Our new regs come into force next month, and I’ve had a few people ask me questions about what the changes to AD and ADXA mean for them. I’ve had my head under a rock, mostly because it doesn’t really affect me – I have an older dog who is more or less retired, and a young dog who is yet to achieve his first clear round.
As an instructor I feel like I should know the answer so that I can give newer competitors a better answer than “go and look at the regs”, so here we are – the most common AD and ADX questions answered.
What’s this all about?
The last standalone AD and ADXA classes have now been run. Starting from next year, you’ll have an opportunity to earn AD and ADXA clear rounds at every champ agility show – but these will be on regular courses that you can also win ribbons in.
At each show the club will nominate one Novice class to be the AD course, and one Intermediate class to be the ADXA class. You don’t need to do anything special for your clear rounds in these classes to count towards titles – just enter them like you would any other class.
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.
A very happy birthday boy after his run
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.
A special birthday lunch: Stuffed Leg of Giraffe with Squeaker In.
He’s grown significantly bigger than I expected, and now clocks in at 23.5kg, nearly twice what his great aunt Spring weighed. He has grown into his paws at last – but my, what big paws they are!
He knows far less about agility things than my previous dogs did at that age. He’s only been over few low jump bars a few times, as part of his jumping grids, and he’s never done any agility handling over jumps. He’s never been through a tunnel. I’ve done nothing about his weave training yet, although if I had access to a good old-fashioned weave channel apparatus I probably would have.
He still hasn’t destroyed anything of value, except for one alarm clock and one sock. He has an excellent recall most of the time, but his delight in the company of strangers sometimes leads him into temptation.
I’m looking forward to the year ahead – progressing from almost no obstacle skills to running full courses, getting into the ring, and hopefully learning to run together as a team. The finish line seems very far away sometimes, but we’ll keep building on the basics and we’ll get there.
Next month we will be starting a foundation agility class at club, which I’m sure he will enjoy immensely.
Merry Christmas to you and your doggies from Rik and Able!
Santa brought Rik a replacement yellow smily face ball for the one that Able wrecked. Able got coal.
Waimate’s annual Christmas in the (very small) Square was cancelled this year due to covid. Instead a group of people decided to sit on the back of a truck singing carols while they drove around town. In Waimate no celebration is complete without our pet vintage steam engine, which was chosen to lead the procession, while volunteers ran along beside it handing out candy canes and Christmas Cake.
I never miss an opportunity to get Able out and about when strange things are afoot, so we headed outside before dinner to watch the steam engine go past. I vastly overestimated the peak speed of a vintage steam engine, but after a thirty-minute wait the world’s smallest Christmas parade arrived, and the dogs had their first face-to-face encounter with the steam engine. Neither of them were the least bit fazed, perhaps because their chances of outrunning it were excellent should it happen to veer off course and chase them.
Learning to Walk the Plank
My Christmas training project is to transfer Able’s contact behaviour onto a low plank, propped up on his mop bucket at one end to give it a tiny bit of height.
Our week got off to a very scary start when Able had a seizure in the wee small hours of Monday morning. It was a very surreal way to wake up, especially as he was completely fine a few minutes later, and it took me a good couple of hours to get back to sleep.
Our visit to the vet that morning did not give us any answers. He appears fine, so fingers crossed it was just a random once-off. If not, it’s possible that he could have epilepsy.
Even in my sleep-deprived state I managed to notice that Able was exceptionally well-behaved at the vet clinic. This has always been a place where he gets overexcited, and with the slippery floors things can quickly descend into chaos. We went to the clinic for a lunchtime every week this winter until the lockdown put an end to that, and it’s nice to see hard work paying off!
So that’s what scared me this week … what about Able?
This week we had our dog club Christmas party. My older dog Rik does not feel a lot of Christmas spirit when it comes to being in close proximity to other dogs, so Able got to have a turn at the games.
Mr Able McYoghurtface. Somehow despite having a much bigger head than Rik, he is better at cramming it all the way into the tub.
The Border Collie Stampede
Recall races are an annual feature at the party. Able won his heat easily, and then he had to wait while the other dogs had a turn.
Able did not want to wait quietly. Able very much enjoyed his five seconds of glory, and he wanted to go again NOW! He’s always been very calm watching the other dogs at agility, but now he serenaded me with a selection of his best monkey noises as he tried to drag me back to the start line.
I bought a collapsible crate for my agility training online. It arrived this week, so I spent the weekend playing CCC (Crate Cone & Contact) games on the front lawn.
Turns out a 3XL crate isn’t quite big enough for Able. Oops.
Able really enjoys his Crate Games inside the house, but I’ve been reluctant to do too much with a wire crate in case he gets caught up and injures himself. I was very excited to finally take our games outside and play with some more speed and excitement.
The Sunroof Entry
As an easy warmup, I thought I’d try sending Able into the crate from a few different angles. This is a fun little game that helps to build the skill of looking for the entry of something – later, the entry of a tunnel or the weave poles. This exercise is featured on the Crate Games DVD but I hadn’t done it with any of my previous dogs. I thought Able would nail it.
I noticed a couple of weeks ago that Able has a strong preference for turning to the left (versus the right) when he grabs his tug toy and turns around to come back to me. This is bad enough that he’d rather make a 270 degree left turn than a 90-degree right turn – not something I want him doing on the agility course when he’s turning towards me.
I asked our animal physio about it and she suggested I try some cookie stretches to work on his flexibility in both directions.
Two months on from his first encounter with them, my intrepid Border Collie has learned to ignore the sheep at the local park. I let him hoover up a few turds as a reward.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been taking Able along to my club’s agility training on Wednesday nights. I train my older dog Rik in the 7:30 class, but I try to arrive before 7 so that I can get Able out and do some things with him before then. It’s important to train a youngster in lots of different environments, so I try to get him out and do something with him wherever I go.
Earlier in the spring we were training on the margins of the main agility field, as we needed to be under lights. This was a great opportunity for Able to practise his basic skills – sit stays, retrieves, agility handling on the flat, jumping lanes – in a more stimulating environment, with other dogs running a course ten metres away. There was a noticeable deterioration at first, but by the third week he had his little halo on and didn’t put a paw wrong all night.
And then daylight savings started and I moved to a different space behind the clubrooms, where we had more room to get moving and chuck some toys around. I decided this was the ideal time to start on Able’s more formal handling education, and I started coming to club each week with an agenda of sexy stuff I was going to work on.
Last week was, of course, Guy Fawkes Night. The one magical night a year when people let off fireworks to celebrate some political intrigue I don’t quite understand that happened 400 years ago in another country.
I say “magical” because Guy Fawkes Night defies the normal laws of time, in which a Night is shorter than a Week, and much shorter than a Month. In fact, any random moment of time can be Guy Fawkes Night, if somebody just wishes it to be so (and blows up the dodgy parallel imported fireworks they’ve been storing next to a petrol can in the shed for the last few months).
I am very lucky with Rik that she does not mind loud bangs like fireworks or thunderstorms. I am now doubly lucky with Able. When the first firework went off he sat up, looked around the room for 30 seconds, glanced over at Rik, and flompfed back onto the floor to resume his nap. By the end of the first week of Guy Fawkes Night, he wasn’t even opening his eyes when another fire hazard went zooming off above our heads.
Our agility club show on Saturday was very very wet. Rik insisted on joining me in bed for a nap as soon as we got home.
Puppy’s First Cone Wrap
This week I tackled something I’ve been meaning to do for a month or so, and taught Able to wrap around a cone. This is a skill that a lot of people teach to their puppies while they’re quite young, but I worry a bit about the impact on the shoulders of repeated wraps, especially for a fairly large puppy like Able.
