Not About a Puppy!

In non-puppy related news, I’m on break from teaching agility at the moment, just teaching tricks classes, which is always really fun. Fun also for me, as it gives me incentive to work on new tricks with my dogs. Last week we took a look at training the dogs to paint, which threw us a few curveballs. They all have the basic idea, but the goal is to look at teaching more sustained paint strokes. We’ll see if we get around to it. Teaching dogs to paint is messy, I discovered.

Middle of August – I can see the end of Summer! And what a long, hot summer it’s been (and probably will continue to be). But by mid-September I expect the weather to be much more mild, so only 4 weeks to go, hopefully with increasingly good days between now and then. Today was just lovely, it got nice and cold last night and today was overcast, mild and breezy with no smoke from all the fires. Gotta appreciate the good days while you can.

Haku had his last lesson before his herding debut next weekend. I had no grand expectations we were going to make much improvements at this point, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to have Haku work with someone else before going up to work with Carol. As I suspected, contrary to what normally happens, Haku was much naughtier with Dave than he is with me. Same sort of things that he was doing with Carol, running him over with sheep and being pushy and naughty.  Yet it ended up Haku had to lift the sheep off of me back to Dave and he had no problem with that. Haku definitely knew who he was working for … and was taking full advantage. Still, I think he’ll be fine at the trial, and I do think he’ll have fun. I have low expectations of actual herding prowess, but that’s never been the goal. I did work Haku after Dave and he was much better for me, just love that boy.

And then Navarre, he really is surprising me with how much he’s actually listening these days. He still has a lot of the same issues, but less so and now has other skills so that it’s just not always fighting about giving space and finding balance. I’m still so amazed that my big dorky puppy can outrun now! And maybe it’s not perfect, but it helps to be coming from a place where I honestly never thought he would. So I have changed my expectations of the puppy, we will continue to move forward with the assumption he actually can progress. That makes herding a lot more fun.

The big news recently is that after seven years Bright finally decided she likes swimming. Bright has been swimming a lot of times in her life, both with assisted swims in pools (which she hated) and voluntarily at our property or here and there. She can swim just fine, but she never liked it. She LOVES water, will always jump in and just hang out with her little head popping out. She’ll retrieve sticks and toys by sticking her whole head under water, there was nothing stopping her from swimming other than she just never seemed to like it.

But when I brought Figgy up to swim in Joan’s pool I ended bringing the other dogs, even though I knew they were going to be annoying as hell. And Bright was especially extraneous as she has BEEN to Joan’s pool before and didn’t want to swim. But it’s been so hot the dogs haven’t gotten out as much as I’d like, so I brought them anyway. And Navarre got to swim, and Haku got to swim, so when we were finishing up I let Bright up to go stand in the water, as is her thing.

Figgy did well with her introduction and just for kicks I asked Carol to swim Bright a little, which I figured Bright would hate, but, hey, what the hell, it was good for her. And then I don’t know what happened, but all of the sudden Bright was like, “Oh, this is FUN!” And was just swimming around randomly in the pool, sometimes for toys but mostly because she seemed to finally discover that swimming was not actually torture, but fun. So, yeah, she was ‘diving’ off the platform, swimming around, retrieving toys and having such a good time – go figure! It really made my heart happy to see her conquering something that I think both of us never assumed would change. Not sure why suddenly she did change her mind, but Bright generalized it to the river as well. She was a little uncertain at first, then she was just going out and swimming like she did it all the time. Bright now gets her turn retrieving in the river! I am just over the moon happy to see her finding so much joy in it now, so unexpected.

Figgy continues to do well with water. Same sort of thing as Bright, she loves to get in the water, will stick her head under the water to retrieve things, but Fig isn’t brave enough to swim yet. Hopefully we can get back to the pool with some assistants before the summer ends, that is a puppy that is going to be a swimmer, I can see it. In the meantime, it’s adorable how she waits in the shallows to grab the stick and bring it back to me.

Marvin continues to recover nicely from his neuter. He does seem a little more friendly and sweet, so fingers crossed. Then I ran out of CBD oil for Dragon, but that seems to have made him MORE hardcore rather than less. We’ll see if it continues, not sure how long he was on it, but that was twice a day for many months. It really did help him come out of his shell, I hope it continues. And Fizzy is just so happy to be reaching through Figgy’s crate to eat all this food she always has in there. Figgy doesn’t like that.

Looking forward to getting back into agility, excited to run Bright again and go back to working with Navarre. We are getting back into our conditioning routine and we’ll start looking at some low jump exercises to get the dogs back in shape for mid-September. I do like having a break from agility, as I feel so refreshed and excited when I go back to teaching/trialing.