Baby’s First Outruns

There is a limit to Haku’s farm usefulness. Gathering sheep he’s good at, but holding or pushing reluctant sheep – not so much. He tries really hard, but the boy has no presence. Practiced a bit at Poodletopia this weekend, which involved separating out 2 of the heavies and the one lighter sheep to help them be not so crushingly heavy. Haku was not much help with this, either was I – luckily, Heidi is very strong. I’m so not a farmer. But your hands feel very soft after wrestling with sheep.

We did get the ladies out there, Haku had some very wobbly drives where I tried not to use the fence as a crutch and drive them to a specific point – and I tried to keep him back behind the sheep better, especially with his cross drive. This often didn’t work, I need to look more at the sheep than him.  Still no real progress getting him to move forward when needed on his walk-up, he’s such a polite boy.

Still, I think he should go play at some baby trials. I have some ideas in that direction, which involves hoisting him off on someone else as there is nothing really locally. My perfect boy is going to be 9 this summer, I want him to have a few trials by the time he’s 10. And maybe he’ll be going strong as he goes into the the double digits, but I do want him to have a chance while he’s still young and strong.

Meanwhile, Navarre is actually making progress in herding! We keep inching forward, but I feel like we finally turned a corner and he does actually kind of have an idea what he’s supposed to be doing – even if he doesn’t always do it. He is definitely stronger on his away side, and, with a lot of reminders that we do not slice in and bite sheep, he can flank nicely on his go-bye too. Sometimes. You can see in his little brain the fight he has before he takes the command about what he WANTS to do as opposed to what he SHOULD do. But as he is a good dog at heart, I’m optimistic. He CAN give the sheep some room too, I think working with just pressure and release has helped, rather than telling him to back off. Still have quite the issue getting him to hold balance and walk up, but he CAN. When he wants to.

Dove was doing such pretty outruns I decided to give it a try with Navarre, assuming he would just be a dork about it. But guess who did his first baby outruns? I didn’t even bother to try with his bad side, but he did do his very first (tiny) outruns and actually moved out and around ever so gently actually feeling the sheep – what a good boy! Maybe my big dorky puppy is growing up a bit.

What we haven’t worked on is agility, and this weekend we have a USDAA trial. It was mostly for Bright, who I had to pull. It was supposed to be Bright’s first full weekend of Masters classes. We were going to do all sorts of things! But Bright is still broken, and it’s been long enough without improvement we’ve moved the injury into the ‘serious’ category. Sigh. I still can’t really tell where it is, almost looks like hip to me, but I’m not sure. It’s pretty consistent. It hasn’t gotten any worse, but it hasn’t gotten any better. Sunday she was bouncing around inside to look out the window at a visiting puppy, then I let her run around a little at poodletopia. Good news, she didn’t look any worse the next day, so … good? The plan at this point is to hopefully get her adjusted at the trial this weekend, assuming someone is there. But I think we’ll have to start looking into getting into a sports vet and see what’s going on.

Still, Bright is happy and it doesn’t seem to be bothering her. She’s just pissed she keeps getting left out of things. Love that girl, if she can never do agility again, I don’t care – I just want her to be able to hike and be the active dog she loves to be. Though I’m assuming she’ll get to come back to agility, you just never know. Worst case scenario though, she’ll be fine no matter what – she’s my best girl.

Navarre I didn’t enter in too many things in USDAA, well, compared to what you can. So many classes in USDAA. I wanted to finish up his Advanced title, he needs a couple standards and a couple games. So we’ll see, we have a bunch of runs on Saturday but only a couple on Sunday, when it’s supposed to be 88 degrees. Sigh. So maybe we’ll stay home instead! I feel like haven’t run Navarre in a trial in forever, I think we’ll be rusty but he’s always fun.

Marvin has a vet appointment tomorrow, taking him in for his rabies shot and talk about getting him set up for a neuter. I considered experimenting keeping him intact, but he’s been having so much fun hanging out in the yard I want to continue without worrying that him being intact will make him more likely to jump the fence. And his balls are HUGE, I swear they’re bigger than Navarre’s. Poor Navarre and his tiny balls.

While Marvin is maturing rapidly, Navarre is still like a giant puppy. I never really think of him as intact. He has some normal mildly obnoxious boy dog traits, like wanting to lick pee and getting caught up in the smells of girls – but he’s really been super easy.  No issues with distraction when working, he’s fine with other intact boys, no humping, obsessive marking or girl obsession. He just acts … like a puppy. And you know what Navarre likes? PUPPIES.

David brought his new puppy over, just 7.5 weeks and I introduced my crew one at a time. Fiona was intimidated by Bright and Haku, who were mildly curious about puppy but mostly just wanted to play with David. But Navarre, who I thought might be too much for puppy, was just in love. And he had the puppy playing in no time. In fact, Navarre was acting more like a puppy than the PUPPY was. Fiona was like, “Okay, that’s enough foolishness, let’s take a break,” but Navarre was having none of that.

Love my big dork, and he survived our crazy thunderstorm over the weekend. We rarely ever have thunder in Oregon, but we woke up to crazy scary loud thunder early Saturday morning. Even Bright was like, “THE WORLD IS ENDING!” I had a pile of dogs plastered to me, the cats were all freaked out. Haku didn’t care, go figure. But it did kind of crack me up that while Navarre was concerned about the thunder, he wasn’t half as dramatic about that as he is about someone blowing a raspberry at him. Dramaqueen.