Famous!

I was asked to write an article about Katie being the first Master Agility Champion greyhound and a little about agility greyhounds in general. It was published in the Summer 2007 edition of Celebrating Greyhounds. It was fun to brag about Katie and to see beautiful photos of her in the magazine and back cover.

Happy Birthday, Travis!

Travis is now 9 years young. He is so youthful in mind, body, and spirit. He still has so much energy and is quickly refreshed with a short rest. He does everything with so much drive. This photo was taken a couple of months ago for Celebrating Greyhounds. I did a little dock jumping segment and they wanted a photo of him. Unfortunately, I don't have any high quality photos of dock jumping so we had him pose with his dead fowl trainer. He's a handsome boy!

Stop Singing!

Katie hates my singing :-). Actually, its pretty much an out of tune imitation of a howl. She gets this look on her face. Gives me a warning and then snaps at my nose. Its a silly game we play. Such a cute little "Pumpkin".

Asheville Kennel Club

Travis had a fairly good weekend at the 3-day agility trial in Fletcher, NC. I consider a successful weekend to be a 50% Q rate and at least 1 QQ. He qualified 3 out of 6 and he did get a QQ on Sunday....... 45 MACH points total. He had some really nice runs and received lots of compliments from people who had never seen him before... so that was nice. One standard run, he ran very well, but missed the up dogwalk contact. That contact is so hit or miss. Luckily, he hit it the rest of the weekend. So now we have 1 QQ towards MACH2 and all of the points we need.

Here, Travis is chilling in our tent at Red Gates campground in Hendersonville, NC. Don't let that sweet face deceive you.... he's ready for anything with a moments notice.

Utility B in Asheville

Katie and I made our first attempt at Utility B at the Asheville Kennel Club show. Luckily, we have a good 2 months for some back to the drawing board training. She actually did very well with the mix up of exercises, but she had a very hard time concentrating on scent articles when it is the last exercise of the class.......... the case both days!!! She never once took time to search for the article and she never brought back a correct one. That and I would really like to improve her down signal. She continues to move forward quite a bit and is probably starting to push the qualifying limit. The most difficult seems to be stopping her creeping forward on go outs. She goes all the way to the gate, turns, and moves forward 10 feet or so before sitting. I do not have much trouble with this in training, but it sure shows in the ring. Not sure how to correct that. However, other than articles, she did qualify in all the other exercises and was probably going to score in the low 180's.

Occasionally, Katie does sleep in my presence (normally she stares at me). After a long day at the show, here she is chilling in our tent at the Red Gates campground in Hendersonville, NC.