Today was Able’s “agility birthday”. He’s now old enough to compete at an agility show. He celebrated his birthday by running a wee course I set up for him with a few friends.
Able is still very enthusiastic about life, and is the only dog I’ve had who was still eager to play with strange dogs at this age. He also still thinks human feet are hilariously funny, and tends to pounce on them when he’s greeting people. It has been challenging at times to work with such a large and excessively friendly young dog – the time he headbutted me and broke my glasses was not a highlight – but his focus for me has improved so much and his little quirks are just what makes Able Able.
Unfortunately Able has been diagnosed with epilepsy, and what with this and other things, he’s had almost no training over the last two months. He started a new medication last month which made him very drunk and severely affected his control over his back legs for a couple of weeks. He has improved a lot now so he’s been doing some agility training again this week, but we have an awful lot of things on our todo list.
Epilepsy is such a frustrating condition. Unlike the other diseases my dogs have had over the years, there’s no way to do bloodwork and quantify how bad it is. The only thing that can be measured is how many days or weeks apart his seizures are. This makes it difficult to get a clear prognosis for his future. It’s also impossible to know whether his meds (which currently cost $9/day) are having any effect at all, until he’s been on them for several months and I can compare the frequency of seizures over time.
If we find meds that work for him, he’ll be on them for life. Some of common anti-epileptic drugs in dogs can cause organ damage over time, which is pretty scary when I have a young, otherwise healthy dog. They also need to be given at the same time of day every single day, which means my social activities have to be carefully pre-meditated.
All of this (plus the fact that he’s an enormous galumph of a dog even when he’s not on meds) means that Able is not as far forward with his training as my other dogs were at this stage. I haven’t started his weaves yet, and he’s only had one session of Aframe training. Hopefully we can make some progress on this before the ribbon trials in August, but I am keeping my expectations pretty modest at this stage. We may need to train in the ring at our first shows, but I’m hoping that we will be ready to tackle the courses at NZDAC in a few months’ time.