. A boxweiler, maybe? He seemed happy to be hanging out with us there, and I started to feel bad that he was going to be crammed in the animal control truck (if they ever showed up, that is). But he was so dog-aggressive he definitely had to be taken off the street and I certainly wasn't bringing him home with me. I wondered if his people even realized their dog had escaped.

So roughly an hour after the whole thing started, the animal control guy showed up, put the dog in his truck. I went on to the store, etcetera, and when I got home there was an e-mail to the neighborhood list from someone whose neighbors were missing a dog fitting the description of the I apprehended. I wrote back and told them what happened and that animal control has the dog.

For more info on ways to break up a dogfight that might be better than the ones I used, see this web page. (You have to scroll down about 5 screens past ads for the guys DVDs. I don't know if I agree with any of the guy's other dog-training advice because I haven't read it, but his fight-breaking advice looks like it would work).

Oh, and I'm going to make sure I always have a slip-lead in my car. Although I hope I don't run into to many more dogfights.

Agility: ASCA fun and I need a DAM teammate

2007-10-30T11:16:00.000-04:00

I've got tons to write about little Pinky puppy (whose registered name will be Pinky Laverne Del Fuego), but it'll take a while because she keeps me too busy to write. But I thought I'd nip in to say that Lucy, Gomey and I had a lot of fun running FEO at the ASCA trial on Sunday. Both dogs looked awesome. Gomey ran like a focused, seasoned agility dog, confirming my suspicions that there's something about running on our home turf at PBH that confuses him and makes him run around like a doofus. I think it has something to do with the fact that I use his ball and ball-on-a-tug while training there, and he's looking for the ball while he runs. He's extremely obsessive and pattern-oriented, and once you play ball once in a location, he expects to play ball there every time you go back. Or if you just drive by. Or if you are walking vaguely in that direction. We'll have to come up with some ways to work through it.

I'm planning to enter another USDAA DAM tournament on Nov. 30, but I need a team. I connected with one teammate through the trial secretary, but we need a third (26" or 16"). I've asked on local lists to no avail, and now I'm wondering if I should post to a couple of the national agility lists. For some reason I'm intimidated by those lists, because some of the people seem a little too intense and obsessive. I want to Q but I also want to enjoy the experience.

Pupdate

2007-10-24T09:12:00.000-04:00

The cute puppy I mentioned in my previous entry is still with us. The home I had lined up for her fell through when the woman, who really, really wanted the pup, came to the realization that her husband really did not. To preserve her domestic tranquility, the woman backed out of the adoption. We're sort of considering keeping the pup now, which means we need to call her something for real. The first thing I thought of was Pinky Tuscadero (after the TV character, not the Australian band that named themselves after the TV character). Then Mark (aka Mr. Dogliness) and I kicked around other names and we both liked Laverne (again, after the TV character, although personality-wise the pup seems more like a Shirley). So we tried out Laverne, and that's what our vet thinks her name is. But Pinky is a better name for getting a dog's attention, so at the moment the pup is called Pinky Laverne. But I really want to own a dog called She-Ra, Princess of Power, although I don't think Mark shares that desire. I might try to talk him into it.

Still, in the back of my mind I'm wondering if we shouldn't go ahead and keep looking for a terrific home for her. Keeping her pretty much breaks all the rules I had carefully crafted to guide myself when I decide the time is right for my next dog. My dogs are 8 and 9 years old, and the time will come when I can't keep asking them to do so much agility. But I will want an agility/flyball dog, won't I? So I've started considering what my next dog will be. Rule Number One: No puppies! I want to know exactly the adult size (under 16"!), drive level and temperament of my dog from the get-go. With a puppy (even a purebred), there's no way to know if it will become the dog you were dreaming of. That's double-true when you don't even have any idea what breed or mix the puppy is to begin with.

Pinky Laverne is a real question mark. Here she is at seven weeks. It's hard to get a good "representative" photo because she doesn't really want to stand still. I'll keep trying. Some people say she looks like she's got pit bull in her, and she could very well have. Others say lab, some say border collie (any time you see black and white with speckles people always guess border collie). She could have any of those things in her, but she's too teensy not to have something small mixed in. She was 3.2 lbs. at (estimated) six weeks and 4.7 lbs. at eight weeks. That makes me think that her "finished" size may be close to Lucy's (15" at the shoulder, 21 lbs). Or maybe it's wishful thinking because my ideal next dog would be exactly Lucy's size. At any rate, I'm calling her a "pithuahua" if anyone asks.

And yeah, you should expect to read more puppy business here soon ... when I actually have time to write!

Oh, and I've entered Lucy and Gomey in one day of a local ASCA trial this weekend. I'm running FEO (for exhibition only) because I'm not registered with ASCA and don't feel like spending the money to register them right now. I'm only doing it because a) agility is so much fun! and b) I want to try and support anyone who has any kind of local agility trial. (Except for AKC, of course. Even if they one day decided to allow mutts I wouldn't bother with them.)

A foster puppy and a great agility dog

2007-10-15T09:34:00.000-04:00

Once again I've fallen behind on my goal to blog often. I worked overtime all last week, plus we are again hosting a foster puppy. I also ran my dogs in agility trials the past two weekends, so I'm a bit exhausted.

The puppy was a surprise, brought to us by the boy down the street. Someone was giving away puppies, he brought one home and his parents said no way. So of course he brought it to the "dog people" on the block. He was very sad to have to give up his puppy. She is very young--the vet estimated last week that she was only 6 weeks old, and we have no idea what breed or mix she is. Our local shelter is under parvo quarantine, which means she would have almost certainly gotten the needle after 5 days if she went in. What else could we do? We had potential adopters for the pup who were supposed to pick her up yesterday, but they backed out at the last minute when they realized having a puppy would be a lot of work. Tell me about it. I'm glad they thought of it BEFORE taking her home, though--a lot of people don't. But that still leaves us with a puppy on our hands. She's cute as a button and sweet as pie, so I'm hoping it won't be long. She needs more attention than we really have for her right now.

Anyway, I really want to talk about agility because I just had two great trials in a row: USDAA this past weekend, and NADAC the previous weekend. I couldn't be happier with the way Lucy and I are doing. I really think focusing on my mental game has made a huge difference, because I haven't had time to do much extra training. It's as if Lucy were just waiting for me to get my act together before she showed me how really awesome she could be.

In NADAC, Lucy and I racked up two Qs each in Chances and Tunnelers and one each in Touch & Go, Weavers and Regular. I was really pleased with the way we worked together. Pleased to distraction, in fact: during our Jumpers run first thing Sunday morning, I was so caught up with thinking about how awesome Lucy was that I sort of forgot to pay attention to the course and didn't realize it until we'd taken two off-course jumps. Oops!

In USDAA we far exceeded my expectations, getting two Jumpers Qs, and one each in Gamblers, Snooker, Grand Prix and Standard. (We now need only one more Standard Q for our MAD title!) I felt really good about every run--like I'm actually becoming the handler my awesome dog deserves. I think she's noticing, too, because she was fast, as if she's thinking "Finally, I can open up and run and trust that you're actually telling me what you really want me to do." And the only thing I've really changed since the awful trial a month ago is my attitude.

With Gomey, things aren't quite as wonderful. We did well together in NADAC, earning two tunnelers Qs and one each in Regular, Jumpers and Chances, and I felt like he was really clicking with this whole agility thing. Then the USDAA trial was a disaster. It was as if he'd completely left his brain at home and had no idea why we were out there. It's like that every time we run at our "home" facility, so something about trialing there just confuses the heck out of him and makes him silly. The funniest monent was in our Snooker run, when I ran him to the opening of a tunnel that ran under an A-frame, perpendicular to it (i.e., there was no discrimination involved). I said "TUNNEL!" and pointed directly at it, and even though he was about a foot from the opening, Gomey turned away, ran a big circle all the way around the tunnel and A-frame and then decided to actually go in the tunnel. It was just crazy and inexplicable. Maybe I'll just stop trialing him at PBH because it's starting to get a little frustrating.

I heart Terrierman

2007-10-05T09:42:00.000-04:00

If you've never checked out the blog Terrierman's Daily Dose, today is a perfect time to dive in. No matter that you don't own a terrier--Terrierman (aka Patrick Burns) is a fan of all working dogs. Today's post is called Border Collie Owners Battle What Doesn't Work, and it's about the struggle of working border collie enthusiasts against the ruination of theor working breed by the AKC (and kennel clubs in general). It also serves as a review of a new book on that topic: The Dog Wars: How the Border Collie Battled the American Kennel Club by Donald McCaig.

If you have a little time, you should check out the entirety of Terrierman's writings on the AKC. I think he he's got the raw materials there for a book that's sorely needed.

Agility euphoria

2007-10-01T18:37:00.000-04:00

Lucy and I had the opposite of the crummy weekend we had a few weeks ago. No, we didn't Q on every run, but we were four for eight, which is better than we've done in USDAA for a while. But there's more, something even better: we got our first Snooker Super Q! That alone would have made my whole weekend. We also got Qs in Jumpers, Grand Prix and Pairs (and then ran as an accommodating dog to help someone else Q). In the Pairs, Jumpers and Snooker runs we also finished in first place.

But even the non-qualifying runs were mostly really good, except for whatever little thing got us NQ'd, of course. Lucy was weaving beautifully, making her contacts (she missed one in the gamblers opening) and even downing quickly on the table. I hate to say it, but I think I need to give some credit to the self-help book! I've read about half of the Lanny Bassham book my friend lent me, and I decided to try practicing the stuff I'd read so far. So I set goals, focused on "rehearsing success" and not focusing on what could go wrong and generally tried to stay positive. I feel like it helped both of us--I know Lucy is very tuned-in to my mental state.

I did flub one run (standard on Sunday) because of stupid sloppiness (I caused Lucy to refuse a jump), and I was very angry with myself afterward. I kept thinking, and saying out loud to a friend, "Why am I suck a dork? I know better," etc. It took me a half an hour to talk myself out of that mindset and get back to the positive, but after I did we went on to have our two best runs of the weekend (including the Super Q!)

Next weekend I'll do it all again, but with both dogs, and in NADAC, which I treat as a training/motivational venue. Maybe I'll read the rest of the Bassham book before then and really put it all together. Then the following weekend is more USDAA--two more chances to get those Standard Qs I need for Lucy's MAD title. At the rate we are going it seems we'll get our Tournament Master's title before we get the MAD, but who cares? Either one would be cool.

Short bits ...

2007-09-28T10:39:00.000-04:00

This weekend Lucy and I will be competing at a USDAA trial in Chesterfield VA, sponsored by the Central Virginia Agility Club. I'm hoping I will feel nice and relaxed about the whole thing, and get myself to focus on the runs, not the Qs. That's when we seem to do best. She's been awesome in class and practice, so I'm hoping a good time will be had by all this weekend.

In other news:

Lucy is accumulating a high kill ratio.

Our Odd Dogs teammates Amanda and Weaver were featured in a local paper.

Gratuitous cute puppy blogging (again!)

2007-09-20T17:16:00.001-04:00

hercules with locopup
Originally uploaded by bunchofpants

This is Hercules, my friend Jackie's 6-month-old Chihuahua pup (seen here with his littermate, Samson). He's eating a "Locopup," which is the doggie version of the gourmet popsicles sold at Locopops, our local gourmet paleta shop. All proceeds from the sale of Locopups go to the Durham County Animal Protection Society.

Agility videos available for rent at smartflix.com

2007-09-20T09:24:00.000-04:00

I've long wondered whether some of the agility instruction videos available would help my training, but they're not cheap and I'm often reluctant to part with my cash unless I'm convinced it's something that will work for me. So I'm very happy to report that Smartflix.com, a DVD rental site for instructional videos, has added some dog agility titles to their offerings. Among the new DVDs available are:

Human Agility Training with Lori Hansen

Agility Foundation Training With Greg Derrett

Competitive Agility Training with Jane Simmons-Moake

4 on the Floor: Modified Running Contacts with Ann Croft

Go The Distance with Stacy Peardot-Goudy

Building the Canine Athlete with M. Christine Zink, DVM, PhD and Laurie McCauley DVM

Most videos at Smaretflix.com are $9.99 for a one week rental. You can check out the rest of the dog training DVDs available here

The riddle of Gomey ... solved, maybe?

2007-09-14T08:49:00.000-04:00

I mentioned the other day that Mr. Gomez will sort of blow right past an obstacle sometimes, even when it is directly in his path (and it's usually the only logical next obstacle). Well last night in class I got a few suggestions as to why:

Val said I have "Lucyitis," i.e., I'm very accustomed to the way Lucy takes direction from me. Lucy is very attentive will pick up on very subtle movements--this is a good thing if my subtle movement is correct, a bad thing if I accidentally flick an arm or point myself towards an off-course obstacle. On Gomey, however, subtlety is entirely lost. If I want him to really understand which obstacle to take, I need to be make my indication very obvious. So running directly toward the teeter, for example, isn't quite enough for Gomey. I need to remember to clearly point toward it, and it probably wouldn't hurt to remember to say "teeter." (With Lucy, I often only call the obstacle if I'm at a distance or there is a discrimination involved).

I have trouble sending Gomey ahead with my usual send-ahead command ("Go!"). I've always figured it was just because I haven't practiced it enough with him. But a classmate wisely pointed out that "Go" is the first syllable of his name (duh! never thought of that before!) That would explain why instead of going, he usually looks at me ... so I need to think of another send-ahead command. I like "Andale!" just because it would be fun to yell it while running a course, but I'm afraid it's too many syllables. I like the idea of using Spanish ... maybe "Vaya!" would work, although properly conjugated I guess the correct form would be "Ve" because I would use "tú" and not "usted" with Gomey. Anyway, I'm open to suggestions.

Lucy update

2007-09-13T14:20:00.001-04:00

I went to class with Lucy last night ... it's true, I'm too addicted to agility to quit or even miss one single class. Before class I did some weaves, contacts and tables with Lucy, and she did them all beautifully (well, her table downs could be a teensy bit faster). Not only was she weaving well and very quickly, but when we finished a set, unless I directed her to another obstacle, she'd flip herself around and head back towards the weaves right after getting her reward. She seemed like she was enjoying them. So hopefully there's nothing physically wrong with her, although I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to get her an athletic evaluation at VetHab just to be sure.

So our off-kilter weekend could have been because of any of the following: it was really hot (mid-to-high 90s); she wasn't fully recovered from the three-day trial the previous weekend; I'm a dorky handler; I was feeling a bit tired and cranky; I was running two dogs and their runs and walkthroughs kept coming up at the same time (which really stresses me out); and I need to master the "mental game" as much as I need to hone my handling. I think it was all of the above.

My friend Barb just lent me her copy of With Winning in Mind by Lanny Basham, who was an Olympic gold medalist and world champion in shooting. I'm not a big fan of self-help books in general, but I'll give this a try. Barb never finished it, and she wants me to report back to her on it--in other words, I think she wants me to read it so she doesn't have to. I've flipped through it a bit and saw one bad sign: it involves affirmations. I'm sorry, but I've actually tried affirmations before, and nothing ever made me feel like a bigger loser than sitting there telling myself what a winner I was. But what the hell, I can at least read the guy's book before I form a judgement of it. For all I know affirmations are just what I need.

For the birds ...

2007-09-11T18:18:00.000-04:00

Our dogs love a nice hike in woods, where they get to smell the world and all its critters. And I'm quite fond of birds, although I'm not really a birdwatcher--I can't get the hang of using binoculars and I couldn't imagine keeping lists of what I've see--I still think they're cool to watch and fun to hear. My husband's quite fond of photographing them. So I was rather distressed to see this article in the NY Times about research indicating that even leashed dogs in a forest reduce the number and diversity of birds present, at least in the short run.

The researchers chose trails in places where dogs were banned and in other areas where dog walking was common, expecting different results in each. “We thought that where there was regular dog walking birds would get used to it,” Dr. Banks said. “Well, they didn’t.”

Regardless of the type of area, dog walking led to a 35 percent reduction in the number of bird species and a 41 percent reduction in overall bird numbers, compared with the control. (People walking alone caused some disturbance, but less than half that caused by people with dogs.)

That's a bit of a bummer.

Awful, thanks for asking

2007-09-11T09:44:00.000-04:00

This weekend was not the most fun I've ever had at an agility trial. In fact, it may have been my worst trial ever. It was the kind of weekend that leaves one wondering why one spends all of one's time, energy and money doing dog agility.

I know I should feel a lot better about the weekend than I do, because Mr. Gomez qualified in 6 out of 8 runs, despite being somewhat of a goofball. But we're still in PI and PII (We finished PI Gamblers and Pairs this weekend, so we'll now be in PII everything), and the lower-level courses are relatively easy. More importantly, refusals aren't counted yet. Once we hit PIII I have a feeling we will tank a lot of runs because Gomey often blows right by obstacles in his hurry to get ... well I have no idea where he's going sometimes. He's just going. He comes right back when I call him and takes whatever obstacle I want him to, but it often seems as if he still doesn't get the point of this whole agility thing. He completely gets the point of the game where I throw the ball over and over and over again and he runs and gets it and brings it back every time. Now there's a game! He's clearly a very pattern-oriented dog, and agility throws up a brand-new configuration every time. I think the poor boy will never get over the confusion.

Lucy's the dog who really "gets" agility, and she and I have become reasonably successful over the past year. So not getting a single Q all weekend felt rotten. A few of the problems were simply my handling, but some of the issues were things I thought I could trust Lucy to take care of. Weaves, for example. I'd spent a lot of time making sure she understood how to find the correct entry from all angles, and had gotten good deal of independent performance and distance with her. She was becoming an excellent weaver. But this weekend, she was missing entries and popping out over and over again. Now I've completely lost confidence in her weaves to the point that I plan to go back and start re-training her in an open channel. There's no way one can succeed in Masters level without trustworthy weaves.

Another issue is the table. She has become slower and slower to down on the table as time goes by. In practice she's great--I say "Splat" and she goes splat. It's one of the first things I ever taught her, and since we don't do AKC, the table only ever means "down," never "sit." But in a trial she just doesn't want to lie down. It's completely infuriating. I'm not sure what to do in training to fix it, because in training she's fine. Maybe I need to borrow a friend's table and feed Lucy her dinner every night in the "down" position. Or, (I don't really like this idea and doubt it will even work), I could sacrifice my runs to her training by picking her up and carrying her off the course if she doesn't immediately down on the table. She hates being picked up and carried. Problem is I can't take her to her crate because she loves it in there. So I'd have to just carry her around for a while. But the big problem with this is that I've spent too much time building her motivation to risk shutting it down by stopping a run in such a way. Still, I don't know what else to do.

And there are those pesky contacts. I've trained, re-trained, and re-re-trained. She just loves sailing over them. She's perfectly capable of a two-on, two-off or a nice controlled, moving contact--she does them in practice ... well, not all of the time, but lots. But she loves to fly in a trial. It's faster that way. And I'm just not willing to end a run for a missed contact. I don't think it's really very effective (I know people who have done it and it hasn't really helped them at all and, again, I don't want to mess with her motivation). But now I'm stuck babysitting her contacts saying all kinds of things ("easy wait easy bottom easy!") hoping to just slow her down enough to at least scratch yellow with one tiny claw. You can't succeed at the Masters level that way (especially in Gamblers).

So right now I need something to build my own motivation. I don't even feel like going to class this week. What's the point? It just a Sisyphean exercise if I have to keep training my dog to do the same things over and over and over again. Of course, it's all probably something I've done anyway, in which case the whole thing is really hopeless.

Agility geekiness: More fun with blind crosses

2007-09-07T08:22:00.000-04:00

A while back I wrote about playing with blind crosses and discovering their potential to get Lucy to turn on the afterburners. I mentioned that I couldn't imagine them working well anywhere but after a tunnel, but then at the trial last weekend I saw several people successfully execute them after a jump. That made me want to try it in practice sometime, and I got the chance during Lucy's class Wednesday night.

Val had set up a very NADAC-y arc of 5 jumps leading into a tunnel, with a line of jumps coming out of the tunnel. The object of the exercise was that we were to run it once staying ahead of the dog and then again staying behind the dog to see which way was faster (Val timed us, and in every case having the handler ahead was faster, which didn't surprise me). Then were to run it again ahead of the dog using every trick we could think of to beat our fastest time. I added my own wrinkle to the exercise, however: the path looked like it might be a good place to to try the blind cross after a jump, so I decided to give it a go. I knew very well that, if successful, it would really make Lucy go faster. I just didn't know if I could pull it off.

I tried it at two different places. In the first run, I did a lead-out to just beside the third obstacle (a triple), where I could make eye contact with her over the first two jumps. If it were a different dog (Mr. Gomez, for example), I might not have tried blind-crossing after a triple because of bar-knocking danger, but Lucy rarely knocks bars and can often slice triples at amazing angles, so I figured I'd take the risk:*

The important thing was to make sure I got moving (and quickly--she really does get speedy if I'm in front of her!) as soon as she committed to the first jump so that I was well out of her path as she attempted the triple, and to remember to look back and make eye contact with her as soon as I had completed the cross. It worked like a charm, except that in my haste to make the cross I went to wide and ended up pulling her away from the tunnel entrance rather than driving her toward it. I got to re-run so we got an accurate time, and I fixed that problem but paying closer attention to my path.

I decided to try leading out further the second time and trying the cross between jumps 4 and 5:

I don't usually take such long lead-outs with Lucy, not because she doesn't have a good start-line stay, but just out of a superstition that I shouldn't tempt fate if I don't have to. But this run worked better--I had a little more time to makethe blind cross and pay attention to my path coming out of it. The scary thing about a blind cross is that you have to turn your back of the dog, and you definitely want to have enough time to make sure your paths aren't on a collision course before you do.

I may or may not get an opportunity to try a blind cross at the trial this weekend--it's likely I won't because they really only work under a small set of circumstances. One must be ahead of one's dog--even farther ahead than a normal front cross. The intended path must also be very clear to the dog--you are turning your back on the dog, after all--so a blind cross may be called for when you want to keep the dog in obstacle focus. If a sharp change of direction is needed, a front cross, rear cross or counter-hand turn would be more appropriate.

*This post represents my first attempt at using the Clean Run Course Designer software. I decided to take advantage of their 30-day trial to see if it was a toy worth paying for. I must say it's quite fun! I may have to bite the bullet and give them some money.

Odd Dogs qualify, take fifth place

2007-09-03T20:29:00.000-04:00

The Odd Dogs' astonishing third place standing didn't hold, and I take the blame. During today's relay event, Amanda/Weaver and Janice/Machias were reliable and turned in respectable runs, while Lucy and I went off-course after the second obstacle. It was that stupid dogwalk/tunnel discrimination, again. I'm starting to think that the best way to get Lucy to take the one I want is to aim for the other one. She didn't actually take the dog walk, just touched it with a paw--a rear paw, at that. Don't ask me what she was thinking or what I did to get that result. At any rate, in the DAM relay if you're eliminated, you're supposed to immediately run to the finish (and pass the baton to a teammate if applicable), so that ended my portion of the run.

Fortunately, a lot of teams did way worse than we did--some had two E's, and I was fortunate that mine came so early in the run that it didn't waste too much of the team's time. And the important thing was that we got our Q, which means I've completed all the tournament requirements for my ADCH. However, in individual competition this weekend I failed to get either of the Standard titles I needed for my MAD. In fact, all I got was one Snooker Q (it was a very nice run). Oh well, I'll be trialing again next weekend, and a couple of weekends after that, and a couple of more after that. Sooner or later we'll manage to pull together a Standard run or two.

DAM team update

2007-09-02T20:08:00.000-04:00

I'm slightly flabbergasted. With only the Relay left to run tomorrow, The Odd Dogs are currently in third place (out of 13 teams) in the DAM team tournament! We ended yesterday in sixth place, which was partly my fault because Lucy took an off-course in Standard and we were eliminated, although Weaver and Machias did pretty well. (We all did well in Snooker, though, and I was very proud of my run with Lucy).

Then first thing this morning, our oddness really paid off on the jumpers course, which was devilishly tricky. The really zippy fast gonzo dogs were going off-course, knocking bars and spinning into refusals left and right--the course was eating them for breakfast, it seemed. But Weaver the Foxhound and Machias the Akita made good use of their slower but steadier pace. Lucy and I managed to rock that course; aside from a fleeting moment when I almost lost her over an off-course obstacle, it felt perfect. It was one of those runs that reminds you why you run yourself ragged building courses, gate stewarding, timing, scribing, setting bars, etc. so an agility trial can happen. We vaulted into second place after Jumpers.

In Gamblers the border collies got a little revenge, because the amount of ground they can cover so quickly made it easier to rack up the points without the danger of off courses and refusals (except in the gambles, of course, but they were optional for bonuses). But we Odds were tenacious and managed to only slip down to third place. Obviously anything can happen in the Relay tomorrow, but so far I'm very pleasantly surprised.

Small bites

2007-08-31T13:04:00.001-04:00

I had been meaning to post something about a rather crummy dog instructors' seminar I attended a few weeks back--in which I did actually learn a few useful things, but then I decided I just didn't feel like being negative. The biggest problem with the seminar was that it was disorganized and chaotic, which made it rather excruciating, but I still caught a few bits that will help me improve my puppy classes. I will try them out this session and if I find them useful, maybe I'll write something then. Otherwise, I found myself disagreeing with a lot of the trainers' methods and thinking Ï would never do that in my class," but it was still interesting to hear how other people do things.

In other news, I have a three-day USDAA trial this weekend at my home turf, and I can't wait. I had planned to go to a trial in August, but as the closing date approached I found myself a bit lean on funds, so I decided to pass. So now I'm itching to compete, and I hope Lucy feels the same. After several weeks of record high temps here, we're actually looking forward to three days in the high 80s/low 90s. It will feel refreshing to us.

This weekend will be my first DAM team tournament. My pal Amanda and I have resurrected the Odd Dogs (a team name we used for an ill-fated PVP attempt last fall) with a third member. Our lineup is Lucy, my little speckled mix, Weaver, an American Foxhound and Machias, an Akita. We figure the "Odd Dog" moniker is fitting considering that two of the three dogs are definitely not your usual agility types. We have shirts and hats and are hoping that even if we don't Q, we can at least take the "Team Spirit" award that's being offered. I just hope Lucy doesn't step on a bee, as she did last year.

And on a completely different topic, Blogger has fixed whatever bug had made it impossible to edit my template, which means I can update my list of blogs over on the right when I get a few more minutes. Until then--and I promise it will happen because some of my few readers have great blogs--I'd like to give a shout-out and thank you to Terrierman for posting this highly entertaining vid of a Jack Russel doing Schutzhund.

Gratuitous cute puppy blogging ...

2007-08-13T14:27:00.001-04:00

every office needs one ...
Originally uploaded by bunchofpants

Someone brought a pup to work today--a little rescued chihuahua, about 7 weeks old, who had been near death when he was rescued along with his sister. The sister dog apparently still needs a home. Hmmm, I was thinking, I've seen a few nifty little agility chihuahuas ... and they're so small it would be a barely detectable increase in my household doggage ... But really, I don't think a chihuahua is really the dog for me.

In other news, I went to a really awful instructors' seminar this weekend ... I'll post more about it later.

The "dog days of summer": a misnomer, plus a word about retractable leashes

2007-08-08T13:08:00.000-04:00

I've been remiss in my dog-blogging, partly because I haven't been doing a lot of training, thanks to a recent heat wave here in NC. Temps weren't so bad last week, but they were still warm enough to keep my training time to a minimum, and this week temps have been at or above 100F, with high humidity that has pushed the heat index up to 110 on some days. It's so oppressive that all classes have been canceled this week at my training facility, even the ones in the covered arena, which at least has the benefit of providing shade.

I have been trying to at least get my dogs out for regular walks in the mornings or late evenings, because the exercise is essential for all of us. I'm also a firm believer that being stuck in the same old house every day, even if there's frequent backyard access, makes a dog bored, frustrated and even neurotic. A dog has to get out and smell the world, I think, to be happy.

This brings to mind a great topic that Christie Keith, one of the bloggers at Pet Connection wrote about yesterday in her San Francisco Chronicle column: retractable leashes. Some people love 'em, some not so much. On the first night of every puppy class session, I always tell my students that they should not use a retractable leash until they get their dog under control on a 6-foot leash. But then I never really incorporate any lessons on using retractable leashes because there's just not enough time in my 6-week puppy class (and frankly, most of the students still haven't mastered the control issue in that period--most need to advance through the pet obedience class before they can get and maintain control on-leash).

As for my own dogs, I only use a retractable with one--Lucy--because Mr. Gomez never seems to be able to get the distinction between being on a retractable and being off-leash. Once he gets past the 6 feet he's used to getting on his regular leash, his brain jumps to "off-leash" mode and he rushes ahead, only to get pulled short at the end of the retractable. I think with careful training and practice I could get him accustomed to it, but it's just fine with me to keep him on a regular leash. He's a bit reactive around other dogs and small children, so it's probably easier for us to stay out of trouble on a 6-foot leash. When I've only got Lucy, however, we do quite well with a retractable.

At any rate, I'm very happy to see Keith's article, because she very nicely explains the ins and outs of retractable leash use. I think I'll add copies of it to the materials I keep handy for students who want more info than we can cover in class. In fact, maybe I should carry copies on my walks and hand them out to people who seem like they could use it ... we usually run into several of them along the way, and I usually end up crossing the street to avoid them.

A great dog-centric flyball weekend

2007-07-17T09:52:00.000-04:00

Lucy and I had an interesting and fun road-trip weekend. We headed out Thursday afternoon to Woodstock, GA, along with my friend Barb and her dogs Twyst and Stetson (a border collie and a Jack Russell terrier, respectively) and stayed the night at the home of Laura Moretz. Laura is a talented dog trainer, disc dog handler and flyball enthusiast, and Friday morning it was like Barb and I were at "Laura's Dog Camp." She gave Barb a frisbee-throwing lesson and showed her some exercises to advance Twyst's disc-dog training. For me, she demonstrated ways to teach Lucy a few things, including getting her to stand on the soles of my feet. It's the kind of trick that requires two people in the initial stages, one to be the platform and the other to lure and reward the dog. Getting Lucy up there was no problem because she's always game to try new things, but keeping my feet stable and level so she she didn't mind staying there was the hard part. It requires muscles I don't always use.

Saturday and Sunday we had a great time at the Athens Dawg Derby flyball tournament. The local paper had a writeup on the tournament, so there were lots of spectators on Sunday. The article, along with a little video, is available at OnlineAthens. It's a reasonably accurate article, except that they call the box a "backstop," which is actually what we call the barrier behind the box.

As I mentioned before, Lucy ran in the veteran's division with the Fur Fun club. I had a blast, not just because the Fur Fun crew is indeed very fun, but because our team was competitive in the division and the racing was quite close. We were doing very well Saturday and thought we were on tract to get first or second place, but a few blown heats put us down to third. Since the format was two one-day tournaments, we were able to make a slight change to the roster for Sunday, and heading into the last race we had a shot at first place--if we won all four heats. The first two went well, but in the third one of the dogs had a bit of a ball-bobble at the box (she didn't catch the ball and had to fumble on the ground to get it) which put us too far behind to catch up. That put us in second place. The exact same thing happened in the fourth heat, and to be honest, I don't know if that put us into third or not ... I have so many second- and third-place ribbons from years of racing that I lose interest in the results when there's no possibility of getting first. So the final result was that Lucy ran well and I had a great time, which is really all that matters.

I really like competing in the Veteran's Division with Lucy. She was staring to slow down a little over her regular jump height (11"), but is running about as fast as her younger days over 7". There are also fewer heats per day (never more than 16), so I don't feel like I'm pushing her too hard. Plus, since the vet dogs tend to be very experienced, the danger of crossers (dogs who run into the opposing team's lane) is reduced. (I think crossing is the biggest risk to dogs in flyball competition. Here's a little article that addresses the subject and how to "proof" a dog in preparation for competition.) Aside from slowing down a little, vet dogs are often very consistent; most of our team's errors over the weekend were in passing, which is all the human's fault. So there's still plenty of room to rack up more points and titles, if that's what people are concerned with (I stopped worrying about that after Lucy got her Onyx award).

I was talking to another competitor who has a little mix dog about the same size and age as Lucy, and she said she would really like to get the remaining 3,000 points her dog needs for the FGDCh-30 title, but she is afraid her dog just can't race as hard as she did when she was younger. I asked if she had ever tried the vet's division, and she said she hadn't because she didn't think one got many points in vet's. I disabused her of that notion--in vet's you're allowed to run with dogs from other clubs, so it's possible to put together a "dream team" for whatever purpose--whether it's winning first place, racking up points or just racing with a really fun group of people. I think I convinced her.

Is pet insurance worth it?

2007-07-10T13:23:00.000-04:00

There is an interesting post at Consumerist.com (one of my fave daily reads) about pet insurance (particularly a company called VPI) and whether it's a rip-off or not. I had been thinking about whether I would try such a thing with future dogs (my current dogs are old enough that the premiums would be exorbitant), but now after the article, and especially the comments, I'm thinking maybe not. It seems like people are very unhappy with the rates of reimbursement they get from pet insurance.

Currently we are on a plan at our vet that completely covers certain routine vaccinations, diagnostics and teeth cleanings and gives us a discount on most other things. It's worked out well for us, but if we were to need a specialty vet for rehab or a serious illness, that would all be out-of-pocket. (Currently I supplement their regular vet care with chriopractic, which has fortunately been affordable so far.) So I was very interested in one of the ideas that came up a few times of "self-insuring," that is putting aside a monthly amount to cover catastrophic costs. That amount could be earning interest until one needs it, which is one advantage over giving the money to an insurance company that seems reluctant to pay it back out, if the anecdotes at Consumerist are any indication.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone (other than a pet-insurance-industry flack) who's had a good experience with pet insurance.

Flyball weekend

2007-07-10T09:12:00.000-04:00

I'm off to Athens, GA, this weekend for the Double Dog Dare Athens Dawg Derby flyball tournament. I've started running Lucy in the veterans' division, which is for dogs 7 years and older, which means her team will jump the minimum height (7"; Lucy's normal height would be 11"), have no false-start re-runs, and all races will be only three heats. What's more, in vets' division they allow dogs to run with other clubs, which makes it easier to field vets' teams in cases where a club doesn't have enough vet dogs of it's own. So this and Lucy and I will be running with a team called Fur Fun, who are known known for wacky antics and fielding fast teams (I hope Lucy's not the weakest link--she's not nearly as fast in flyball as she can be in agility).

A teammate and I are going down a day early to spend a day with Laura Moretz, a disc dog competitor and a member of the 2007 Purina Incredible Dog Team (as well as a member of the Dogsmack flyball club. I don't have a disc dog (Lucy won't catch them and although Mr. Gomez loves frisbees, we don't play because of his bad hip), but maybe I'll "interview" Laura for a blog post about disc dog training. The most I know now is that first and foremost, one must learn to properly toss the disc ... actually I think that's a great deal of the challenge in disc dog competition, because even a lightning-fast dog can't do well if its handler keeps bungling all the tosses!

Stuart Mah seminar recap (of sorts)

2007-07-06T15:29:00.000-04:00

I thoroughly enjoyed the Stuart Mah seminar on Wednesday, although I think my brain got a little bloated with too much food for thought. The seminar didn't have a title, but if I had to pick one I'd call it "Obstacle Focus is Your Friend (or can be if you learn how to use it and train your dog to do its job)." The point being that a) obstacle focus is where the speed is, handler focus always slows a dog down; b) yes, you can actually steer a dog in obstacle focus but c) you need to communicate well and your dog needs to know its job. Of course all of this involves getting rid of some bad habits, bad instincts and trying a few things that seem downright counterintuitive ...

The course and exercises we did made us put the dog in obstacle focus and transition between obstacle focus and handler focus. I hadn't really thought before about how much I rely on handler focus (and consequently have trained Lucy to mostly stay in handler focus), but now I can see how it's slowing me down. Well, not just me--Lucy, too. Stuart made a comment about how he could tell that Lucy really wanted to let loose and go faster (in obstacle focus, of course!) but that I was holding her in handler focus (without really thinking about what I was doing). So basically I need to let my dog go be dynamite. (Whilst incorporating the stuff we learned about steering--I'm not going to describe it all in depth her because it would take hours. Go take one of Stuart's seminars.)

One of the things we talked about sort of destroyed a previous notion I'd had. I was always been under the impression that my verbal cues were the least important aspect of communicating with my dogs on course, with motion and body positioning being much more crucial. So I'd been concentrating on really using my body to direct Lucy and downplaying the verbal stuff (I mentioned my progress towards that goal in my last post. But Stuart said that's valid enough in handler focus, but in obstacle focus the verbal cues become much more important. Duh, makes sense now that I think of it--if I'm trying to get my dog to drive away from me toward, say, a tunnel in obstacle focus, making her look at me to pick up a signal will necessarily slow her down and probably bring her towards me, back into handler focus. What if I need her to stay out? So there are some good reasons to make sure you have some good verbal cues (like right and left, which Lucy knows and Gomey ... well sort of). The trick is to actually deliver them in time for the dog to use them successfully. He compared the way a lot of us give cues to having a passenger in your car who screeches "Turn right here" after you've already entered the intersection going straight in the left lane. (He used a lot of driving a car analogies.)

Anyway, there was way more to the seminar than I can possibly do justice too (or even remember--I could very easily take the same seminar over again and still benefit). So now I'm itching to get to runthroughs tonight because it's a Steeplechase course--a perfect opportunity for a little obstacle focus work.

Quick agility update

2007-07-03T10:33:00.000-04:00

I didn't have time to blog about the Midnight Madness NADAC trial last week, but it was quite fun. It's a great way to have a trial in a place where it gets oppressively hot in the summer. After darkness fell, it almost felt like summer camp and the atmosphere was very relaxed. Plus, as much as I grouse about NADAC's silliness as an agility organization, I must admit that NADAC trials are generally always fun, and I do like the Tunnelers, Weavers and Touch & Go games.

I did very well with both dogs, but I got tripped up several times by a discrimination (dogwalk/tunnel) that I've worked and worked on. I guess I'll just have to work and work on it some more. (Maybe Stuart Mah can help me at the seminar tomorrow!) But mostly, my dogs ran like champs and I didn't do so badly as a handler. The highlight of the whole weekend was Weavers on Friday night when both of my dogs ran the course so near to perfectly I couldn't think of anything at all to criticize about either run. Those are the moments that make me think "THIS is why I love agility!!"

Generally, when she wasn't taking the wrong obstacle in a discrimination, Lucy ran as if she were tuned in to my very thoughts. We're becoming quite a solid team and it's exhilarating to run with her. I also am able to keep my mouth shut a lot more on course, because my body communication is improving. So I usually only spoke when I needed her in handler focus, with an occasional "yes" for reinforcement and to keep her confidence up. Now if we can maintain this teamwork for the upcoming USDAA trials I'll be ecstatic.

As mentioned, I'll be at a Stuart Mah seminar in Hampton, VA, tomorrow. I'm so excited I keep hoping today will fly by--what a geek I am!

Great googely-moogely: NADAC Hoopers "Phase II" rules

2007-06-22T14:38:00.000-04:00

I don't even know what to think after reading this post at the Elite Forces of Fuzzy Destruction blog about the "Phase II" rules for NADAC Hoopers. May I please apologize for having called it lame before? Because lame is better than ... words are failing me, but I think "stupidly insane" is apropos.

OK, maybe I'm overstating it a bit, because honestly, it seems like Sharon Nelson is trying to come up with something to rival USDAA's Snooker game, which is incredibly fun and not at all lame. But really, is it too much to ask to have a few actual obstacles on a agility course? I mean, if I ever get to the point where my dog is too old or too lame to do anything but step through a hula-hoop an inch off the ground I really hope I'll have the good sense to save my money, stay home and rub my dog's belly as he or she snuggles next to me on the sofa.

But then again, if I had a novice dog who wasn't weaving yet, I suppose I'd be glad for yet one more game I could do at a trial. But once that dog gained full skills, I think that I'd be a little less excited about the whole Hoopers thing. If Sharon decides to make it a requirement for a NATCH I'll have one more reason to treat NADAC as only a training venue and not care about the titles. Not that I even really have any idea what's involved in getting a NATCH because the NADAC titles and awards chart has been offline for "important revisions" for months and I never bothered to look it up before the chart disappeared.

More discussion on the new Hoopers rules can be found at the NADAC Yahoo group. Well, "discussion" only if you define the word to mean "everyone tells Sharon how great they think Hoopers will be and maybe asks a clarifying question or two"