Salutations


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Thank you
dogmum

Spring Beauty

My good girl enjoying the spring weather.

Springtime?

We have had unseasonably warm weather lately and this morning it is
mild enough to sit outside. Here Sadie finds a good smell on the wind.

Storage

Always stack your springers in order of size.

Relaxashun

...you're doing it right.

On the first day of Christmas

....my true love gave to me - a beer. In a tree.
Sadie channelling Bob & Doug McKenzie.

Snow Princess

Sundog

Elliott checking on things in the yard. He is continuing to recover
from his ACL surgery. He has built up considerable muscle mass and has
almost complete freedom generally. However, he is still weaker on his
left side and cannot yet frolic with abandon in case he might injure
himself. But he is slowly, slowly improving.

Cuddles

Frozen Dog

Sparkles in the winter sun.

Snooze Alert Level: High

Dog in a box

Strider behaving at HDOC.

Seen at the show

Seen at the show

Seen at the show

Let's Pretend!

As I learn more and more about doing competitive obedience, I discover more and more the usefulness of something called a correction match.

At work the other day someone asked what I was doing on the weekend, and I said I was taking Sadie to a correction match.

- A what?

- A correction match. It's a sort of, um, well, it's a pretend obedience trial. The difference is that you can help your dog if she makes a mistake.

It's hard to explain obedience activities to people who are really only asking to be polite, and whose eyes begin to glaze over the instant you start using terms like "q" and "nq". So as I tried to distill the essence of the correction match into a simple phrase, this is what came out.

As I have discovered, the correction match can be a very powerful training tool for any dog and handler team. You have the full experience of the trial: you travel to a hall, which may be completely new to you and your dog. This was the case on Sunday. We went to a nice facility called The Poodle Farm in Vanessa, Ontario.

Just as at a real show, you set up your crate, you check in and find out where you are scheduled in the running order, you warm up your dog, you put yourself in the ring with a person who may be a complete stranger, who has a clipboard and who runs you through your paces as though it were an actual trial. In classes that require stays, you can test the strength of your dog's stays, and if you choose to, you can stay in the ring to help your dog, or you can come back intermittently to reward your dog. You see the strength of your competition, you watch other handlers and pick up tips you can use in your training. You commiserate with the teams that are having a bad day.

Sadie does not yet have what I would call a great deal of ring experience, so she still finds things overwhelming and stressful when we go out to new places. I am trying to take her out as much as possible to expose her to new people and new places, and correction matches are a safe and positive way to help her grow in confidence and develop her trial skills.

Unlike in a real trial, if she makes a mistake, I can correct her, re-do the exercise, break off the exercise and start over, encourage her when she is doing really well, and communicate in ways that are not allowed in an actual trial. So, for example, when we were doing our heeling pattern and instead of following me through an about turn (this is a u-turn to the right to send you back in the direction you just came from) - where was I, yes, so, instead of actually doing the "heeling" bit of the exercise, when I turned into the u-turn, Sadie decided that it looked like much more fun to jump the fabric-draped gating that we were just coming up to, to see what might be on the other side, and took down most of the line of gating in the process. Much tail wagging and spriteliness on the far side of the gating - look what I just did, mom!

Had this been a real trial, my mortification would have been extreme. Since it was a match, we were able to laugh it off, put the gating back up, and I was able to immediately re-do the exercise and make sure that she stayed with me, and reward her for doing it right.

I do have some jitters even at matches, so this is good too. Because I can talk to her, and encourage and help her, the whole experience is positive for us both. One of the things I try to do mentally at a trial is to hold on to the feeling of enjoyment I have when I work with my dog in a non-trial environment, and the feeling of calm, and to remember it as precisely as possible so that the next trial I go to, I can bring it back to mind and try to put myself in that positive, happy frame of mind.

I think that when I go to our next trials, I am going to try to convince myself that it is in fact no different or more important than a match. I need to stop investing so much emotion into the trial situation, because I keep sabotaging myself with my nerves.

A fellow match attendee mentioned yesterday that it's natural for us competitive types to enjoy the pretty ribbons and try to get them and that it is a good feeling to earn them. But the ultimate goal of doing dog sports is to spend time with our dogs and have fun with them. At the end of the show, you go home with the dog you love, ribbons or not.

Other certainties of dog shows - there is always another show next weekend, and you never, ever know what the dogs will do. Every dog and handler team has their day, and every superstar has unpredictable days. If you put in the effort, you and your dog will accomplish the things you want, while having a good time. The same person also told me "it's funny how the harder you work at something, the luckier you get".

A bonus to yesterday was the glorious weather. It was a beautiful early autumn day. Full sun, moderate temperatures, no humidity. The drive to Vanessa was filled with trees just beginning to turn colour, fields of pumpkins ready to harvest, corn as high as an elephant's eye.

On our way back home, we passed through Ayr and visited Riverside Park. Sadie jumped up into my lap and we watched the world go by for a bit.

Elliott is Improving!

Elliott has been on antibiotics for 18 days now and we are seeing good improvement in his leg. He is once again walking on the underwater treadmill at the rehab clinic. Last week he did 20 minutes in there at 2.7 mph. He is no longer hopping around except occasionally when turning to the left (the surgical side) and he is starting to voluntarily bear weight when standing. He is also volunteering encouraging movements like moving backward. I am cautiously optimistic that this was in fact an infection and I am hoping we can get rid of it and start to move forward again. Last week one morning I took along the camera to get a bit of film to look at later to check his walk, and was thrilled to see he is starting to bounce again. His normal gait involves a bouncy step as he pushes off his feet. He still has a hitch on the left side which you can see, but he has continued to improve over the past week and is now walking mostly at a normal walking speed, not just slowly, and has been able to bounce for longer and longer periods during our walks. He is also back to doing gentle hills and is doing much, much better again. Thank you for your good wishes and I will be sure to post further updates as he continues to (I hope) improve.

Every Diva Has Her Day

I love doing obedience with my dogs, and it is a great feeling when they do well in the ring. However one of the best aspects of obedience is the humility your dogs remind you to observe when they don't have a good day in the ring. As a trainer who I respect a lot has said many times, these are not robots we are taking in the ring. They are dogs and we don't know what they will do on any given occasion.

Personally I like to use the "failures" as learning opportunities. No work in the ring is a failure because you spent time working with your dog, and you gained an opportunity to learn and observe your dog's behaviour, and insight into ways to help your dog do better the next time. This is a dog beside you, not a robot. How is your dog feeling physically? Have you done everything you can to care for his needs? Has your dog had some exercise the day of the trial before you go in? Have you played with the dog that day like you would normally? Have you done your best not to stress yourself out to the point where your dog picks up on it and decides that whatever this is we are doing, it's obviously not going to be fun because you are freaking out?

In spite of doing everything you need to do, you will still have days when your dog surprises you in the ring. This past week we did one Rally trial at the German Shepherd Dog Club of Canada National Specialty. They generously offered one all-breed Rally trial and although the entry was quite small, several shapes and sizes of dogs apart from GSDs were present. I entered Sadie in both Advanced and Excellent, hoping to get another RAE leg towards her title.

Sadie passed her Advanced leg, but pretty much fell apart in the Excellent leg. She lost focus, spent a lot of time looking around and exploring, and I worked quite hard just to get through the course with her. We nq'd of course, and I realized it about halfway through but tried to just complete the course in the best way I could and to stay positive and get her through it.

The course was in an arena we had never been to before. Maybe I should have made an effort to get her in there earlier in the day than I did to let her see where we would be. The ring was indoors, inside an arena, on sod. Sod had been brought in and laid down on the cement to form the ring. I think she was surprised when we started working the course to discover that she was on grass. The arena was large and spacious, and not too many people were around. So at one point when the air conditioning unit came on overhead, she stopped and looked up at it. This trial started at 6pm and we did not go in the ring until about 6:45 the first time. The second round was at about 7:30. This was a first for her and although we do classes often at night, we had never trialed at night. I brought her in about an hour before the trials started and let her walk around and explore but obviously there were conditions in place that caused her to not be able to do her best. In the ring I would not say she was actively deciding not to listen to me but displayed a level of distraction that I was not able to fully draw her out of. She would come back, make contact, do a station, and then I would lose her again. Out of this experience I can take several things to work on. I need to get her out more to different venues. I need to do all things possible to remove the stress from these situations for her. I need to take her to new places and work only focus and use quality rewards for that focus. We also just need to get to more trials and get more experience. She is only 3 years old and really has come so far in the past year that I cannot be unhappy with an off day. We ALL have bad days, including the fabulous dogs who so happily consent to come along with us to the shows. Even the best obedience dogs in the country make mistakes sometimes. After all, we the humans are the ones who sign up, pay the fees, drive to the show, and ask the dogs to come along. It's all our idea, not theirs. The fact that they are happy to come along and do the strange things we ask really is a kind of magic.

Yesterday Sadie participated in her very first Open trial. Unfortunately she made one mistake in the drop on recall which caused us to nq. But I don't care. It was a mistake we can fix. What I was absolutely thrilled about was that she did all the other exercises, and she did a great job. She got excellent marks on heeling, which has always been our weakest area. She did her retrieves, she did the broad jump, and she did her out of sight stays. She did everything with very little visible stress and with a happy wag to her tail when we were finished. I was delighted that she did such a good job in her first trial and I know that she is ready to continue trialing in Open. I know that with more training and more ring experience she and I will have success in the months and years to come.

Thank you Sadie, for being such a good teacher. I will try my best to make our competition time fun and rewarding for both of us!

Wordless Wednesday Part II

Wordless Wednesday