FCI Marathon

Asher has had a sudden burst of stalkiness. He’s trying to use it with the dogs now, and is suddenly getting sticky/stalkier with toys too. I tried him again on sheep this week too, and he was more interested, but not at all ready yet. I’m okay with him taking it slow though, Dave says someday I will realize what an amazing dog Navarre is – but he’s certainly not going to be appreciated in his time as I don’t have the skills to run him. SO PUSHY! It’s just always a battle with Navarre and sheep, not my idea of a good time. He continues to look better for other people, and I’ll admit that we’re a little better together then we used to be. Though that’s not saying much. To be fair, we haven’t practiced. I thought Dave had a good description of a quality that Navarre has in every day life, he wants to be ‘personally invited’. He really is quite easy to live with, but when I’m out with the group he’s always the one that when I tell the dogs to come to heel he has to have his own personal invitation that, yes, I meant him too. Apparently you multiply that kind of behavior when aroused, which he really only gets super aroused on sheep – he’s such a chill dog otherwise. Something to work on, I suppose.

With Navarre I do have some goals to help us get better in herding, so hopefully that will happen eventually. Actually practicing is kind of a big one. Though I get confused on exactly WHAT I should practice. I had it in my mind we needed to go back to step one, look at essentially fetching and, well, circling sheep. Today Dave was like, “Why spend so much time working on something you rarely use?” So I don’t know, but I’m also not in danger of practicing yet, so I don’t have to worry about it. I do need to have a picture in my mind of what I want it to look like, and break it down until we’re successful without yelling or arguing. Which I’m sure won’t be any problem at all.

Practicing is the biggest thing, but the other project is whistles. Navarre does a lot better with whistles and I have no concept of raising my voice without yelling, so at a distance, even if I’m not TRYING to yell, it’s still yelling to be heard. I’m a quiet person! And I’ve tried with Ian’s whistles, and I’ve gotten better – but I still can’t do the away whistle, and especially with long tones. So that’s been a big road block. However, dogs are smart and even if I attempted to do the same whistles that Ian does, they’re never going to sound the same. Navarre can learn two sets of whistles, which I think is my solution here. So my current goal is to try to find some whistles that I like and can actually reproduce successfully. I’ll try them out on Navarre with the eventual goal of working with Asher.

Still, even if Navarre and I never do a damn thing together, herding continues to make him incredibly happy. It’s really his thing and what he loves most in the world. I do think the weirdness we had for a while on sheep was just Puppy Angst, I don’t see anything that he was doing before. Navarre is all around much happier now that Asher is older. He still doesn’t like the puppy, but he’s over most of the Drama.

Haku and I worked on penning this week, not super successfully. Ian said it’s because both dogs don’t have square enough flanks so keep pushing the sheep when they need to just be keeping them in place. Now, I’ll take responsibility for Haku – but I damn well didn’t train Navarre, so if he has shitty flanks, I know who to blame. Haku had a great time though and is looking really good. I don’t remember if I mentioned it, but he feels substantially better to me now that he’s on the (very expensive) muscle building supplement. I still try not to over do it, but I’m not super worried about him any more. And we have a lot of fun together playing with sheep, even if we don’t do it right. ALMOST penning is just as satisfying as actually doing it in my book. I always felt like it was my problem not being quite sure when to move him, and then when I would ask him to flank I’m looking at the sheep and Haku, very correctly, keeps flanking and we totally screw it up. Still, it’s such a different feeling when out with Haku, he takes a lot of shit from Ian and Dave that he doesn’t listen more often than Navarre, but it FEELS like he’s trying his best the whole time.

Next weekend is the big Idaho road trip with Navarre and Asher. I’m hoping they may get to be friends along the way. It could happen. We’ll do the Kathy Knox clinic, but my expectations are very, VERY low. Should be a fun time though. I wish puppy were more turned on to sheep at this point so Bonnie could play with him while he was out there though.

Asher kind of did some agility training this week, but I’m still not counting it as ‘agility’. We introduced a rear feet running mat, the table and did some front feet pedestal sequencing. The sequencing is more body awareness for me though, I want him to be thinking about decelerating to hit the target and stick it. Same with the table. He’s much faster for toys than food with these exercises – such a border collie. He also achieved true hugging, so he can now sit up and hug a toy.

We’ve got lots of legs, his head is getting surprisingly large and the canines are finally coming in. I’m pretty sure all the baby teeth are now gone, he lost his last canines this week – teething has gone very uneventfully. He still continues to want to tug and doesn’t seem overly concerned with it. I’ve still be waiting for most of the baby teeth to come out before doing a lot of tugging again though. My little puppy is becoming a VERY awkward teenager. He still has this fringe of bright orange hair on top of his head left over from his puppy coat – it’s not attractive. When is he going to start looking like a DOG? Good lord, so awkward. He’s so butt high at the moment and legs everywhere, maybe he’ll start evening out a little by six months. Maybe.

Bright and Navarre went up to an AKC trial this weekend, just one day and our third trial this year. It went about as expected. For premier I ended up making my own course again, such stupid design and poor spacing. So that just puts me off right there, don’t need to drive all that way and pay a bunch of money to go make up my own courses. Standard was just a boring, down and back course – typical AKC course that could double as a novice course. But, hey, at least the spacing was … okay. The reason I went up is because Jan Skurzynski was judging, and her jumpers course was fun! So at least one course was fun. I was jealous of the big Premier event they were having up north and a USDAA trial over in Bend. Not a lot of local options around here, and I’m not going to travel. So we’ll see what happens this year, I plan to enter our one local USDAA show that we do a year, then I’m not sure after that.

As for the dogs this weekend, Navarre was jumping 24 – I don’t remember my reasoning behind that, but he did fine, jumping looked good, no knocked bars. He just goes SO WIDE. So he did well on my premier course I made up (other than confusing a threadle with a threadle rear), the standard course and ALMOST all of the jumpers course. Right at the end was a rear cross … sigh, it’s kind of comical how bad I am at them. But I’m pretty damn sure, “NAVARRE COME COME COME” does not mean “Quick, flip away from me!” Hmph. Still, he had a good time. Not herding good time, but he thinks it’s fun. It’s funny how just totally relaxed he is around agility compared to herding, isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

Unfortunately Bright was off, not sure what the deal is. The first run I pulled her after she knocked three or four bars. I didn’t give her a big warm up for that run though, so for the next run I really warmed her up, we played at the practice jump, she was stretched out and as ready as we could do – and still knocked the first bar she came to (after dramatically leaping off the dogwalk, but that could be unrelated!). So I pulled her and took her to be adjusted. She did have some things that needed to be fixed, so maybe it was that or maybe it was just we haven’t practiced and we’ve been off all summer. Hard to say, but I was planning to drop her to 16 this winter anyway, so might as well do it now. I’m not super concerned yet, though it was very disappointing for both of us at the trial, she was so excited to be there and so pissed when Navarre got to play and she didn’t. Miss running my Brightness, she’s my agility rock these days!

Asher did well at the trial, I do think he went to one up in Ridgefield when he was a tiny puppy. Mostly he had to learn that everyone did not, in fact, want to be body slammed by him. He seemed to finally grasp that everyone we passed did not want to say hello – however, quite a few did, so he got lots of love. No issues with going past the other dogs or dealing with crowds or noise, so that was good. I was especially tickled when he started offering heeling as we wound through the crowds. Good puppy!

Oh, and he got adjusted again, I did everyone as long as I was there. Nothing out of the ordinary and it was nice to hear that Asher felt good, or ‘gumby-like’ was the exact description. He actually did super well at being adjusted (this was his second time), holding still and being a very good dog. Less so when WAITING for his turn, but, hey, he is only five months. He figured it out though.

It is an adjustment dealing with four dogs on mass. Four dogs FEELS right still, but it is a lot more to deal with, especially with one of them a puppy. So walking with four dogs on leash through an agility arena is … interesting. The puppy is not usually the issue though, let it be said. It will be a lot of dog when Asher finally grows up, his brother weighs 41 pounds at 5 months – holy crap! Now, I don’t know how much Asher weighs, but I’d like to think he’s not 41 pounds. Let’s just say he isn’t, because that would just be depressing. He’s not going to be small though, that’s for sure.

FCI agility championships is Finland this weekend! The livestream has been very good, so that’s been fun to watch. My favorite event of the year, I love seeing agility done well. So many running contacts and trained behaviors, and so many impressive teams and crazy fast dogs. With the right training though, you don’t have to be super fast to handle … though it helps. Not a fan of ‘every jump is a backside’ though. It’s one challenge, but one that I think is harder on the dog’s body than normal jumping – fine in moderation, but, good lord. The theme of the weekend was long lines of threadles, backsides and serps slices and being able to handle them completely independently to stay ahead. My dogs are certainly not super good at that particular challenge, they tend to start guessing. As usual, the Russians had it TRAINED, and that is just so much easier then relying on handler timing! Fun to watch, though I stayed up much too late …