Payton’s Second Agility Trial
The weather for Payton’s second agility trial, and first ever outdoor trial, was surprisingly beautiful, even a bit hot on Sunday (and I came home with a pretty serious sunburn on my neck, backs of my ears, and arms – yeouch!) It broke the pattern, or “curse,” of the local agility trial, which traditionally calls for sub-50 degree temperatures, high winds, and rain if you’re really lucky! We were all quite delighted and I will accept my sunburn as penance for forgetting to grab my bottle of sunscreen.
Here’s the video of Payton’s runs:
Saturday Payton got his NAJ title. He also got his very first Novice Standard leg. I was pretty stunned, because going into the trial I expected a bit of a disaster for being outside. Once again the rules included “don’t pee on anything.” Happily, he peed on nothing! And came home with his first “Double Q” (which of course truly means nothing sub-Masters.)
His Open Jumpers on Sunday run looks more like the Payton I am used to! THAT is my baby dog. The dog who’s running around in all these other runs and picking up Qs and blue ribbons and stuff, I dunno who that is. Poor guy got popped in the face by a weave pole in jumpers and was quite startled, but I was very proud that I just pulled him back to start over and he got it done instead of staying offended. His collection obviously needs more work so he doesn’t barrel into the weave poles and pop himself in the face anymore…
His standard run was great and he came home with another first place and a second leg towards his NA!
Overall, I am very pleased with Payton. He needs more control, but that is something I’ve been noticing as we practice – as he’s gotten more and more confident in various obstacles and sequences he’s gotten faster and the control is slipping a bit. Self-control has been a constant with Payton since I brought him home and will likely be a challenge his entire life. Luckily, I am up for the challenge. I have a whole host of things to work on with him this fall and winter, and hopefully he will be a really great dog come spring (and hopefully I’ll suddenly come into money so I can trial him more often.) After Saturday, he was getting a small fan club. My heart was glowing with how many people thought he looked good, was coming along really great, and had very complimentary things to say about the baby dog. We are all very proud of him and excited for his future!
Payton CGC
Wednesday I happened to be browsing around on a local club’s Facebook page and noticed they were having CGC tests the following night. $10 if you weren’t enrolled in a class (which I am not.) Hmm, $10 isn’t a whole lot… I’ll take Payton!
Immediately after I made that decision I started to panic. What am I doing?! This is the dog who sometimes spontaneously decides he hates random stuff that has always been present, like the bag hanging on the coat rack, or if we move something five inches he thinks it’s an intruder in the house and must be barked at. Or we’re out on a walk and WHAT IS THAT ROCK DOING THERE. or THAT PICNIC BENCH. Or THE FIRE HYDRANT.
And then of course sometimes I see stuff that I think “oh Payton is going to think this is bizarre and bark at it” and he completely ignores it.
But it’s just the CGC right? Right? No big deal… right?
Thursday after work I went through the house and found every weird thing I could come up with to play “Look At That” with him. This is a fairly regular game with him; I regularly patrol the Dollar Spot at Target or the Dollar Store and buy anything that looks bizarre or I think he will find weird so we can play. I found a wind-up t-rex that my parents put in my stocking years ago. This Payton did not like but worked through it quite easily. Next I found the old Bumbleball that I got Auggie when he was a puppy and turned it on – that was a piece of cake! Then I grabbed a plastic bag with tennis balls in it and shook that. Who cares! Threw a handful of cookies on the floor. Nope, you can’t fool me.
Okay, cool.
I’M STILL PANICKING.
My next move was to load up Payton in the car and drive to PetSmart so we could practice in a different environment. This is a little bit of cheating because Pay has been to PetSmart a good handful of times, but still, sometimes he sees A Bad Thing at PetSmart and you never know what kind of people or dogs you’ll encounter there, so it’s worth the practice. We did see a man in a wheelchair while there, which he didn’t care about, so that was pretty cool. He did amazing in the store, I was feeling pretty good.
Put him back in the car and he started flipping out at a fire hydrant he saw on the side of the road as we were driving. *facepalm*
We got to the club and got out of the car to a line of people waiting for the doors to open, so I took Payton off in the grass and pottied him and started working. He was doing amazing again so we went closer to the line, where people had dogs freaking out and barking and lunging at other dogs. GREAT. Played more Look At That and he was awesome.
Then we had to get into the building when the doors opened, which meant we had to get actually IN LINE – with all those dogs who were spazzing at other dogs. And spazz dogs make Payton a spazz. I’m not making excuses for my dog, reacting to a reactive dog isn’t a free pass – Auggie doesn’t react to reactive dogs, for example – but “other dogs” aren’t Payton’s, trigger, it’s “other dogs wigging at me.”
My solution was to simply pick him up and hold him until we were in the building and we had more space. I wasn’t going to leave him in line with other dogs stressing around him, making him stressed out. He wasn’t completely calm in my arms but he was a good deal less stressed than if I had left him on the ground, and reducing his stress level to manage his threshold was my goal. Sometimes you have to manage a situation until you have trained through it, so management was my solution at that point in time.
Once we got inside and got my paperwork, I got us settled down in a chair in the corner where we were mostly away from other people and other dogs, and started working on getting him to calm back down. While I filled out my form, Payton had a I DO NOT KNOW WHAT THAT IS I DON’T LIKE IT moment – at the frickin’ CLIPBOARD I was using the fill out my paperwork on. Well this does not bode well. On the other hand, I was able to get him to eat cookies off the clipboard and was able to pick it up and carry it back to the registration desk without him flipping out at it, so we were able to work through it pretty easily.
We watched other people practice for a while and once the floor had cleared out a bit, it was Payton’s turn to practice.
Two things for me to come away from our practice with: One, my dog is not the most reactive dog in the building. Two, my dog may not have the tightest heel in the world, but he does have the most enthusiastic, attentive, happy heel – especially in comparison to some of the other dogs. And this was around OTHER DOGS going spazzo which normally would have him be flipping out. Yes, we were practicing with a handful of cookies (and later with cookies sitting on my chair across the ring) but thinking back to how he reacted at the rally trial in May when I couldn’t even get my dog’s attention back even with cookies right in front of his face, he has definitely made progress.
At this point, I sat down in my chair and thought “It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t get his CGC tonight. This is a win. This is worth it.” I was so immensely proud and he hadn’t even really done anything yet.
Then it was our turn in the ring. Turns out the evaluator was the same evaluator who CGC’d Auggie! We didn’t have a perfect heel in the actual ring, he got more distracted once we were “in the ring.” But he did everything reasonably well – and he was AWESOME in the distraction test! I patted him and told him he was a good boy and he didn’t even really think about reacting to the distractions. The lady dropped a bag full of soda cans pretty much right in front of him, and he just looked offended, like “Why are you throwin’ stuff?” Hardly even looked at the guy hobbling around us on crutches.
The guy who took Payton for supervised separation came back and said “This is the most talkative dog in the world.” Um, uh oh, LOL. Apparently he took Payton in the room and shut the door, and Payton looked at him, muttered something, then turned back to the door and muttered at the door. And kept muttering back and forth. Like “C’mon. We should go back out there. This is boring!” That is apparently NOT a fail, but it was pretty hilarious. Yes, Payton does talk quite a bit. He’s rather obnoxious, I know.
So my Pay has his very first ribbon! I know it’s just the CGC, it’s not like we’ve done anything amazing… but I can’t help being proud when I was anticipating Mr. Horrible Meltdown to come out and play and send us home with me in tears.
YAY PAYTON!
Master Auggie
So this is the result of this weekend. Well, not just this weekend. The result of a long time, a lot of work, and more money than I care to even try calculating.
It takes 10 Excellent B Q’s to get Master’s titles. Auggie got his MJP on Friday afternoon and his MXP this morning.
And with that he is more than likely all done. I doubt if we’ll ever get his speed up to where it needs to be to ever get a PACH, so there’s no point in continuing to shovel money at it when he has just as much, if not more, fun playing in the backyard. I’m already entered in another trial and there’s one here locally that I might enter depending on the judge, and I’ll be getting Auggie a pirate ship cake that says BON VOYAGE AUGGIE and we can have him a little party. I may bring him back out of retirement one day if his speed issues ever get resolved and let him play again… but I’m really not counting on anything. I feel like this is it.
I wish I had gotten today’s run on camera. It was so totally an Auggie run. He was a little snot in the rally ring so I was hoping he would be on fire and run fast in agility and he was definitely revved up. We have been having rear cross into tunnel issues but he took off for the tunnel today like nobody’s business. He came wide around a jump and headed for an off course tire and I ended up yelling “Auggie Auggie AUUUUGGIIEEEEE” – and he stopped RIGHT in front of the tire and looked at me and came over to take the dog walk like he was supposed to. He flew through the weaves so fast he slipped but kept in them and tore it up. The triple jump was the last obstacle and he was running so wild I thought he might knock it. He took off and I thought “oh God, he’s not going to clear it.” He clipped the last bar. It went CLANG…
but it didn’t fall.
There were people outside the ring watching and they all let out a “WHEW” when the bar didn’t fall. I looked up and mocked wiping sweat off my face, hahaha. One of the agility people I know was scribing and she yelled “Boy, you had to work for that one, didn’t you?!”
It didn’t even occur to me until we were out of the ring that that was it, that was #10. We were done. I was just laughing so hard. What a snot.
I really wish I had it on camera because it was just… it felt like a defining run for us, LOL.
I’m so proud of him and even though I’m sad that we will never get a PACH and never get to run a victory lap or anything like that, we have done so much in our time together. At more than one point I thought he was done and I would have to quit, but he never quit on me. After our very first run in agility together, I heard someone outside the ring – and to this day I don’t even know who it was that said it – say “One day, that dog is going to be awesome.”
In some ways that was more of a curse than anything else because I have always felt like I was giving up on him whenever things happened. Dropping him to preferred felt like I was giving up on him, because one day that dog is going to be awesome. Even this sort of feels like I am giving up on him, because one day that dog is going to be awesome.
But the reality is that “one day” is today, yesterday, last Tuesday, tomorrow, next Wednesday – every single day since the very first day I brought Auggie home and every single day until our time together on this earth has ended. It doesn’t matter if Auggie will never have letters before his name. It wouldn’t matter if he never had any letters on his name at all.
My dog IS awesome. And he always has been. He is an amazing dog, and I could not have asked for a better partner in our journey together through this ridiculous game called agility life.
September 19th & 20th Trial
Somebody needs to tell Auggie he’s doing it wrong.
This past weekend, I was glad to be back at our local club for the trial. It’s a site we’ve been to many many times, a place I’m comfortable at, and a place I feel like Auggie is comfortable at. I was hoping he would be more relaxed as far as some of his recent issues with the a-frame were concerned, hoping he would have fun, and hoping we might go home with a couple ribbons.
Saturday was a bit of a hairy mess. We didn’t even get started running Novice until after 4PM in the afternoon… and Auggie and I had rolled in around 10AM to set up and hang out with everybody. It was also a sunny day and a bit warm due to the sun; more than once I found Auggie huddled up in the back of his crate trying to catch air from his crate fan.
So when we got out there for our JWW run, he wasn’t totally feeling it. He slowed to a walk through the tunnel about halfway through, and as we entered the weave poles, he stopped entirely and stuck his nose to the ground. Augh! Something smelled quite good and he was no longer interested in me. Attention Auggie: this is not earthdog. This is agility. After several attempts and trying to get his attention back, I waved at the judge and carried my bad little puppy off the course. Snotbucket!
I sat outside the ring and mulled things over in my head. He was still so pokey. What’s his deal? His breeder offered that his confidence might still be shaken from everything he’s had to deal with as far as his jump height going up and down all over the place. Would I ever be able to restore his confidence? I wasn’t sure. And if I can’t restore that confidence, I might just resign to playing with Auggie in the backyard instead of competing.
And then we had to run Standard.
The course was set up in a pretty straight line. Jump, jump, a-frame, jump, tunnel.
Auggie would see that a-frame, and, God willing, that would be the end of the story. If I could just get him to run straight up the a-frame, everything else after that was secondary.
I decided not to even bother putting him in a sit. I was just going to drop him and take off running. I’ve seen people do that before, so why not? Maybe having him in a sit was screwing with his momentum.
So I put him down. And I took off and he came with me. And I yelled and screamed and drove that dog like crazy.
And he went up the a-frame.
I was roaring and screaming and yelling the whole time. Angels sang a chorus of Hallelujah.
And then I pushed him off the entrance to the tunnel.
Hahahahaha! Oh well. Other than that, he ran great, even did his weaves flawlessly (presumably to make up for his total disaster over on JWW.) Even with the one refusal, we got a Q! Awesome!
Sunday was not a very good day as far as the weather went. I decided I would go out early on and watch the excellent runs, and then leave during Open, pick up Auggie, and bring him back with me so he wouldn’t be out there for so long during the day. Shortly after I arrived, we got caught in a good downpour of rain. Lovely. The ground got nice and wet, then the sun came out and looked like it might at least dry up the obstacles.
Then I left to get Auggie and it rained some more. And then I sat there and it rained and rained and rained. Eventually, the rain was just there to stay. I was glad that I invested in my ASICS for the sole purpose (haha, get it?) of running in wet, muddy conditions. Auggie, however, does not have shoes that are specially made for running in wet, muddy conditions. He just has little feetsies that sometimes slip.
Oh well. If he knocked bars or anything, I wouldn’t blame him. I figured we would just go out and see what happened, and if it looked bad, I would pull him.
Well, he didn’t slip and he didn’t knock any bars, but he off-coursed twice. Once was my fault, the second time, he was too busy going “LALALALA THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVER LALALALALA!” At least I can’t say he wasn’t enjoying the game anymore at that point, because the look of joy had obviously returned to his face, and surprisingly, despite the weather, his speed was back as well.
So on we went to standard. He went straight up the a-frame again – bliss! He came out of the tunnel and I pushed him off the broad jump… then oops, I let him back jump it, getting us a wrong course as well as a refusal. Then we came to the weave poles and… Auggie disappeared on me at pole four. Doot doot de doo, he went to go check out the sandbags they had holding the dog walk down. I stood there calling him back… he started to come back, and then went “Oh hey, a-frame!” I distinctly remember going “AUGGIE DON’T YOU DARE.” LOL. He came back to me again.
I was THIS CLOSE to blowing off the run. I thought we’d had too many refusals, wrong courses, and now we were way over time. There was no way it would be a Q.
But in my head I heard his breeder’s voice, and what she always tells me. “Fix it. Whatever happens, just fix it.”
So I fixed it. It took me a while because I had to back him up a few times to help him get the entry correct, but we fixed it. And then on we went, up the teeter, through the tunnel, over the dog walk (where I practically had a heart attack because he looked for a moment like he was going to slip off it), and then through the last tire jump.
“That should be a Q,” his breeder told me after the run.
“Oh, there’s no way. That took forever. We had to be way over time.”
“No,” she says, “I think that’s a Q.”
So I packed up the car, then waited around some more… and what do you know.
That was a Q.
In fact, we were really good as far as time went. We would have Q’d even if we were playing regular agility!
And that means that in four days of trialing Auggie got his NAP.
The same dog that took me TEN TRIES to get a single Q towards his NA.
You have to be kidding me.
So there you have it. We’ve gotten a jumpers title now, and a standard title. Just, sadly, not all at the same time, LOL. We’re still in Novice Jumpers until we get those 2 more Qs towards his NJP. I have to decide if I want to move him up into Open Standard or not.
MANY UPDATES
When did I last update this thing? I have no idea.
What has happened in the meantime:
Next to nothing. We had another agility trial hosted by the same club as the one I previously posted about, and it only solidified my decision to never, ever, ever go to a trial hosted by this club again. It was terrible. I saw things on the Novice Jumpers course that no judge in their right mind should have had in a novice course. It was just terrible. If that were my first trial I would have thought “This s**t is too hard” and quit agility forever. Really. Some challenges are necessary, I agree, but when there are things that make a course flat out DANGEROUS – no matter if it’s Novice, Open, or Excellent – there’s a real problem.
We have received our official jump height card and I am not happy with the measurement. I have heard rumors that you can no longer challenge, but don’t know if this is true. If it’s not true and you can still challenge, you better believe I’m challenging.
Regardless, we have been practicing with jump heights at 16 in the meantime, and we’re doing pretty good. I’m very happy with the clearance Auggie’s been giving me.
I have not been doing a lot more work in the jumping program, because the weather has been disgusting – rain 5-6 days a week, and one sunny day that is usually insufferably hot; that one sunny day we have been taking advantage of to scoot off to Auggie’s breeder’s house for agility practice, so the jumping chute on the same day would be too much for him, IMHO. I am hoping the weather improves, and I think I may actually start the program completely over again using 16 inch jump heights.
Meanwhile, the agility trial I went to also offered rally, so I went ahead and entered rally both days. We didn’t place the first day, and got second the second day (some other guy beat our time by a second or two, and also Auggie kept trying to high-five me instead of down, so I’m pretty sure that is what happened with our score, LOL.)
Regardless of placing, we did Q both days – so Auggie now has his RN. Hurray Auggie!
This coming weekend we are doing a little indoor trial. We are two legs away from our NA and two away from our OAJ, so if he has a stellar weekend… well, I will just pee my pants with joy. I’m hoping to at least come away with one Q each after the weekend is over and done with.
I haven’t been doing our Natural Jumping program. I got thrown off with bad weather, an intense summer course, and a vacation. I’m unsure now if I want to actually start back over at week 1 at 16 inch jump heights and let him work through it, or what I want to do. Being unsure of where to start again is holding us back for sure. I think I will see how this weekend goes, and then maybe get started again next week.
Auggie has started DOGGIE DAYCARE as of last Wednesday. He’s doing really well. Hopefully I will be able to get some pics in the coming weeks and post some cute Auggie-playing-with-other-dogs photos. =>
Uhhhh I think that’s it. I’ll try to remember to update this thing more often.
Trial #2, Day 2
Our haul from today…
Wait a second!! Are you SURE you saw that right?? Maybe you should look closer.
I am now the proud owner of Sentinel’s The Flash NAJ CGC. That’s right… we got our novice jumpers title this weekend!! And all three of his qualifying scores – we got running 16! Snazzy!
Today’s runs:
Standard run!
He got buggy on the table and that’s what screwed us, but J is almost positive he just didn’t “see” the table as a table. She thinks he saw it like a jump, since it’s so thin and the walls around it are plain white, not to mention the top is pale purple. So we got 1 table fault (two points) and a refusal for that, but it was the time more than anything else that really put us over. I then failed to pull him in enough to get him a straight shot into the tunnel, so he didn’t go into that right away – another refusal! Also, notice that he doesn’t come OUT of the tunnel. I notice he’s not coming, I can’t see the tunnel moving – where is Auggie? I lean over and look into the tunnel… and he’s standing there at the bend, nose to the ground, sniffing something interesting! He sees me, goes “Oh – HI!” and comes running out. What a goofball!
Regardless of the NQ, I watched this a billion times because of how wonderful his weaves are!
JWW – the run that got us our title!
Would have been clean, but he changed my plan on me! I was going to front cross before that blue tunnel, but when he spotted the tunnel he suddenly sped up so I couldn’t get in front. I KNEW he would hate me trying to rear cross him into the tunnel, and sure enough, when he got to the tunnel entrance and I started to try and cross, he suddenly hit the brakes. Refusal! The time it took for me to back him up and put him into the tunnel put us over time. You can’t see them as well here, but he did flawless weaves again here… so beautiful.
Anyway, I came around that last jump and everybody was clapping and going “THAT WAS GREAT!” and the VMO says to me “That was a Q!!” and my mom goes “YOU DID IT” and J goes “YOU DID IT!”
And I say, because I saw the time on the clock as I picked Auggie up at the exit, “But we went over time.”
“It’s okay,” J says. “You’re allowed time faults in Novice.”
I stare at her.
“You get a point off for every second over time, but you weren’t over by that much, even with the refusal. You did it.”
I stare.
“YOU DID IT.”
“Wh…??”
Seriously… it didn’t sink in. It didn’t sink in until I looked at the scores posted and saw, yes, he really did Q. And then I stammered out to the trial secretary that we get a new title ribbon. And even now…
we’re in Open. My dog can run in Open.
I’m in shock. Seriously.
Canine Good Citizen
We did it!!! Auggie passed his CGC test. Awesome!!
The only reason I took the test was because it was offered free as part of our local dog training club’s “AKC Responsible Dog Ownership” day. Otherwise, I was terrified about paying to take the test and failing miserably.
I panicked a little when she tried to touch his front paws and he pulled his right one away from her rather forcibly… but when she picked it up again he let her touch it. I also was nervous about the “walking in a crowd” exercise, because they put a child in the ring to walk past him. He didn’t bark or look twice at the kid though – and then, during the “distractions” exercise, they gave the kid a bag of empty soda cans to walk around him and jingle the cans… and even though he looked at her twice, he didn’t bark!! Awesome progress for my little guy.
He lost his focus on me a little because the ring smelled of a bajillion different dogs already, and he was so busy sniffing he wasn’t interested in doing boring stuff like a sit or a stay, so I had a bit of trouble getting him to pay attention to me – but he heeled beautifully during the “on a walk” exercise, and for his recall test he came running towards me with glee. It was such a gorgeous (and adorable, because he always looks like “HI MOMMY WHEEEE!”) looking recall that people kept stopping me after the test to congratulate me on how great it looked.
I’m so proud of him! I had my doubts, but he did it. Even though CGCs don’t go on a pedigree, Auggie is now Sentinel’s The Flash CGC.
The photos:
Test #2, I think this was – “hi, can I pet your dog?” We started with our backs to the fencing on the left, but he didn’t want to sit facing that direction… so we rotated.
The grooming/inspection test.
Walking through a crowd. WITH CHILD. I love it.
They gave him a HUGE milkbone as a prize… and he was quite happy.
