Gauis Baltar JE

Congratulations to Sean and Gauis for not only earning their Junior Earth dog title,

but doing so in one weekend. While managing to qualify in Introduction to Quarry every time as well! Making this a 4 Q weekend. That was after a total bust of a trial in North Carolina last weekend.
On Sunday he even reached the rat in IQ in under 5 seconds (4.2)! Very impressive.


If you've never heard of Earthdog (especially if you have a dachsund) Check out this earlier post.

Gauis was his usual exuberant self at earth dog. And waited patiently and politely to take his turn as usual....right..... All those terrier breeders are going to ban us from going to those trials one day just because Gauis is so annoying.



Now it's on to Senior Earthdog! Where there will be a false den to contend with AND.......

Gauis will be expected to recall back to the front of the tunnel away from the rats.

HAHAHAHAHA!

This dog won't take food when he knows he's about to see a rat. I have no idea how we are going to train that.

But you all will be happy to know that Sean held up his end of the bargain and gave Gauis a whole steak for dinner for completing his title.

Sean's only concern this weekend was Gauis changing his working styles while engaging the quarry. You see dogs are allowed to scratch, dig, growl and bark at the rat as well as bite the bars that separate them from the quarry. All of these things are considered "working". The dog must work the FULL 60 seconds after he reaches the rat to qualify.

Now the first few trials Gauis went to he worked by barking. Non-stop barking. Which was nice because when your standing at the opening of the tunnel you can hear him. This trial he would alternate between barking, growling and biting. All acceptable but nerve wrecking because only the judge can hear them. This leaves the handler standing at the front of the tunnel wondering Oh, gosh did he stop? Did we NQ? What's happening in there? But the biting does increase the possibility of us walking away with a broken bar one of these days. A badge of honor on the earth dog circuit.

Well before I go I will leave you with a few more photos of Gauis and our buddy Zeus who I'm sure is happy in his new foster home. We'll miss you buddy :)

A Tempary Companion

Hey everyone,

I'd like to introduce you to Zeus.

Now I'm sure your asking yourself. Who is that? You only have one dog Liz? Well you would be correct. This is my SUPER temporary foster dog. You see about a month ago I contacted DRNA and applied to be a foster home. It was a pretty in depth procedure. I mean there were test questions and full recommendations and everything. It was like applying to college. So all of that got approved and then we needed a home visit. And there we sort of hit a brick wall.

You see Sean works at night and I work during the day. Which means Gauis is only alone at home maybe two-three hours. It also means we are difficult to caught in the house at the same time. Great for foster dog parents but sort of a scheduling nightmare for a home visit. So the home visit thing was going nowhere and I thought in no time we'd get rejected for simply being unavailable.

But then I got a urgent email about a dog emergency. "Can you just keep a dog at your house a few days while we get him in a real foster home?" Well of course we could. That was the whole point right? That we were in a position to take in a foster dog. That suddenly changed to, "Hey can you guys go pick the dog up from his original owners?" So we did that too hence our VERY temporary pal here. In fact I'm trucking him off to his new foster home this afternoon.


Here is what we've learned about Zeus so far. He is 1.5 years old. He is both large dog and small dog friendly. He was taken from a yard with two large boxers and went to agility class with us Thursday and got along with everyone. He's a love bug and hasn't meet a stranger as of yet. He is 100% cat safe, and ignored Gracie even when she hissed at him. The three of them slept on the bed together yesterday. He was apparently raised with three cats according to his original owner. And he has yet to mess in my house, so he seems reliably house trained. AMAZING! Not what I was expecting from a foster.


Gauis wasn't so sure about this foster thing at first. Some strange dog in his house eating his food, playing with his toys and talking to his people. But then he realized that he could play with the him! Like anytime he wanted to, not just on special occasions like at a dog park. Then it was all over. He was in love.



I thought giving back fosters would be really rough for Sean and I because we might get attached. I never thought about Gauis falling in love :P Such fun, can't wait to get our next foster.

Property Damage

You might not be aware of this but we recently moved out of our teeny one bedroom apartment into a new house.

It's huge compared with our last living accommodations and one of it's biggest selling points when we were looking was it's ginormous fully fenced wooded backyard.

Use Gauis to estimate size :)

One of it's few drawbacks was a single room with carpet. Now Gauis is pretty good about house training when supervised. When left to his own devises, not so much, especially not on carpet. He sort of demolished the carpet at my last place. But I had a plan. You see this house has an extra back bedroom that I was going to make all his.

Complete with a water bowl two doggy beds, kitty towers (for the cat) and chew toys. In essence this is more room than he had to run around in my old apartment! We are even going to put up his title certificates and ribbons and lovely pictures of him on the walls so it's homey! We were even going to make the kitty stay in there with him to keep him company as he loves his kitty. His own room, that's great right? And it sure beats having to stay in a crate.

I did not take this picture in this frame and do not "own it" so ssshhh no tattling on me.

So no proublem? Happy puppy, happy mommy, disgruntled yet resigned kitty right? Wrong.

Gauis would like everyone to know that he does not like being closed in one room. Not even for the measly 2-3 hours he is without human companionship during the day. Even if that room has MORE SPACE then he was used to inhabiting in total.

Extreme damage close up!

This was accomplished in about 3 days and I have no doubt that given a month he would be able to dig himself out. And having to sweep up large chunks of wood every night was not making me happy. He also managed to bang up his noes something awful.

I don't think this is separation anxiety as he never had that at the old place. I think this is just snotty, spoiled, bored behavior. For a while this meant crate time. As I will not give into this and see another carpet ruined. But now we are trying the baby gate.

He has managed to knock it down twice and escape (No accidents in my carpet room, thank the lord). And he hasn't jumped the baby gate yet (Something he has accomplished in the past. Serves me right for all the agility training.) So far so good.

SO I hope this dispels any perfect puppy myth Gauis might have had going for him. Anyone whose read this blog from the start I'm sure knows he's not perfect. But for the new folks. He can cause just as much trouble as any dog :)

P.S. I'm sure you noticed I found my camera's battery charger. Agility trial update tomorrow!

Trick Title Sucess! (And other things)

Hello everyone :)

There are some new faces here because of this little post on:

The Long and Short of it All: A Dachshund Dog News Magazine: Gauis Rocks: Expert Trick Dachshund - Amazing Vid...: "We told you this was coming, and we know you can't wait any longer! Congratulations goes out to our pal 'Gauis,' the first-ever Dachshund..."

Which is a great dachshund news blog, so check it out if you haven't heard of it already. But Gauis big news is that he got his expert trick title! Check out the video: (Now if you joined my blog from the long and short, you've already seen this. If not you've seen most of these tricks already. Think of this as a greatest hits video)



But we aren't stopping there! There are plenty of tricks left to learn and things I want to teach. Such as roll on a barrel:



We are currently working on distance. But it's getting there! So stay tuned, I have lots of fun stuff planned.

In other news, we have an agility trail in Woodbridge this weekend. (Just one more leg for NJWW title!) so wish us luck. I'm sure you'll see an update on that)

Also, posts have been lacking recently because I lost the charger for my camera's battiers. And I like having nice pictures with my post not just videos. But today it was found! So expect a more active future.

Unimpressed.

Gracie, she is unimpressed.

Lost Video

So in the interest of full disclosure. And to not be accused of only putting my good runs up here. I have this video. Turns out I found the missing standard run from my second day at Belroi.

You know, the one where he was so pumped up he screamed at the starting line then almost broke his stay, then took the wrong end of the tunnel. When he finally seemed to pull himself together, I forgot the course and everything pretty much falls apart from there.

So this is what it looks like when everything goes wrong. But he ran fast, he had fun, and all of his barking was excited not upset. So what more can you ask for.



In other news! I have a new theory on our weave pole mishaps. I think I'm babysitting him to much at trails. If I take a deep breath and just trust him, he'll do them like he does in class. Georgie said that her and Popeye (Remember Popeye, the brown dachshund from the earthdog post?) had the same issue for a while. Only instead of running off to scream at gate stewards Popeye just missed his entries (Because he is better behaved in every way than Gaius). So that's my goal for wood bridge. Trust my dog. Yikes what a tall order.

As an extra, here's a video of our friend (And head trainer at the dog school I go to) Cindy Briggs' dog Jody and some of her tricks. Video by yours truly.

Introducing Gauis Baltar NA!

These darn things are bigger than me.

Exciting news!

So we've been to two trials since you last heard from me. The first of which was Belroi and

the second of which was in Fredricksburg.

Geeze Belroi seems so long ago let's see what I can remember. Our first day at Belroi (Saturaday) we started with Jumpers with weaves... What can I say about this run. It was perfect (two tries at the weaves but what can you do?). He was fast and followed all of my positional cues. A perfect run. Next was standard, which he did very well in. Our only hairy moment was a strangely placed front cross on my end because I ran out too far with him to make sure he made the broad jump. Instead of waiting for me to exsicute said front cross he decied to simple blind cross me (a big Greg Derrett's handling system no no) and take the A-frame. Luckily the A-frame was the obstacle we were suppose to be headed for. Gaius suddenly behind me frazzled me enough to say "Hey! you blind crossed me" to him while he was at the top of the A-frame. The judge heard me and laughed. She then shouted "He knows where he's going as we headed to the table. The only other mishap in standard was Gaius deciding to run and visit his daddy instead of doing weave poles.

I've noticed Gaius always seems to do something funny at the weave poles. Like that's where he decides to bark, or go visit Sean or wonder off. I think it's because he finds them stressful. They are still tricky from him, which means he'll probably get them wrong and have to do them again. Which means they are less fun than other obstacles. So he gets there and goes "Aww man, not weave poles. Why don't I find something more reinforcing to do" and that's where I get my barking fits. There is another time I get barking fits, but that is another story I'll talk about in a minute.

Video of Day 1 at Belroi (A double Q!)

Belroi Agility Day 1 from Sean Van Damme on Vimeo.

Second Day at Belroi didn't go so well. In Standard he was a nut! Crazy fast but he didn't take any of the right obstacles. He was just crazy. Way to excited. I don't have video for this one for some reason. I'll go through the flip and try to find it again.... so expect an edit here with Gaius' manic crazy, there are bees in my brain run. The start of the jumpers run was much better. He was actually in control and taking the right things. Then we say the photographer and Gauis lost it. I don't think he's ever seen a camera that big. Well then we sort of had a barking meltdown. My main goal after that was just to get him back on track and finish the run happy and fast. Which he did, but by that point we'd missed an obstacle and made too many mistakes to Q.

Here's the first 25 seconds of his jumpers run monstrosity. The camera died mysteriously right when the run started to go south:




That leads us into Fredricksburg . Day one was Standard first out of the gate. It was a disaster Gaius' barking was so bad I had to pull him from the ring. Not because I was trying to teach him a lesson, just because we were going to get whistled off for taking to long. This totally bummed me out. And a spent my time until Jumpers wondering if Gauis and trialling was really something I wanted to keep doing if he was just going to bark. The Jumpers run still had barking but was much improved. It lifted my spirits enough to come back the next day and I'm sure lucky I did.

We have no footage of this day due to some wonky flip camera stuff. My poor dad. Though I'm kind of digging the mysterious lack of footage on all of our bad runs. All coincidence I assure you. No conspiracy here.

Saturday was awesome. There was still barking.... lord was there barking, but we managed to Q in both jumpers and standard. Which means Gauis got is Novice Agility Title! And he only has one more leg for his jumpers with weaves title!

Here is the Standard Run:



Again a weave pole meltdown. But I'm beginning to think that's more about weave poles and less about people. Other than that a lovely run. I did let him blow his dog walk contact. But there was a big GIANT guy with a hat on as a steward RIGHT next to the dog walk. And I figured if I kept him running he wouldn't notice. And it worked. So I was rewarded for bad behavior.

His Jumpers run saw another weave meltdown. See a pattern here? There was another meltdown after a jump. I have a theory there too. I think the other time he stresses then goes over threshold is when I make a handling error. I gave him a wonkey rear cross in the wrong place right before then and I think it threw him off. He also doesn't seem to be barking at anyone there.... he's just..... barking. But with only one refusal we still got our Q! See for yourself:



When I got off the course I wasn't sure if I had Qed. I asked the AKC representative and he said he had. Then he said "And he gets extra points for cursing at you."

I said "He's not cursing at me, he's cursing at the whole world"

The judge shock his head and replied firmly, "No, he's cursing at you."

And maybe he is. Maybe what he's saying is 'mom, we haven't practiced weaves enough and you make mistakes sometimes. When I get to weaves or you mess up, screw agility. I'm going to find another way to entertain myself. Like barking at that woman in the freaky sun hat.'

So new homework, weave poles and no more making mistakes (shesh!)
I don't really get the whole ribbon thing... but if you like them mom... whatever.