We Take the Bad With The Good

Gallery: OP Std 08 inch-B0511

Well we had an agility trail this weekend. We just did Sunday so that means two runs. This was our first trail after our three day extravaganza where we taught Gauis not to bark at judges... or ring crew... or helpless bystanders. And the verdict is, the lesson stuck! We had no barking this weekend. He did run off from me in Standard and sniffed the leash runner but then came right back and completed the course. So huge progress!

Now on the subject of our actual runs.... well they were sort of a disaster. But a fast happy enthusiastic disaster. Which is really sort of the best kind of disaster I guess. Here they are in all of their embarrassing glory.


Sorry it's really hard to see. Sean was far away for parts of it.


Sometimes I wonder if I should put my bad runs up here. But then I think, what would I learn if I only kept the good runs. The pretty runs. This blog is suppose to be all about record keeping. If I want to make progress I need an accurate account of where I am so I can know where I'm going. Besides Sean is a journalist and would never let me give you all biased reporting. So you get it all, the good the bad and the ugly.

Speaking of ugly look at this very unflattering picture of Gaius charging off the end of the teeter.


Gallery: OP Std 08 inch-B0511

So here's the breakdown.

Standard: Started off VERY enthusiastically. Gaius loves the teeter so having it early on is good for him. I was a little unclear about which jump to go to next which caused him to dart off (and sniff the leash runner as mentioned before). But no barking and he came right back. I think table after the A-Frame is hard for him because he's just going so fast and he slid right off of it but then hopped right back on. Next was the tunnel, which he refused to go through. But it had standing water in it so he was just being a prissy purse dog who didn't want to get his little footsie wootsie's wet, which I can tease him for but can't really get upset about. After that lovely weaves!

Gallery: OP Std 08 inch-B0511

Actually we had lovely weaves in both runs. Can you tell we've been working on that? Sometimes I feel like agility is a bucket with a bunch of holes in it. Once you plug one hole another shows up. But maybe that's what makes it fun. There is always something to work on. Well after pretty weaves he missed his dogwalk contact. Something he has NEVER done before, not even in class. I've known for a while that he needs work on his dogwalk contact so I'm not super surprised. I know how to fix that. His teeter was pretty too looking back at it, look how close to the end he got and let it drop out from under him. He dose love that teeter.

Gallery: OP Std 08 inch-B0511


All an all it was a disaster of a run, but a really fun disaster. I'd rather run him when he's having a blast and running his heart out, than get a Q with a run that had mediocre enuthsiasum where I have to cheer-lead the whole thing, and it's like I"m pulling teeth. He really liked that run.

Jumpers: Jumpers was less enthusiastic. It was a bit hotter, and it did start with weaves not his favorite. Then he refused a jump which confused me. Then my handling got wonky so I don't really blame him for that. I think he spent most of the run thinking "Mom, what the heck are you doing?" I count that one was my bad, being that every time I was being clear he sped up and looked like he was having a good time. My brain just wasn't in it. So we had I think one more refusal and were a bit over time. I sort of lost my place too somewhere in there. That's a bad mommy, no cookie for her!

His ears really do have a mind of their own during agility don't they?

Gallery: OP JWW 08 inch-B0511

Gallery: OP Std 08 inch-B0511

No Qs this weekend but a good time had by all. We have a two day trail next weekend in the same location and then the weekend after that it's a three day trail indoors. Then after that a Tracy Skelnar seminar. An agility filled month. I'll keep you all informed.

Wilbur Update

Been away for while, but that's because I'm trying to do this whole graduation thing. My life should settle down after my thesis defense and you can expect a ton more posts after that. Anyway I thought hey, I haven't updated you all on Wilbur and he's been up to some things so I should probably do that.

Willie Wonka aka Will aka Wooly Bear aka Wilbur (We've settled on Wilbur being the perfect old man name) is almost 100% health wise now. Phew. So here's the saga. When I first got poor Will he had lost 7 teeth, including his two top canniens, and just been neutered. He had almost no fur on this back end and both ears were ridiculously infected. Also two of his toenails had just been cut so they no longer grew into the pads of his feet and his wobbly back end made stairs and even getting around a problem.

Time and rest helped him recover from the surgery. Many many many baths, vitamin E and Omega 3 pills cured the hair issue. Good nutrition some weight loss and exercise (And weekly massages ) means that not only does he do some stairs now, but he actually runs! There is nothing that makes my day as bright as watching this dog happily run back and forth on my hard wood floors. Even his potty training is coming along. I think it was tough at first because every time I brought him out to pee he would trip and fall down in the grass (He's much steadier on even surfaces) so he never wanted to be outside. But now that he's steadier he doesn't mind as much.

The ears have been..... a saga. First it was cleaning his ears everyday with medication twice a day for about two months. This cleared up the left ear which is now fine, but the right ear was a different story. Nothing worked. We changed medications, we changed cleaning solutions, we increased the number of times a day we cleaned it, nothing worked. And the worst thing was it hurt him. Every time I cleaned it he would yelp and there was always a tiny bit of blood in with all the other gunk. And he'd rub the ear on things every chance he got. It really bothered him.

So the doctor finally decided to do a simple surgery where he would flush the ear canal with saline. In the midst of doing this he found a small polyp. Apparently this polyp was most likely caused by the years of neglect and infection. But now it was the reason we couldn't get rid of the current infection. So in for another surgery to remove the cancer. Now he sort of looks like Frankendog. But we hope the issues have been solved.

Anyhow on to brighter news about old Wilbur. So as I said before Wilbur has the perfect temperament. He's just not fazed by anything. Never met a person dog or situation he doesn't automatically like. So I thought, he's the perfect therapy dog. So to pass the therapy dog test in our region he would have to pass the CGC test plus a couple other things like dealing with a wheel chair, or with someone on a walker and rougher petting. Most of this stuff I thought would be a breeze for Wilbur.

Greeting another dog ✓
Friendly petting ✓
Supervised Separation ✓
Walk through a crowd ✓

I don't even need to teach him loose leash walking cause if you keep a pretty good clip he can't really walk very fast so he doesn't pull. I'm sure he pulled as a younger dog but heck now he is luckily to keep up with you at all.

The tricky part would be sit, down and STAY. Ok sit and down I had already sort of taught him. Stay was a bit tough. He has NO impulse control and all he wants to do is follow me if I walk away. Also I realized I only had like a week to teach him this before the test. We were.... inconsistently staying by the day test time rolled around. But luckily our friend Pat was doing the test and let us do the stay part a few times to prove that he could actually do it which was really nice of her.

Other than that, Wilbur passed both tests with flying colors. There was a little hick-up with the recall. He tried to come but ended up stepping on his leash and tripping himself. Then he was a little scared of continuing to move. So we did it again without the leash and he came right to me. During the test where there is a wheel chair he spent the whole time giving big lovey dovey eyes to Pat's Scottish terrier Pumpkin (she was not interested in his romantic advances). About the third pass with the wheel chair Pat said "-Sigh- He's not even looking. Could you at least get him to glance this way?" I tapped him on the head and pointed at the wheel chair as it glided past. He glanced at it and then looked back up at me as if to say So? and then turned his attention back to Pumpkin. It was pretty funny.

Of course the loud sudden noise part of the test didn't bother him. It made the lab taking the test next to us jump and Wilbur just stared right at me.

The woman with the lab said to me "Wow, he's so good. He didn't even flinch".

"He's deaf" I said.

"What?"

"He's deaf, he didn't finch because he couldn't hear it."

She thought that was pretty funny and laughed. I guess it's sort of like cheating.

During the rough handling portion Pat accidentally grabbed and tugged on the ear with all of Wilbur's stitches. I was like "WAIT! He has stitches! Be careful!" but it was too late. He winced but didn't do anything else except wag his tail. She apologized but said if that didn't prove that he'd never bite anyone, nothing would.

So Wilbur is an official CGC dog and he only needs three supervised visits in the next 6 months to be an official therapy dog (We have to wait until he has his stitches out though. No open wounds on trips is one of the rules). I think this was the job he was made for in life. We can't wait to get started.

Remember! Wilbur is still up for adoption here at DRNA (ignore the stupid jokes in his profile. I didn't write that)

Footage

Thought I'd post the footage of Gauis' Saturday runs at Winchester. My parents only came Saturday so that was the only time I could get video. The standard run is clean but about 30 seconds over time. Jumpers had one refusal but still way over time (OMG those weaves are slow I could have knit a sweater) . He was showing more pep in his step darning Jumpers though. So I like to think that is a good sign. You can see he's still nervous about the judges (check the dirty look he gives the judge on the A-frame). But I'm so pleased he managed to control himself. And his tail is up so he's not miserable.

It's Not all About the Ribbons

So a three day agility trail and Qualification wise we are 1 in 6 . The last run on the last day we managed to pull out a Q (skin of our teeth). I'm sure you would surprised to hear me say that I think this has been our most successful trail yet. I mean in the past we've gone 3 in 4 at a trail (I think we have, may have been two in four). Well that's because there are things more important than the ribbons.

My goal was to get Gauis to stop running off form me at trails to bark at the judge (And ring crew, and trial secretaries, and the audience). It's something we've been working on since we started trailing. Well actually it's something I've been working on with Gauis since he was about 5 months old. Which I think is one reason it's such a frustrating issue. It's like he can learn so much but I just can't get him completely over this one little issue. Here's some really yucky runs, with a very distracted dog that had a tendency to run off and yell at people.

So I've talked to about a million people trying to get advice on how to fix the problem. I was told more run throughs. Which as far as I'm concerned is never a bad idea, but he doesn't bark at folks in practice, or in class. I only see this behavior at trails. The fact that this is a tricky issue to deal with was brought home to me when Laura Derrett said this when I asked her about the issue. "Hmmm, that's a tough one. I don't know." So I decided to go with another Laura's advice and she said 'naughty mean dogs that bark at folks don't get to play the game, and get put in their crates with no cookies.' or something like that.

And that was the goal of this weekend, not Qs. So the question of the day is how did it work?

Well as predicted, first run on Friday Gauis runs off from me to bark at the Judge (It was a poor provisional judge at her first trial. Gauis was the second dog she had ever judged and of course he ran at her and barked. Not a very warm welcome committee my little dog). So I gave him a negative reward marker (AHOH) and then walked over to grab his collar (Not hard, just to take hold of it, something I do in his normal life all the time and that he doesn't find intimating.) . He saw me coming and took off which resulted in a bit of a benny hill moment (He was not scared of me he just doesn't like being penalty walked anywhere and he knew that's what was coming) But after I finally got a hold of him he was walked by his collar out of the ring straight to his crate which he was unceremoniously chucked into.

He was furious at me. When I came back in fifteen minutes to take him out to use the bathroom he had shoved the blanket I kept in there with him and his water bowl up against the wire door so that they covered it almost completely. Through the tiny crack that was left I could see him sitting (not laying down comfortably as he normally is) with his back to the door staring at the solid plastic wall of his crate. He didn't move from this position until after I had put his leash on, and he wouldn't make eye contact with me the entire time I took him out to pee. No calming signals, no ears back, just simply pretending the other end of the leash didn't exist.

After that he seemed to get over it, especially when I didn't take him back to his crate and let him sleep in my lap till his next run. For being so ring 'stressed' he sure isn't stressed by the trail environment, even with all of the new dogs and people. He spent most of the trail out like a light some of the time on his back, spread eagle.

So next was jumpers which started around 7 pm (Oh my gosh it was a long trail, we got there at 11 am). And you know what, he stayed with me. Not a peep. I defiantly saw his ears go back a few times when he caught sight of the judge out of the corner his eyes. but he managed to resist the urge to be naughty. He worked through it. Granted we were slow as molasses but hey I'll take it. He gets more comfortable rehearsing the good behavior we'll get the speed back. We ran clean, just ten seconds over time on Friday.

And that was sort of the theme for the rest of the weekend. No barking except for that first run. He was slow and tentative but manage to restrain himself. In fact he got a little faster throughout the weekend. And his last run on Sunday was only two seconds over time which was a small enough time fault that we still managed to Q! (Hence the ribbon picture and out first leg in open!). Other than being over time we had some refusals, some knocked bars, and some off courses. But none of those are a big deal, I'll take a million of them over the barking. The standard courses especially were pretty rough (some I thought were harder than the excellent courses. One had three different discrimination between tunnels and contact obstacles in it).

I was really proud of him. I hope I never have to walk him off a course like that again. Hopefully he'll remember that lesson and we won't have to worry about it anymore. But it just feels good to have a way of dealing with the problem that works.

Pet Expo

Well here's the update on this years Henrico Pet Expo. Gauis participated in both the agility demo and the tricks demo. He was quite a hit with the crowd during the tricks demo, being the only small dog to participate. The picture above shows him jumping over Lindie a black and tan lab as the two dog trick finale. Sean was sweet enough to make this video that shows some of the highlights of the day.



He did really well with the crowd. I was pleased. He was distracted once when a little girl in the audience leaned through the ropes to stare right at the weave pole entry, but on the third attempt he was able to ignore her and do his poles. And he never barked just distractedly wandered in her direction. I think I really cleaned up my tricks for this event. Perfecting a trick isn't as fun as initially teaching it, but it's an important skill to practice and an audience certainly helps add incentives to do so. It'll be nice to be able to teach new things again though. Three day agility trial this weekend, wish us luck!

Two Dog Trick

Foster dogs are good for training sometimes :)

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to Gauis who turns 3 whole years old today. Gosh have we have been through a lot in the last 2 years 10 months. He learned so much last year. We've earned three titles (NA, NAJ and JE, Plus the trick titles I guess) and been a lot of places and done a lot of things. Mom went from new dog mom trying to teach her pup agility, to an agility instructor and started taking in rescues. If Gauis learns as much next year as he did this year I can't wait to see what he accomplishes.

The picture above is a 6 week old Gauis who weighs about 2 pounds. Here's a video depicting his first day home with us. He was so tiny then he fit in the palm of my hand.



Speaking of things we've done and places we've gone,
Some up coming posts to the blog:
An Update on Will
Trick Lecture by Silvia Turkman
Two Day Seminar with Susan Derrett
The Trick Expo!

So you can see why I haven't posted in a while. VERY busy!