Agility Spaz

Good lord my puppy is a giant red spaz. Back to agility this week and, oh yeah, overarousal issues – haven’t seen THOSE for a while. It’s, uh, safe to say that he forgot just about everything – or he just couldn’t focus because he was so excited to be back (‘Wheeeee! TUNNNEL! WHEEEEE!’). Collection, what’s that? We did actually train some basic handling skills, right? Obstacle commitment to anything but a tunnel?

So … yeah, we spent the week introducing running contacts instead. Which is going … okay. Just shaping it with a board off the table, like I did with Navarre. We did bring out the mat a bit just to see what he would do and I didn’t like it all. Now, to be fair, we haven’t REALLY trained it to fluency, but he DOES work hard to hit it … in a really awkward and uncomfortable looking way.

Asher has been alternately brilliant and then clueless with this. We worked on it for 5 sessions over the week, before and after classes. He’d have a FABULOUS session where I swear he had the idea and was running down confidently with lovely low hits … and then the next time out he’d stop and lie down midway down the board. And then jump like a gazelle 10 times in a row.

Now, it doesn’t help we are using the basically reverse luring manners minder method. Where the manners minder is THERE, but he doesn’t really care about it, but he drives to it … and past it. He recognizes the beep as being correct, if he doesn’t hear the beep he immediately turns around and runs back to the table. If his hit is okay he gets a cookie  from the MM, where I have to insist he go eat the cookie. If his hit is really good, he gets a thrown squeaky. If his hit is AMAZING he gets a thrown toy and I release the dogs for total race around the arena pandemonium.

So 5 sessions later, I can’t say we’ve had the lightbulb moment yet. Which I suppose I shouldn’t expect, but he is a clever little puppy sometimes. I suppose he can’t be instantly amazing at everything. Or still amazing when you return to things after 2 months …

We did work up to doing some short simple USDAA at home starters jumpers courses, though it took a week for him to settle down into it and he still really loves that tunnel! We worked at 12, 14 and a little bit at 16 just because I was feeling lazy and didn’t want to reset jumps.  The wingless jump on the course got taken out by that TAIL quite a few times, and knocking bars when my handling wasn’t clear. Lots of pulling off obstacles, which is not an issue we had before (but not tunnels!). He loves it, he’s trying very hard, and we had to bring the excitement level WAY down for him to be successful. He’s a baby, he’ll get there when he gets there.

Navarre was also SO HAPPY to be back, and just his full body wiggle and bark – there is nothing else like agility to let dogs just be purely joyful and enthusiastic in such a happy way. And he’s ridiculously wide and I just don’t care. I never had any expectations for Navarre to be anything other than the big happy goober he is – maybe not the, uh, most efficient agility dog – but he doesn’t care. I did do some basic RC foundation work with him as long as I had it set up, and it was interesting to see that he needed work too – surprised as with the full dogwalk he’s pretty darn consistent. We’ll work on it, not much else going on.

Once again, so hard without Bright. It’s like getting hit all over again when we got back to these routines and she’s not there. She loved her agility, and she loved racing around the arena, she loved stealing the toy from everyone – it’s not the same without her. Nothing is. Her smiles, her wiggles, her snuggles. Sigh. We are going to have a Bright relative visitor next week, it will be interesting to see how much I see of her in him, if anything. Hopefully the boys will be nice to him, he sounds like a soft sweetheart.

I continue to alternate between thinking getting a Bright relative is a good idea and not wanting a puppy at all – because I don’t want some random puppy (or really a puppy at all), I just want Bright. Bright’s favorite puppy we ever raised was Aja (now Rev), who was out of Bright’s sister Glee. We all liked Aja (Bright the most!), and she fit in really well with the household. She had a lot of, uh, drama like Bright – but with much better bounce back. She’s very Bright like, but sassier.

She is 2 and a half now, living in Idaho with Lexi and doing some agility (which she seems to very much like!). There is a possibility that assuming Karen did want to breed her and she passed her health tests, that I could raise a litter with her and see if a puppy seemed like she wanted to stay with us. Which is just a whole lot of ‘what ifs’, but that’s what seems like the right choice at the moment. Who knows what life might bring, but I did very much enjoy her – one of my favorite puppies.

Knock on wood, the boys seem to be settling into a new social groove, Asher and Navarre are playing more again, Haku and Navarre aren’t giving each other stink eye all the time any more. Which is good, as apparently if you want to get a dog neutered it’s now a three month waitlist because of the virus. So put that plan on the back burner until things normalize in the world – Navarre is a lucky guy.

What was REALLY nice is that for the first time in over two months I actually HAD A WEEKEND. I was in heaven! It’s really nice to be back to a normal schedule, and we got in two rainy hikes and some herding practice over the weekend. We worked a single which was really helpful for Asher, he really thought about what he needed to do and where he needed to be. It was helpful for Navarre, he finally stopped looking for the other sheep! Still having issues with Navarre just guessing on flanks, I don’t really know how to fix that but it’s a bad habit to break. It only takes a few steps in the wrong direction to totally fuck up a line, that’s for sure, and when it happens so consistently, it’s hard. He can and does know his flanks, he’ll do the same thing with verbal and whistles. Asher gained a little bit of confidence turning sheep as well, which he needs work on – and, yes, he has a bad habit of blindly running fences instead of feeling his sheep on his outruns. Really happy with him though, getting more and more confident, he’s such a fun dog.

Dove is off making more Rooster babies even now – can’t wait to meet them!