Suddenly Thoughtful Puppy

Suddenly, pretty much overnight, and for no particular reason I can see, Asher is being all thoughtful in both herding and agility. I’m rather suspicious and keep waiting for it to fall apart, but enjoying it while it lasts. In agility he finally seemed to be like, “Oh, my job is to go OVER the jumps!” And now when he’s running around with the other dogs in the arena he now randomly goes over jumps in his way WITHOUT demolishing them, and that’s when he’s at high speed craziness. And in sequencing and multiwraps, same thing, it’s like he had some sort of epiphany and he’s now just being so … good. I don’t know even know what to think about it, as it didn’t seem related to anything I did. But there you go, suddenly thoughtful agility Asher. I’ll take it!

We put together some fun little figure 8 sequences this week, the big news being he can now sequence with rear crosses! He’s especially good at extended rear crosses, because that’s kind of his thing, you know, just keep going. But, once again, he was being really thoughtful and trying and it was actually really easy to run him because he would both move ahead of me smoothly and come in when asked. Maybe he won’t be so hard after all … we shall see. Could just be a phase. But this was WITH toys this week, no overarousal issues, it’s just so weird he’s like this totally different dog.

But I also felt okay looking at some sequencing as suddenly he’s going to be a year old next month – when did THAT happen? Wasn’t he 9 months old FOREVER? He’s still a baby goober, but I think we can actually start working on things now, almost like a REAL dog. Exciting!

We did start his running contact training too, which was really just review. We had done some mat work when he was younger, and played around a little with Justine’s stuff as we’re auditing her class as well. But one of the decisions I had to make with this class is what kind of criteria I really wanted for the RC mat, and I’m going with ‘less’. So in his RC flatwork class there is no specific foot criteria like with Justine’s, with four feet on the mat. I had played around a little with this with Asher, but he really struggled with this. We were looking at a mat in a fairly large box and he could do it, but it wasn’t at all comfortable looking. So we never progressed from there. In this new class they just skip straight to ‘hit the mat’, and we had already trained that, so it was easy to breeze through the first lesson.

Asher isn’t super great at driving to the manners minder, but he’s getting better. He won’t be nearly the chore that Navarre was, who just thought it was stupid. I wasn’t really pleased with the hits we were getting with me doing stationary work, where he was ‘pouncing’ on the target, but once we introduced motion and moving across the mat he gave me some really nice running split feet hits. I’ve never actually used a mat for RC training before, and I’m still not sold on it. However, it’s not going to hurt to go through the flatwork with it, no one says I actually have to use it on the board when the time comes. We’ll see how I feel about it at that point. In the meantime, fun to have homework that I think is appropriate for his age and gooberness, and Asher is enjoying it as well.

Then in herding I had zero expectations, he has been pushy and slicing and a great big puppy. Then today he was just sort of magically feeling his sheep, responding to pressure and, well, being thoughtful and trying. Where did THIS dog come from? We could actually walk with the knee knocker sheep around the pasture (which, let me say trying to go fairly quickly backwards uphill across a pasture filled with holes and objects is not easy!) and he was holding without pushing (well, too much). He wasn’t just rushing and slicing his flanks, he was steadying up on his own and being all sorts of awesome for no particular reason that I could see. So, huh. I was so shocked I didn’t want to break the magic, so I didn’t work him too much, but incredibly pleased with his new found abilities. As a reward for both being good and just waiting so patiently while we talked, I let him do a tiny bit of driving and he certainly enjoys. I am now very excited for our Spring Break of herding!

Meanwhile I gave Navarre over to Dave, I will be attempting to work him on our road trip, but still a possibility that Dave might run him at trials at some point. I don’t know if that will happen, but they will need both practice and to teach Navarre Dave’s whistles for that to be a possibility. So today they introduced Dave’s whistles, which are very different than Ian’s, so I don’t think he was confusing the two, he just has to learn a new set. He can do the down and steady/there fairly easily, it’s the flank whistles that will need to actually be trained. So who knows what will happen with that, but Navarre was having a great time and he’s always seemed to like whistles better than verbals. And, yes, if I ever do actually get comfortable running Navarre for real, he will have to learn a THIRD set of whistles, which will be mine. But we’re in no immediate danger of that, and he’s a very verbal dog, I’m not worried about it. Dogs are smart, they can figure it out.

As for Navarre, we trekked out to a new chiropractor this week. So this was the first time I’d been able to get him to one since he was struggling with the weaves back in January. I do think he’s definitely better since we’ve been seeing Maddy, but I wanted to get him adjusted as well. I had never heard of this lady, but a group of poodle folks brought her out to do all their poodles, so it was a good referral. Once again, I don’t know how much of any body work care is total BS, but I have had some good results through the years. Maybe coincidence, I don’t know, but it makes me feel better. This practitioner was very ‘rough’ compared to a lot I have seen, Navarre cried when working on his neck/shoulder area. However, he showed no signs of soreness afterwards and was of course instantly forgiving, as he doesn’t hold a grudge. She felt his neck and ribs were all out, but the back end wasn’t as bad. So we’ll see what he looks like and what he feels like with Maddy next week as well. He’s certainly been playing and running and feeling good. Fingers crossed we can call this issue solved and get back to life.

Haku also came along for the ride, as he’s always the most hard on his body. But he was actually looking pretty good, he had a bit of rear stuff, but his neck and front were actually pretty fluid. I do want to get Asher in at some point, but I think we’re going to try to see a lady when we’re out in Idaho, so he can wait. There is nothing that particularly concerns me with him, but he did run into Navarre last month, and he’s a giant goober. A giant goober that is hopefully done with growing. So hoping that’s true …

Oh, and we have some agility seminars lined up! I decided with the whole corona thing to just go ahead and skip trialing for now. Asher is going to do morning with Mia, who we haven’t seen in a very long time, and then going up north with Navarre to see Justine, who we also haven’t seen for quite a bit. We will be very out of practice, but that’s okay. Planning to run mostly Navarre and maybe some puppy, if the exercises look like something he might benefit from.

This will give me some incentive to really start thinking about what kind of more advanced cues I actually want to train. Right now I’m looking at adding new cues with Asher of:

• Slice jump threadle

• Wrap jump threadle

• Tunnel collection cue

• Tight turn away

Which is not a huge amount of new cues, but more than I had before. There are more I could consider, like a tight push vs slice push and left and right (so not going to happen). Right now Asher doesn’t know any backside cues, so it’s all theoretical. We have introduced tunnel threadles, but they’re just motion based at this point.

Not in any rush to introduce giant puppy to anything overly complicated in agility for a while yet though, so it’s still just in the planning stages.