Go, Speedracer! Go!

 Frankie had a pretty good weekend at our last trial. She got her first FAST Q and earned her Novice Standard title. She also had five out of six very good start line stays. She's holding her position until I release her, and looking forward at the obstacle, not at me.

Her failed start line on the sixth attempt was entirely my fault. 

AKC requires dogs to enter and exit the ring on lead. Archie wears a very loose martingale on a nylon leash. It is mostly decorative as he doesn't need it for restraint when we enter. Even when I slip the collar over his head and toss the leash to the leash runner, I know Archie will stick by my side until I put him in position, and he will stay there until I release him. He's a good boy that wants to please me. 

Frankie wears a martingale attached to a braided fleece tugging leash on top of the buckle collar she wears all the time. She does need that leash for restraint. I guess I got overconfident. We entered the ring for her first run in Open Standard (I of course moved her up after she earned her Novice title). She was over-aroused, as usual, and I was a bit tired and distracted. The first obstacle was the tire, with a straight approach to the dogwalk, which she could see through the tire. I slipped the collar off her head and started to stuff the leash into my pocket. My mistake was not holding on to her when I did this. I thought she'd stay by me, like my good boy Archie. Nope.

She took off, slamming into the tire and heading up the dogwalk. Hitting the tire like that was a fatal error, equivalent to knocking a bar from a jump. So the run was already lost. AKC has a new feature called Fix-N-Go in which you can go back and fix an error. You still lose the Q, and you can't go back to the beginning if the error occurred in the middle of the course, and you can't attempt the fix anything more than once. But we hadn't even started the run, so my Fix-N-Go could start at the tire.

I called her back to me. She came right back! I made her sit and led out only a few feet away from her to the tire. I knew I couldn't get any more distance than that. She was so excited that she was nearly levitating out of her skin. I released her and off we went. 

And she had a really great run! She didn't make the Aframe contact, and she missed a jump near the end of the course, but that didn't matter because we weren't running for the Q anyway. Her performance was better than I expected. She smoked the weaves! People were applauding!

The effort and time I put into her start lines did pay off. I saw a lot more control and focus from her throughout the weekend. She's right on the cusp of understanding that agility is a team sport. 

Our next training goal: running contacts. Even though I have taught and used stopped contacts with every other fox terrier I have done agility with, I don't think I can realistically and reliably get stopped contacts from Frankie in a competition setting. Rather than fight her, I want to use her natural talents to make our teamwork smoother. Top competitors train running contacts to shave precious hundredths and thousandths of seconds off their time. That's not my goal. We are not world team material, and she's plenty fast to earn top placements in her classes once we work out the teamwork thing. I think that running contacts will feel more natural to her, and that will improve our communication on the course.

T3i: Costco and GoDog

 It's been forever since I put up a T3i post! That's Terrier Toy Testing Institute for new readers. 

We have a handful of GoDog plushies. They are expensive but extremely well made. They usually get an 8 out of 10 score from T3i.

The embroidery detail on GoDog toys is always exquisite. Yes, that is intentionally targeted at us, the humans, because I promise you our dogs don't give a shit about that. But the hefty, nubbly material and well-placed squeakers make these toys great for tugging, throwing, and shaking.

Here's Archie with one of the limited stuffing dinos:

Throw it already!

And here's a bunny I picked up at a dog show earlier this year. 

You know he's well made because his ears are still attached.

Imagine my surprise when I was wandering around Costco last weekend and saw a bin of enormous GoDog plushies for $14 each. Of course I grabbed two!

They aren't as well made as the smaller toys, which can easily cost $25 or more. But they are much better constructed than most $14 stuffed dog toys.

 

Turquoise dragon for Archie

Big red dino for Frankie

They have nice embroidery detail, are made from thinner, but still colorful, nubbly material, and contain plenty of squeakers in head and feet, a honker in the body, and crinkly plastic in the tails. Frankie can just about lift her dino off the floor. Usually she drags it around by the neck frill. Sort of how she treats the cat, come to think of it.

Costco and GoDog for the T3i win! Still giving these a score of 8 out of 10. The dogs love them.

Oh, Frankie!

 So I'm trying to run Frankie at trials now. She's quite the handful. She is blazing fast, heedless of personal safety, and has some strong opinions about what she is supposed to do out there.

At our most recent, rather disastrous, attempt at trialing, a friend asked me, how's her start line? And I had to admit that it wasn't great. He replied, if you start a run with chaos, then the entire run will be chaos. 

I've been thinking about this every day for the past three weeks. It's a great example of how advanced handlers can readily see problems and solutions for other handlers and dogs but get a bit blind when it comes to our own situation. His comment spurred me to dig deeper into Frankie's training, and to go back and retrain a lot of her behaviors. 

She is unlike any other fox terrier I've worked with. She is astonishingly smart and relatively easy to train since she is both toy- and food-motivated, which gives me lots of options for rewards, but I'm having to learn how to work with unexpected minutiae of behavior that I never saw in my other dogs. 

Frankie has also made me rethink how I train, literally the mechanics of how I approach teaching, rewarding, and reinforcing behaviors. The most important change is that I can't fix problems in the moment. With Frankie, I need to keep going forward no matter what. If I stop, regroup and redirect her to fix something, like ask her to repeat a contact, she blows up. She becomes so over-aroused and so anxious that she can no longer perform at all. I can only note the problem so I can isolate it later in a separate training session. 

The second most important change is that I need to keep her training sessions very short. The longer she works, the more overstimulated she becomes, and our connection becomes very fragile. 

There are many, many dogs whose stress and anxiety produces the opposite: when they shut down, they disconnect, walk away, stop performing, sniff, leave the ring, etc. When Frankie tips into over-arousal, she doesn't want to leave but she's not able to actually do anything. She has big emotions and big energy but doesn't know what to do with them. It's my job to monitor her and manage her training so that we finish before she reaches that state. It doesn't take long, sometimes just 10 or 20 seconds.

And the third thing I've learned is that I need to stop micromanaging her and put the responsibility of self control onto her. There is no physical reason she can't easily clear the jumps, no physical reason she can't hold a start line stay, no physical reason she can't stop on the contacts. It's all mental control. I have gone back to the very basics of these behaviors and am retraining them with criteria that are more clear to both of us. 

Our journey is a bit rocky now but I know that I will be a much better trainer and handler with her as my partner.

Frankie: A Work in Progress

 Training Frankie in agility is a challenge. Well, it's a challenge no matter what dog you have, but Frankie poses some unusually challenging challenges. She's very fast, and outpaces me quickly. I started her on distance training early. I spent last summer working on a beginning distance class using Frankie and three agility friends and their dogs as test subjects. She hates to be drilled, and more than a couple of repetitions of a skill will frustrate her. She is heedless of personal safety and has taken out jump wings more than once. She drops bars, but I think that I'm the biggest problem there with late commands and getting in her way. She's a little dog but she needs a lot of room!

Because she is so resistant to drilling, I try not to spend too much time correcting mistakes. It works better for Frankie if I keep moving and circle back to the place where she had a mistake. I'd rather keep the speed and enthusiasm and focus on teamwork. 

Her start line stay was initially nonexistent. She'd stand up and walk or creep up to the obstacle, and she would break her stay if I took too long to get into position, moved, or even just took a breath. That's getting better in part because I have been working this behavior into our daily routine. But honestly, as Frankie gets older, she is showing a better understanding of her job. 

Frankie and I took two sessions of Rally Novice taught by another instructor at the club. Rally allows the handler to verbally praise their dog and use a lot more hand and body motion (with some limits) than formal obedience. Dogs and handlers navigate courses with stations. At each station, a sign indicates some sort of skill, like "dog down, handler walks around" or "270 turn to the left" or "about turn." Dogs are on lead for the Novice level. And it's like formal obedience in that the dog is worked from the handler's left.

 Frankie came into her first Rally class with no loose lead (that means she pulls on lead), no heeling (she forges ahead of me and often turns into my path), and no down. She's still not really got those things even now after two 8-week sessions, but she's getting better. And she has her moments of brilliance. Her left turns (dog on the inside of the turn) are just lovely. Seeing her excited to work with me for the full hour of class, and putting all of her energy and focus into this very non-agility activity, is a lot of fun.

Like most smooth fox terriers, Frankie went through a final growth spurt at about 18 months old. She got very lean and muscled almost overnight. She also got a little taller. She's lean, fast, agile, far too smart for her own good, opinionated...in short, the perfect smooth fox terrier.

Despite having significant reservations about whether Frankie was ready and concerns about her leaving the ring, I entered her in a trial a couple of weekends ago. One run, one day. This particular class could be run as FEO, for exhibition only. I could take a toy into the ring with me. I have 60 seconds to do what I want--run part of the course, all of the course, one obstacle over and over, you get the idea. FEO runs don't count for anything. It's an opportunity to train in the ring. Everyone kept asking me what I was going to do with her. I said, well, that depends on what happens at the start line. If she holds her start line stay, I will run the course. 

 First things first, however. Frankie got measured for the first time. At home, I had measured her as 15 1/2 inches at the shoulder. But now she had to be measured by a judge with a wicket. She did great! And measured out exactly at 15 1/2 inches. This puts her in the 16 inch jump height class as I had expected.

So how did Frankie do at her agility debut? She was magnificent. She exceeded all expectations. Her start line stay was amazing, never took her eyes off me despite the commotion in the gate area just feet behind her. She was a little worried about the new teeter but got right back on and performed it perfectly twice! Her weaves were blazing fast. Not one knocked bar. I could not be more pleased with her performance.

Video? Why of course, I have video. It's still on my iPad. It's enormous. I'll figure out how to get it dumbed down enough to slap up on the blog. 

In the meantime, I've got some agility training to do.

New, and New To Me

 I bought a new car this summer. It wasn't just new to me, it was actually new, with all of 12 miles on the odometer.

On a whim, on a hot summer day in July, I decided to stop by the local Honda dealer located near my house after lunch. I'd been thinking about getting a new car. I had been researching EVs for months but wasn't finding anything that met my driving needs. But I thought, maybe I can downsize and get a smaller SUV instead of the Odyssey. 

I gave a Pilot a quick test drive and hated it. Light, bouncy. And not nearly enough cargo space.

I love my Odyssey van. I can easily haul three dogs and the mountain of crap that we need to comfortably survive in a hotel and at an agility trial. I can fit 8 foot long pieces of PVC in it. I can sleep in it if I have to (and I did during the move from Oregon to Arkansas). The Odyssey just works for me.

I bought my first Odyssey lightly used. It was still relatively low mileage but I wanted a newer car with updated safety features that the old one lacked. 

The dealer had two Odysseys on the lot, a white one (hated it) and a lovely slate blue one. I looked at the salesman and said, I'll take the blue one. No test drive needed. I know what I'm getting. It's not sexy or cool, but it is exactly the kind of car that I want.

A couple of hours and a lot of paperwork later, I was transferring dog crates and assorted gear from the old Odyssey to the new one. I felt strangely emotional--I was losing an old reliable, well, I can't say a car is a friend, but it was a reliable tool that I used every day. A tool that had transported me back and forth across the country to both coasts more than once. I was sad to say goodbye to the old van. But I drive Hondas for a reason: I immediately felt at home in the new van with its nice leather interior and spiffy safety features.

 

Frankie

It's time to lay out some of Frankie's origin myth. 

Oh, who's Frankie, you ask? She is the smooth fox terrier puppy I picked up over the Fourth of July weekend in 2022. She was only 10 weeks old at the time, and the last of her litter. I had some reservations about both of those facts but decided to load up Archie and Azza and drive out to northwestern Arkansas to see her. Her breeder was registered with AKC, and told me this was her last litter of smooths. She and her husband were switching over to whippets. I met the sire and dam and both seemed in good health and good conformation. The sire was a finished champion. 

And there was the puppy, a scrap of a thing, by herself in an expen under the shade of a tree. She willingly tugged with a raccoon tail toy I brought with me and seemed quite feisty and healthy. She had a lazy left eye and the usual "carousel horse" planes to her head that you see in American-bred smooth fox terrier lines. 

I had really wanted another male puppy. Male smooth fox terriers tend to be more biddable and willing to please. The females tend to challenge everything, making them harder to train. Archie is a dream of a companion and agility partner, and I was sort of hoping that I could strike gold again with another male. 

But nope, that wasn't happening. This little pup was coming home with us: last of the litter, runt, lazy eye, female. So many things that weren't on my list. But she had a spark that drew me in right away.

I named her Frankie. 

She's still a tiny thing, 16 lb and about 15" at the shoulder. Her lazy eye mostly resolved on its own. It will show up now and then but casual observers would never notice it.

In the past year and a half, Frankie has proven herself over and over to be one of the most challenging fox terriers I've ever worked with. At every waking moment, she vibrates, levitates, with energy. She never stops moving. She wants to be touching me all the time. She is exceptionally bold and oblivious to personal safety. As a result, she and Archie have never been in the same space together, although they do interact across gates in doorways.  

Azza fell into the role of auntie after a couple of weeks of cautious observation. Azza didn't embrace Frankie as quickly as she did Archie, but she eventually came around. Amazingly, Frankie can regularly inspire a lot of play in my 12-year-old desert dog. 

 

 

Frankie is a foreign body surgery looking for a holiday weekend. She eats toys, bedding, sticks, acorns, small stones. She chewed the handle and snap off a 6-foot nylon leash and swallowed almost 3 feet of it. Following a panicked call to a vet school classmate, I dosed her twice with hydrogen peroxide. Once she began to gag, I reached in and pulled out the leash.

Once I realized that I could not monitor her every move outside nor could I train her to stop constantly hoovering up inappropriate things, I ordered a customized basket muzzle that she wears when she is running around the backyard. I had to add some additional strips of duct tape across the bottom because within days she learned she could slam the muzzle down on acorns and pop them into the muzzle so she could eat them. This morning, she still managed to pick up a tree branch (not a twig, a 2-foot long branch) that had fallen overnight by pushing a smaller branchlet sticking off of it into the muzzle.

When I had her spayed earlier this year, she destroyed two cones and the collars holding them, and started to dehisce her abdominal incision within hours of coming home from the clinic. I ended up getting two full-body vests, rotating them every 24 hours so I could wash one, and zoinking her to the moon with alternating trazadone and gabapentin every 4 hours (plus a short course of antibiotics). I had to take three days off work because I couldn't take my eyes off her for a second. 

Frankie is currently taking a novice rally obedience class at the dog training club. One of the other students in the class complimented Frankie on her nice conformation, then gently asked, so, do other smooth fox terriers have a ... similar temperament? I laughed and said, no, Frankie is definitely a unique chaos agent all her own. She is so spicy, so much MORE than I've seen in this breed before.

On the bright side, Frankie sleeps very soundly at night in a crate next to the bed. Goes in without a peep, sleeps a full 8 hours. I'm not surprised--she has to recharge her batteries for another day of mayhem. 

Her agility training has been quite a ride as well. She is comically fast. Think Roadrunner cartoon fast. It has been a challenge for me to learn how to handle her. She gets overstimulated/frustrated very quickly, spinning in circles and jumping up to bite my arm. I'm fortunate to have good training partners and instructors who help us work through these problems. 

Everyone keeps asking me when I will take her into the ring, and I say, she's not ready. Not even close. Archie started competing at 15 months. You could argue that he wasn't quite ready then, but he wasn't hell on wheels either. Frankie and I are still working on performing as a team. But progress is there--in the past 4-5 weeks, she went from only being able to complete 4-5 obstacles before melting down to completing 12-14 obstacles with some semblance of control and direction. I plan to debut her this coming summer when she is 2 years old. She needs a little more tempering.

 

You Are Served

 The lab regularly receives necropsy submissions from animal rescue groups, county and city shelters/animal control, law enforcement, vets, and owners that involve suspected abuse. I've been subpoenaed five times at work in cases that have made it as far as a trial. 

In all of these cases, I'd already been contacted by the prosecutor's office and was expecting the subpoenas, which come by email, but it's still a shock when they pop up. 

In one case, once the defendant took one look at the four witnesses lined up to testify for the prosecution, including me (I did the necropsy), another vet who treated the animal before it died, and two people from the rescue group, he asked for a plea deal right away. Showing up is important!

In another case, I testified in a county courthouse in northeast Arkansas. That was a simple trial in front of a judge. The evidence from necropsy was compelling--the same poison was found in vomit near the dog's head and in stomach contents from the dog. The guy was convicted.

Earlier this month, I testified in my first jury trial. Animal abuse was recently elevated to a felony charge in Arkansas, and the prosecutors worked really hard on this case. After doing the necropsy, I spent a couple of hours on phone calls with them, then another hour-long in-person meeting for trial prep. 

Trial day arrives. I was the eighth of eight witnesses for the prosecution. It was late in the day by the time I was called in, and everyone was tired. I was questioned for over 45 minutes! I was really stressed going in, but the prosecuting team's prep was good, and I think I did a good job of explaining emotionally difficult and technically complicated things to the jury. The prosecution used as evidence some of the necropsy photos that I sent to them. Even for me, it was jarring to see the photos splashed up on a giant flat screen beside me. I know the jury was shocked. I even acknowledged in a couple of my remarks that I knew it was hard to look at photographs like that. I was prepared. I am good at my job. It was still a relief to be dismissed. 

The prosecution team texted me the next morning--jury voted to convict, defendant sentenced to serve 2.5 years. 

Veterinarians deal with death every day. Nothing is routine--each case brings its own burdens. Animal abuse cases are particularly hard on the entire team. I didn't expect that being an expert witness would be part of my job here at the lab. But I made this career change in order to do more meaningful work, and sitting in a court room talking about difficult topics is just one of the meaningful things that I do now.