Confidence?

Gah, Asher really is so much fun – and I love this age and just having so much to work on and a dog that loves to work on it! Hot weather this week, and lots of it – so not much running with Asher, but lots of brain work. He really is such a fun problem solving dog, and he enjoys the challenge of discriminations without worry or frustration. Worked on lots of Justine challenges with proofing exercises, and he is doing really well. I hope it all sticks, he’s certainly doing well right now and picks up new concepts so quickly. The plan is for him to have a lot more trained cues than my other dogs … we’ll see if we can make that work.

We are continuing to work on contacts. He’s magically up to doing a full height teeter at the arena, which didn’t have much to do with me, he pretty much decided he was done with tables and breaking it down and just kept running over to offer it full height. Well okay then. Which was kind of the big revelation of the week, Asher enjoys doing the whole obstacle, especially with the dogwalk – he really dislikes doing the jump on/turn around/send down into position exercises. So we compromised, as long as he gives me good dogwalk/aframe hits, I don’t make him break it down. And he liked that plan and was trying really hard to be correct. As for the teeter, he keeps giving me a four-on end behavior, which is what I tried to start with originally and he just didn’t want to do at the time. So we’ve now switched to four-on, which I like – but we’ll see if he changes his mind again …

As for the dogwalk, happy to be back to full height with that – but I was less happy with a lot of his hits than I have been, because he was throwing down front feet instead of hitting solidly with his rear feet. He was determined not to miss a second time if he did have an issue, so he was a bit more clunky. I think he will smooth out once he gains more confidence, and hopefully figure out how to hit with the rear feet which is more comfortable (and easier to judge!). He did lose his footing on the dogwalk once, but hopped off gracefully and, knock on wood, it didn’t seem to affect him. Overall he’s much more confident with the height thing – he CAN now go up and turn around on a full height dogwalk, though he’s not a fan.

Aframe is back to full height as well and looks better than it did, but it took longer to get that back than the other two for whatever reason (I think its position in the arena was part of the issue, but good to work through that space restriction). Once he did he was doing some nice comfortable low hits. This was with very little speed, so we’ll see how it eventually holds up once we put it in a sequence situation. All of the contacts are nice and independent, which I think border collies are just naturally good at that sort of thing. So sending, running past, recalling, lateral distance – no problem. We have not started any turns on the contacts yet, just straight off exits. No problem driving ahead – Asher likes to go!

His contacts from this week, with Navarre thrown in for comparison:

We will eventually get back to taking his agility on the road, but I’m tentative about it now after that loss of confidence which I had never seen before. He definitely is not the same dog when we are both in a new place and without the other dogs – which is not unusual, but I don’t want him to develop any bad habits. We practice quite a bit without the other dogs in the arena and he’s just as confident and excited – however, when I bring him in to use as a demo dog for classes and there are people in the arena watching him he’s way more distracted and not as focused. You know, like he’s a puppy or something …

Trailblazer!

The dogs do have a new favorite toy at the arena, which I wouldn’t have thought they would be super into, but it continues to be a hit – the Chuck-it ‘Ultra Tug’ – which is just a chuck it ball with a short strap. I mean, they like balls, and they like tugs, but for some reason this combo just hits the sweet spot for all the dogs, more so than most other toys (Navarre would still prefer the frisbee!). It is nice for throwing, but it also good for calling them in to tug. It’s easy to tug with, easy to hold – though less easy to present without getting chomped on (a-hem, ASHER), but we now have four of them:

Let it also be said that the best Christmas present I’ve given the dogs in a long time is the Power Chewer Bark Box – omg, the toys are SO CUTE! This month was ‘shark month’ and the toys are durable, creative and fun every month. We have really gotten our money’s worth. And the treats we use for ‘bedtime cookies’ every night, which is a ritual the dogs have very much learned to enjoy. The ‘chews’ included are really stupid, but hey. I ordered a year subscription on a Black Friday sale last year, and then pre-paid which brought it down to about $20 a month, and I have found it very worth it and very fun. We enjoy our bark box every month, much more so than the ‘Bully Make’ box we tried a while back.

Navarre continues to be feeling well and is super excited to play. We haven’t been doing much agility other than playing around with low jumps, tunnels and contacts though. He’s SUPER excited to do them though! I’ll admit, I haven’t RUN a sequence in quite some time – it’s just too hot. So we toodle around. Sigh, I would like to get into doing more running and sequencing of challenging courses once the weather cools down, but this is not the year for it – and certainly not any sort of trial or seminar. I’ll have to actually bring my own motivation – maybe 2021 will be his year for agility? If there is any agility to be had …

Navarre has a lot of skills, but I’ll admit we haven’t really pulled them together as much as I’d like. He’s grown up now though, this WOULD have been a good year for agility if it wasn’t for broken dogs, viruses, shut downs … life gets in the way. I actually feel that he now prefers agility to herding, now that he feels like he has to actually listen in herding I don’t feel like he’s nearly as excited about it, I think he finds it more frustrating and enjoyable. While agility is always just fun. Knock on wood, he continues to seem like he’s improving physically, his mowhawk is getting flatter and flatter and he is super spunky. I hope he’s back to 100% soon!

I haven’t been tempted by the online agility, which initially sounded kind of fun, tried doing some of the USDAA@Home in classes – but the courses for the most part have TERRIBLE spacing and are just not very interesting or fun. And then when people are TRYING to qualify during classes they suddenly throw all criteria to the wind, which is not helpful. And of course I don’t care about titles, I just thought it might have some fun courses – but no. And UKI has their online thing, but I have zero interest in spending 5 years to go up through all their levels to get to interesting courses, so no point. Maybe there was some sort of online international pandemic cup somewhere? I feel like I saw something, but we are still working on just getting Navarre back to 100%. Still feels so weird to only have one agility dog …

Haku continues to worry me, and he continues to lose muscle mass. He is having a harder time jumping into the car recently, he misjudged it this week and fell. Breaks my heart. I have a ramp for him, but I didn’t think he was to that point yet. He might be. We continue to play with agility, but I really do think losing Bright was really hard on him in so many ways. I have not had good luck with longevity with my border collies, and it really worries me – 11 should not be old. I also heard that one of Bright’s siblings has a mass, I’m really hoping it’s something that can be fixed – much too young!

Very much enjoying watching the new Dove puppies – she’s such a good mom and puppies are SO CUTE. I’ll see them when they’re two weeks old, trying to keep my exposure at a minimum – but puppies still need visitors! Puppies make life better.

In herding we saw Dave this week, Navarre definitely seems to be feeling better – and therefore does not feel I need to be involved in the process again. Sigh. He got better, but he’s a tough nut. But a happy nut, I think the better he feels the more he can handle the pressure in herding again. These sheep were very much into running, and he struggles with not getting pulled into rushing to control them.

Asher got to go out to the big field there for the first time, I thought he might struggle with his outruns without fences, but he actually did very well. He surprised us both by being remarkably grown up, first by being very careful about negotiating the ditches when working the sheep, and second by not crossing over even when we really thought he would when I sent him to collect escaping sheep and the terrain forced him in, he stuck to the flank no matter what and caught those sheep. He did struggle more with driving in the new location, he was questioning a lot more and his distance was much closer than at Maddy’s. Still, he handled everything really well, because he’s awesome like that. He’s just so USEFUL, it still amazes me. I’m very happy with my puppy!

Apparently we may have an opportunity to go to a herding trial when we go out to Idaho this Fall … which I don’t think either dog would be remotely ready for, but hey. We shall see, haven’t quite set my schedule yet, because, well, it’s 2020 – don’t want to get too carried away …