7 Months!

Benefit of Asher knowing how to send around an object, he can now play ‘Tree’ at the park with the other dogs. Since he prefers to send to left, he goes the opposite direction of the other dogs, which is novel. He also does a lot of just running straight to the tree and then spinning around and thinking that counts 😉 He’s catching on though, and it’s so much fun to see him really running full out these days. He’s quite the powerful, big strided boy. I don’t know if he’ll be able to turn, but he certainly can accelerate – he seems to float when he runs.

Asher is finally almost seven months, which is way more mature sounding than six months. I’d like to think he’ll have the majority of his height by 8 months … but I could definitely be fooling myself there. Navarre grew over 1/2 inch after 18 months. I may be delusional, but I do feel like Asher’s looking less ‘large’ and like maybe he won’t be giant. Can you say that at six months? I can pretend, anyway. I’m going to call it, I think he’s going to be shorter than 21 inches, but kind of cobby. He just seems to be staying kind of compact looking, and he doesn’t really have knobby wrists anymore. Hey, it could happen. Right now he’s significantly shorter than Haku (who is 21 inches), so I think it puts him at not quite 20 inches at almost 7 months. Knowing my luck he’ll still end up at 24 inches at the withers.

After kind of getting Asher to stop smacking me, for some reason that obnoxious behavior seems to have come back in full force. So he’ll just run up and punch me as he just smacks and goes on his merry way – it’s not cute, especially the bigger he gets. It’s not a greeting, it’s just painful and I’m not a fan. His sister is learning to the art of GENTLY saying hello … Asher isn’t there yet. He is slowly learning the art of walking with everyone as a group, so heeling from the car to the park or arena. That is VERY hard for puppy, that’s for sure. He is growing up though!

Asher continues to be super fun to train. There is just no drama and so much focus for a young dog. I love working with him and he thinks it’s a blast. He’s such a good problem solver and picks up on things so quickly. This week we put his contact board after a tunnel and it took like one repetition for him to understand how to stop in position both coming out of the tunnel and coming towards it. And we haven’t worked on that behavior in quite some time, and never anywhere except for in the living room with no speed or momentum. So, yeah, stopped contacts look great so far!

I did sign up to audit Justine’s running contact class, Asher isn’t ready for that yet but I wanted to see how she trained the process. It’s crazy how quickly they grow up and while he’s not ready for any actual agility training yet, it will be here before you know it. We did introduce playing on the end of a teeter the other day and now, of course, we have issues with him trying to run up teeters when he’s in the arena now. Which was interesting as he NEVER went on the equipment before that, despite the fact that Navarre spends probably MOST of his time running up on the dogwalk, Asher would just watch him to do it and never try to follow. He’s now been on the dogwalk. I really think Asher is going to love agility, so far we are very much enjoying the flatwork.

As for agility, as I do think about agility all week long, I already have a pretty clear picture in my head of what skills I want to work on, how I want things trained and how I’m going to get there. I already have his progression of skills planned out in my mind, I know what kind of behaviors I want, what I want my obstacles to look like, and what sort of handling system I want to use.  While I’m open to new ideas, for the most I already know what I want to train and how I’m going to get there with agility.

We continue to play with little bits of ‘agility’ here and there and Asher LOVES it. Perhaps a little too much, I haven’t had a dog be quite so enthusiastic about the foundation training before. We introduced figure eights with wings this week and, wow, he really likes to go FAST. And he just gets this totally jazzed and kind of glazed look on his face just going around two wings. It’s kind of fun and kind of suspicious, like maybe he’s going to be one of those overarousal dogs around agility. We shall see, so far he’s just really fun, I hope that part stays the same. We’ve now introduced more independence into his sends and wraps, and can now do front crosses and front to blinds on wings and he really, really, really likes tunnels. I’m also surprised how very enthusiastic he is about the bang game on the teeter considering that teaching him to shut a cupboard was one of the things he struggled with the most when he was younger. But, yeah, flying leaps with all four feet onto the end of that thing, he thinks it’s super fun.

Some not very exciting video of us playing around:

I try do a little training before classes to get some more calories in him, he’s very enthusiastic about food and toys, and he needs to gain some weight. While I continue to try to keep him very lean at this age considering his size and rapid growth and worry about OCD, he got a little TOO skinny there with his last growth spurt. I also wormed all the dogs, just in case, as we had been having some erratic loose stool from random dogs. I would not be surprised if they had giardia from drinking in puddles in the forest, so it doesn’t hurt to dose everyone for a few days and then put everyone on probiotics. We shall see if that gets everyone back to regular, as we normally don’t have any issues.

Asher is going to have half siblings soon! Well, more like 3/4 siblings, Rooster has been bred to the sister of Asher’s grandfather, Jiffy, who seems like a very nice dog. So that will be really fun to see what they’re like. I think they’ll be smaller as Luna definitely adds the size, and there will be no Luna in that mix. I know I’ve been super happy with Asher, so I think that litter will be a nice cross.

Speaking of nice dogs, I remember the days before I got border collies when NONE of my dogs were particularly cuddly. There is a definite drawback to having FOUR large cuddly dogs, everyone wants the love, especially when I’m trying to read before bed at night. Just getting IN the bed is a huge challenge, then trying to fairly spread around the snuggles. There is not much reading going on, that’s for sure. Now, when I’m actually sleeping, thankfully Bright will not sleep on the bed, and Navarre kind of comes and goes, so at least I get a little more breathing room (though the cats lock the legs in place). Asher is getting bigger … and sneakier. If Haku moves at all from ‘his’ spot, which is shoved up right next to me, Asher swoops in and takes it over now. Oh, and he is so sweet. The other night he was all upside down curled up next to me in the crook of my arm, he fell asleep while Navarre cleaned out his ears and was snoring while I read my book. Ridiculously cute. Asher has inherited the ‘snuggly, but not annoying’ gene, where he enjoys the closeness without being pushy.

I entered a trial! Both obedience and agility … on the same day! Because I’m sure that won’t cause any conflicts at all. They are having their big multi-event trial up Ridgefield the end of November and I went ahead and entered Navarre in Open obedience TWICE on one day, and then both dogs in FOUR things in agility. I’m pretty sure I’m going to regret that, but we’re ready for some action around here. They STILL haven’t said where 2021 AKC nationals is going to be, but that will be the first day of qualifying for it, so maybe it will count for something. Bright is having her preferred debut at 16, and Navarre is back down to 20 inches. Then the goal is to finally finish that CDX, hopefully we will only need ONE of those Open runs.

Poor adult dogs, they have not been getting any agility. I’m either working with the puppy or with other people’s dogs. I’m running a lot of dogs for injured handlers in class these days. Which is super fun, but my dogs have been taking a back seat. We have an international playday set up for this weekend though, and we even have a seminar with Tamas Traj coming in January, complete with an ISC event he’s judging while he’s out there. So that could be super fun … if we were actually, uh, practicing and in shape. Which we are not. So we’ll see what we can do.

OMG, so many fricken online dog classes these days. Everyone is trying to sell you something on the internet, that’s for sure. I’m also amazed with so many things out there that there is anyone actually left to take all these classes. I very much enjoy Justine’s online classes, she’s a fabulous trainer – but most online classes are just not very good. And I’m amazed people are able get ANYONE to pay for some of this stuff out there. Then the costs of seminars, that’s just insane for a small amount of time and a crazy amount of working spots in that short period of time. How is it even worth it? But people seem to still pay and find it worthwhile, so, hey, what do I know.

Asher is being brushed. He’s not a fan, but we ended up having to power through the drama. It wasn’t even about being brushed, just the CONCEPT of a brush and he would flip out about it. And we tried patience and tons of counter conditioning for months, but it just escalated the drama in a very typical border collie fashion. So finally I just sat him down and said he was going to be brushed, get used to it. And this is TERRIBLE training … that works with border collie drama. Same damn thing with Bright and the measuring device. We worked on it for MONTHS to get her to be even remotely comfortable around it, and she would have nothing to do with it no matter what I did. So finally I just picked her, plopped her on the table, told her stay and measured her. Then she was fine. She didn’t LIKE it, but when it was no longer a choice she stopped flipping out about it. Border collies have an odd reaction to taking away their choices – sometimes it just calms them right down. No way in hell would I do this with other breeds of dogs. So, yes, Asher can now be brushed without flipping out and hiding behind the furniture. Dramaqueen. For now we’re just doing some matter of fact brushing before dinner every night and he’s getting more and more relaxed with it.

Oh, and Asher is now howling with the train whistle every time it goes by – which is a LOT. Sigh. Luckily he only does it when they whistle, which is not very long, and it IS cute. To me. Maybe not to the neighbors.

Asher continues to think sheep are rather curious, but he doesn’t quite get the point of it all yet. We did a little bit with Ian’s sheep this week, who are more ‘exciting’ and don’t just stick to the handler – but he looked about the same, interested but not really getting the point.  He was really sweet with Ian, running up to him and snuggling, but that’s not really what we want him to do around sheep 😉 Asher definitely thinks it should be a team sport and wants the human to be involved – I appreciate that.

So I took Asher down to Heidi’s and played with the babydoll sheep a little to see if he would be more comfortable with me working him. The problem is there is no small areas to work in, and attempting to work Asher in a big field with the sheep was ENTERTAINING, but not super helpful. He’s definitely more excited about the whole process when I’m involved. So I got Haku to help out and that actually worked pretty well. Haku was a good sport about it all and mostly stayed out of the way while Asher circled and circled … and circled. Asher definitely thinks circling sheep is where it’s at. He’d even change direction, which I have herding PTSD about as Navarre would ALWAYS dive bomb the sheep when I asked him to change direction. Asher is just super sweet and even when he was being ‘naughty’ and chasing down sheep, he was still super gentle. I was never at all worried about the sheep or felt he was doing anything bad. He’s just learning and I appreciated his enthusiasm, and the fact that he was willing to try to figure out what I wanted to. It didn’t feel out of control. Now, as for any balancing – not so much. He was circling, he would sometimes go out and bring them to me – and sometimes he would split them and chase them. I do think he was a lot more comfortable with me working him, so we’ll try that in the future. Which was the eventually goal anyway, and I’m not particularly worried about ‘ruining’ him. I don’t think anyone is particularly impressed with his soft and gentle personality on sheep, which is actually rather nice – low expectations will be good for us.

Meanwhile, I think Navarre has turned a corner in herding, I think he finally realized after four years that handler is actually involved in the process. I just feel recently that he’s no longer ‘arguing’ about every little thing. He seems to have finally gotten on the ‘team sport’ train and he seems okay with it. At least a little bit. Well, with other people, anyway. We’ll see if it continues. It was very sad, when we went down to Heidi’s to play with Asher on sheep afterwards we let the dogs all run around and play, but he just stared at the sheep the whole time, he’s never done that before. He really, really, really likes his sheep.

OMG, so rusty with our agility. Daisy had a fun international play day at her place and we joined in. Definitely needed to break things down! Bright was especially dorky the first time I ran her, just running off and taking all the tunnels. But she did fine once we did break it down. I still can’t run too much without the knee tweaking, which apparently I can sort half ass it when I’m running at my arena, but when I was actually trying to get places it wasn’t happy. So we do much lazier handling, which I SHOULD be good at, as I like lazy handling in general. Still, it was a fun day, we hadn’t played fun international stuff for a while, would love to do it more often.

Navarre continues to love ALL the puppies except those related to him. He thought Pixel’s puppies were fabulous. But I suppose I shouldn’t say that kind of thing anymore, him and Asher are really cute together and, knock on wood, good friends. They all enjoyed getting to go to the river with Carol’s dogs over the weekend, Asher hadn’t been swimming for a while since the Molalla is so cold. He’s not quite the swimming fiend that Navarre is, but he very much enjoys the water and is still a good swimmer.