Shedders

We shedded! We did three sheds with a group of about 9 sheep out in Ian’s field. We weren’t focused on the actual shedding part, but looking at spreading out sheep, making holes and keeping Haku’s flanks and position correct without and creeping in. But he made such nice holes I went ahead and called him through he came through every time I called – what a good boy! Then I immediately sent him on to go pick them up, so I think he thought this was a fun game. Haku so loves his sheep, and I’m so happy with the relationship we have around sheep these days. I’m really quite annoyed that he’ll be 10 this summer, both Haku and I really would love to do more, and it took us such a long time to get here. How much time we get … that’s still a big question.

Haku had a couple incidents were he would be off after very limited exercise – usually just running around in the arena for maybe 10 minutes before class. So kept resting and keeping him quiet, but wondering if that’s just who he is or we pushed it too far too fast. Then we have weeks like this week where there was tons of running at the arena, at the park, in the field, at herding, at hiking – and I don’t see anything at all. So I swing wildly back and forth between thinking he’s permanently broken and he’s perfectly fine (for an almost 10 year old dog).

Then Haku is now totally on his prescription joint food, and I put him on a diet to make sure he didn’t have any extra weight to be putting any extra pressure on his joints. Now he just feels so very old and frail to me, his neck is so skinny and he just really has lost a lot of muscling. And I intellectually know that we have yet to even really start to build him back up after his rehab (because we keep ‘resting’ whenever I see anything off), but I also start freaking out that maybe he has something else going on entirely. Like the day he was off after very limited romping in the arena I came out later and he had thrown up a HUGE chunk of some stuffed toy that he had obviously swallowed whole – ugh! And, yeah, since that I haven’t seen him look off in his movement since then – could that have been the issue? Could it STILL be an issue? Why does he keep eating crap the older he gets – he never used to!

So, yeah, I worry. And it makes it obviously hard to have any actual goals or plans with him, and he’d really like to go back to having a job again. He gets REAL nutty without a purpose in life. Mentally, he’s definitely not ready to retire. And hopefully he’s feeling okay, we’ll continue to go back to building more activities back into his life. His next herding trial with Carol is this month, so we’ll see how that goes.

Meanwhile, Navarre continues to feel multi-talented as I do have three different sports he’s training in at the moment. We have been reviewing all his Open obedience behaviors, especially drop on recall, as we deliberately didn’t work that one while he was getting ready for novice. He’s not and never has been one Nature’s Downers, but he seems to be remembering the game without getting sticky or anticipating. Mixing that up with the signals exercise, he’s pretty darn solid in practice anyway. I haven’t brought out the dumbbell again, we’ll look at that next week. Still need to actually train that heeling. He’s very much enjoying it though, still looking at an Open debut in June.

In agility we have been practicing at 24, which has gone surprisingly well. Tricky backsides he’s knocked some bars, but he’s putting in some very solid and athletic jumping efforts with the big jumps. And, yes, he goes much wider. We’ll practice a bit more next week and see what he does with it at a trial next weekend.

I found this video amusing as I never noticed he ran under the same jump twice

And in herding, Navarre’s still just working with Ian or Dave. It was Ian this week and they did some shedding and then an exercise with Jennifer and her dog. They attempted to drive the group of sheep back and forth between the two handlers. Navarre had never seen another team on the field at the same time, and, funny enough, apparently he’ll lie down no matter who is saying it (except, perhaps, if it’s me). So that caused a lot of confusion when trying to get him to lift the sheep off of the other team and he kept just lying down when she would ask her dog to lie down, and then brought the sheep to her, and was just generally baffled by the exercise. Still, he got through it, but needs more work lifting off another team, that’s for sure. He was doing some good stuff though, he is progressing – well, at least for other people.

As for Bright, we didn’t do much this week! We are puppysitting a 13 week old rat terrier puppy, so that’s been keeping us busy. She has a nervous hyper energy that makes it challenging. She’s constantly groveling and licking the dogs mouths, I mean CONSTANTLY, and they don’t like it. Mostly we just try to keep busy, and the dogs were much less offended by her out hiking, and have been getting gradually better. Then we had a meet up with her litter sister that is also in the area, but Tilly kept trying to take her out! Ah, siblings. We’ve done a bit of training here and there, I know she’s been started on a lot of behaviors, hard to say though as she’s mostly just bouncing around. But she has a really cute wave and we’ve just been doing simple things like hand touches and fold back downs. Mostly she just has ENDLESS energy, it’s like she’s on speed, just super happy and bouncy and running around continuously.

I’ll have to say, after having this kind of hyper energy in the house, I know it’s definitely not for me! The dogs agree, I think we all enjoy the relative calm crew we have around here. Though, to be fair, she’s winning over Navarre – he’s having a great time now that they’ve learned to play. I love getting a chance to play with different breeds, I always learn something new! I think she’ll settle in more and more as the week goes on though, and already seems more relaxed around the dogs.

Speaking of puppies, Dove’s puppies are 3 weeks old! Finally they have eyeballs, they can hear you, they can walk (stumble) and interact! They are already a very social litter, they enjoy coming to say hello. My particular favorite (Hawk, the red boy) is very good at making eye contact even at such a young age. He’s also quite the poser! Next week they’ll be ‘real dogs’, which will be really fun.

These puppies suck at group shots

The girls are better posers than the boys

Ginger!

Eagle has a blue eye like his mom

Falcon is still the super model of the bunch

The boys

Dove enjoying some time away from the puppies – she has SO MUCH milk it’s hard for her to run!

I had wanted to do puppies in slings, but they’re too wiggly and the sun too bright when I had an assistant! Unfortunately they’re going going to get more uncooperative from here … Eagle was the least cooperative

Kestrel

Hawk

Kite

Falcon