A Lovely Day Spent Outside With Your Dogs is Never a Wasted Day

My agility instructor held a show-n-go at her facility today. The weather was a bit nasty yesterday, very windy and grey, cloudy, and cool. But I got up at 6am this morning to a calm, clear sky and a lovely sunrise. It got up to perhaps 55 degrees today, so in order to spend most of the day outside, I dressed in plenty of layers.


I originally planned to take only Gracie. I figured she'd benefit the most from this new take on agility. Mimi is very comfortable at Debbie's facility and I didn't think that she would really need to go. But this morning I decided to take Mimi and the new puppy both.

Our setup. I had planned to put Cap in the smaller crate on the right but Mimi and Gracie were being snarky to each other.

It turns out taking Mimi was an excellent decision. Even though this was a casual show-n-go, there were plenty of people and strange dogs and unusual noises, enough to turn the usually comfortable class setting into kind of a scary place. And indeed, Mimi started displaying her fear behavior at her first run. This was a fantastic opportunity for me to work through some of her issues. She did much better in her second run (Jumpers), and by her third run, back in the Standard ring, she was a little stressed at the start line but once we got going, she was all business.

Gracie did pretty darned well considering she has never done more than 8 or 9 obstacles in sequence before. She had a lot of problems with the dogwalk in her first run. The first time up it she thought it was the teeter, a common green dog mistake. And there was a tunnel under the first half of the dogwalk. Gracie had never seen such a thing and kept jumping off the dogwalk onto the top of the tunnel. It was funny but not what I wanted. I finally lured her slowly up the dogwalk and once she got past the tunnel, she was all, OOH! Now I get it! She struggled in Jumpers--I wasn't stopping to reward her enough--and kept shutting down around obstacle 10. But her third run (Standard) was outstanding. Perfect dogwalk the first time, fabulous teeter, listened to me all the way.

I videotaped both of them and hope to get that posted later this coming week.

And then there was Cap. He got plenty of attention and time out of the crate. I did some long line work with him and we played tug and fetch. Mostly I walked him around the periphery of the two rings, letting him sniff what he wanted, and occasionally calling him to me to work on recalls. He's got a great headcheck at his name and comes every time I say come. We also started a bit of circle work/chase me games. For the most part I kept him away from crowds of people and other dogs.

Of course, as soon as I walked him in the gate, Debbie made a beeline for us, very curious as to who and what this little fluffball is. She and a couple of others think he has BC in him. The mystery of his origins continues!

The other most excellent benefit of all this play and work and agility is that I now have three totally exhausted pups!

Cap curled up at my feet in the computer room. I've not seen him stop moving before this except when crated.

Mimi in the "isolation room".

Gracie in the cat bed in the chair in the living room.