Saturday, April 18, 2009

Done in By a Cold French Fry

We are doing another trial this weekend, this time in Wichita Falls. Operation Jealousy continues to be a success.

Yesterday, Mimi and I tried our hand at AKC FAST, their version of Gamblers. She was probably a bit too wound up and spent 28 of our 30 seconds running around sniffing. Debbie was watching and we both think that Mimi wasn't stressed as much as excited.

After a couple of hours, we had our Standard then Jumpers runs in quick succession. In that time, I walked all of the dogs (I took Harry along for the ride) two or three times each along this nice park-like area along the river. Taking Gracie out of her crate for a walk, leaving Mimi to stew, then coming back for Mimi's turn, is pretty time-consuming but it totally plays into Mimi's obsessions.

I was able to walk her around the arena while dogs were running in both rings, even visit a vendor booth, and Mimi was, well, relatively normal. No lunging on the leash, she was looking around, tail up, ears up, head up. I even sat in the bleachers for a few minutes chatting with friends with Mimi standing next to me getting lots of attention. AMAZING.

However, our Standard run was a total bust but not because Mimi fell back into her ring stress mode. No, we were done in by a handful of cold french fries.

As we were moving through the gate area to get ready for our Standard run (the gate area in this arena is a very wide central aisle between the two rings with some bleacher seats), Mimi noticed a dozen french fries on the ground under the bleachers. Unfortunately, she noticed this two seconds before we had to go in the ring!

She jumped the first jump, then turned around to leave the ring...yes, to head to those french fries! I grabbed her and carried her out of the ring.

Debbie filmed this fabulous bit of agility history for us.

Postscript to the french fries: I crated Mimi and went back to the scene of the crime. I picked up the french fries and threw them away, then took a Jif peanut butter packet and Mimi back to that spot. When she satisfied herself that there were no more french fries on the ground, I gave her peanut butter. French fries were instantly and completely forgotten.

In Jumpers, Mimi had refusals on 7 or 8 jumps because this was the Sniffing Ring. However, her weaves were awesome (12 poles, perfect entry and execution), and she eventually did all of the obstacles in the correct direction in the correct order. We had no off courses, just refusals because she was running around. I had this elegant handling plan that of course fell to pieces because when she runs around like that, we end up on the left when I planned to be on the right, etc. Still, she was not particularly stressed. Her ears and tail remained up, and frankly, she couldn't do 12 weave poles perfectly (if a bit slowly) if she was worried about the agility monster getting her.

It wasn't a stellar day but given Mimi's sketchy performance history, it wasn't absolutely terrible. And we go back again for another attempt this morning.

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