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Merry Christmas to you and your doggies from Rik and Able!

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?

The Wheelbarrow of Terror

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.

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 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.

Cookie Stretches

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.

Things Go A Bit Pear-Shaped

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.

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.

There’s one exercise that has come up and over and over again in my ongoing agility learning this year. It was featured heavily in multiple presentations in the 2021 Lemonade Conference, and I’ve seen it pop up elsewhere too. It’s not something I’ve ever put much effort into training before, but I guess that’s about to change.

It apparently improves your dog’s balance, his strength, his movement and his endurance. It’s low-impact and you can do it anywhere, even in your living room during a Level 4 lockdown.

I’ll reveal what that exercise is soon, but first it’s story time. I took Able for a walk last week, and we were accosted by a stray dog. I am used to this being a stressful situation, as my older dog gets very wound up about other dogs in her personal space. However, Able was absolutely delighted to make a new friend, and soon they were happily play-bowing at each other while I tried to move Able along. It soon became clear that his new friend was going to follow us, so we went home for the dogs to have a play-date in the back yard.

Well … I brought home a bitch in season for my intact male ten-month-old puppy to play with. They had a delightful time playing chasie around the back yard before I realised – and fortunately the penny never dropped for Able. I guess he isn’t quite all grown up yet, but it’s a very important lesson for me in the perils of owning an intact male dog. I was worried about whether I would be able to fence him in securely – not about bitches throwing themselves on him as we walk down the street!

Now, back to that magical exercise that will turn your dog into a super athlete. What could it possibly be?

When I last described our foundation contact training, Able was taking a short step towards his upside-down bucket, then stepping onto and over it and stopping in his 2o2o position. I was then feeding him on his ice cream lid target.

I had grand plans about transferring this training to a plank as soon as daylight saving started, but I still haven’t found the right object to prop it up to the height I want. In the meantime I’m making plenty of progress with my trusty mop bucket anyway.

Susan Garrett’s DASH

Training the actual 2o2o stop position at the end of the plank is only a small part of stopped contact training. The much bigger and more important part is proofing – making sure that the dog is confident to go to that position at speed no matter what.

Susan Garrett has an acronym for which elements of your training you should focus on in which order – DASH (short for Desire, he finds that Accuracy, Speed, Habituation).