Check Out the Gating!

Katie and I tried out the new gating I just built. Hopefully it resembles what we will see at the Greyhound Nationals. Katie did awesome. We did some remedial work and she quickly caught on and was doing full length go outs to the new gating after just a few minutes.

Trouble for Travis

It just wasn't Travis' weekend. On Saturday, he got in big trouble when he chomped down hard on my thumb when he was mouthing his bumper. He can be very careless. Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. Then on Sunday, he tried to jump into his van crate with the crate door open only part way. The crate door attacked him and wouldn't let him move forward or back. Travis is dramatic, so he was screaming as if it was an alligator that had him. Luckily, just a small mark on his side. At least performance wise, he is running agility so smooth, clean, and accurate right now............... why does it have to be August, the most trial-less month of the year. I want to show this dog!

Do Greyhounds shed?

YES!!!! Greyhounds do shed! I found this critter in my dog room
yesterday. Now you must be thinking I must never sweep the dog room if I have a hairball the size of an Italian Greyhound floating around, but the truth is I do sweep rather frequently. I may have slacked for a week and I was extra thorough in my sweeping yesterday, but its still a lot of hair.



This is the dirty work of 5 greyhounds. See, Travis and Katie have a stepdog brother, Stacker, and two sisters, Julie and Allie. My husband, Stephen, and I met in the local greyhound adoption club. We actually started out married with 6 greyhounds until Teresa passed away last November.




Back row - Travis, Stacker, and Katie.
Front row - Allie and Julie.

A New Wrench

Well, my good obedience greyhound friend, Kathy Helmke, just alerted me to a new twist I can look forward to at the Greyhound Nationals. She'd already warned me about the show grounds being near train tracks and the noise created by the changing of rail cars. The park is not fenced and we are near a busy road. There's a pond with possibly ducks and geese. Overall, just a distracting and sort of bizarre place to say "hey, what a great place for a dog show". My guess is that the show folks don't have to worry as much about distractions as the obedience folks.... remember you have to be perfect in obedience. A loud noise or flapping wings could easy cause your dog to miss a signal or a voice cue. Katie and Travis are used to working outside and are pretty well focused..... especially Katie, so I wasn't too worried about what she had told me thus far......... until now.

In utility, directed jumping requires you to send your dog to the other end of the ring (50 feet) and request a sit. Once seated you direct your back over a jump on your left or your right, per the judge. You repeat the exercise, sending your dog to the other end of the ring and then directing them back over the other jump. The jumping isn't too hard, but sending your dog to the other end of the ring (go outs) is a difficult concept to teach. Ideally, they should run straight to the other end, but to a dog... what is straight... where is the other end...and why the hell am I doing this when I'm just going to come back? It takes a lot of practice to get a dog to run confidently away from you, all the way to the other end, and straight and centered. One of the ways you accomplish this is by teaching your dog to run to and touch the middle section of gating. This gives your dog a visual target. In the southeast we typically use, ring gating that looks like old style baby gates divided by stanchions (see picture). Katie has learned to target a stanchion. WELL, Kathy informed me that the Greyhound Nationals do not use the same gating, but use posts and chains. Poor Katie is not likely to make sense of this new visual in a show ring setting. BUT luckily we have over a month to work on this. She should transfer her good go out skills to a new type of gating fairly easily as long as we actually practice it.......... so guess what Stephen and I are building this weekend........ new ring gating!

And by the way, Katie has been just perfect. Absolutely wonderful! Her article pile is up to 6 now and she's finding the correct scent article like a champ. We'll keep adding 1 article a week until we are up to 8 again.

Travis on the otherhand is sloppy, but oh well. He's still quite entertaining and so animated. He does everything as fast as he can. I'll have to warn the judge on the drop on recall that he comes in like a Ferrari!!!!

Back to herself

I am so pleased with Katie again. She is working so well. She is working her scent articles very quickly, confidently, and correctly. The exercise looks great! Everything is coming along just fine as well.

Well, the humans are off to a little weekend trip to Kentucky. Katie and Travis are staying with Anne Jones. I am sure they will be bored, but they will be safe and not learning any bad habits.

Perfect

Yesterday, Katie was perfect! No mistakes. I definitely needed that. We were working at the training building prior to the greyhound obedience class I teach. We did all of the utility and open exercises and she did great. Her articles have been much better. She seems to be so much more confident in that if she smells the right one first... she grabs it and goes. Before she seemed to have to narrow it down and check the other articles before deciding on the best pick. I much prefer her to be confident and quick to find it.

Today she wasn't perfect, but she still worked really well. She has a bad habit in the signal exercise of walking several steps prior to laying down when I signal her. So basically she's standing at one end of the ring and I'm 40-50 feet away at the opposite end. I give her a hand signal and she is suppose to drop to a down, ideally in place. But she tends to take a few steps towards me and then lie down. Its passing, but you can lose a lot of points. So I've been placing a pole in front of her that forces her to lie down in place. Well, today I tried it without the pole and she looked as if I was talking to her in sign language (ok, bad joke since I sort am doing hand signals :-). So we will need to work without the pole. She dropped beautifully in place once she figured out what she is suppose to be doing, but obviously the pole had become part of the signal.

Photo - Here's Katie hoping a squirrel would fall out of the tree.... of course, the pesky muzzle would make a falling squirrel almost impossible to catch, but she would still like to try.

Back to Work!

Well, after a week of hiking at Wildlife Action, we are back to training again. Travis didn't miss a beat. He's still running very clean. When I set up practice agility courses, I try to make them difficult, so we have something to work on. However, he's really been running clean lately and even with a week off, he still is. I guess I would say that Katie didn't miss a beat either. She's still making the same mistakes, but I'm more relaxed about it. Its funny how you think... "once we get the UD, it will be so nice to not feel the pressure anymore". Well, I just cannot not put pressure on myself. We are going to do remedial article work. Will work with a pile of 4 articles this week, 5 next... and so on. I think she just needs to build up her confidence again.

All of the NY premiums are out and I started filling them out. I've already entered agility and my entry has been confirmed.

We are experiencing a heat wave right now. We hit a record high for the low the other day.... the low temperature for the day was 82 degrees... Yikes!

Time Off

Well, we have taken some much needed time off............. I have not trained Katie and Travis for 4 whole days now. OK, so it is hardly a break by most standards, but for me this is a long time. I just do not take breaks... the joke is that my tombstone will read "Finally, she rests." (thank you, Stefanie Noe :-). For the most part my greyhounds are not looking for a break either......... after all this is all suppose to be a fun game and it is the highlight of their day since I am generous with the food rewards and I always have good food. I was trying not to train for an entire week, but now I'm kind of missing it and thinking about starting up again this weekend. I am getting over the fact that no one really cares if Katie ever finds a correct scent article again and the sooner I don't care, the sooner she'll be just fine and able to do the exercise. It truly is not a big deal. Both of our obituaries will probably not mention anything about scent articles and even if they do, I doubt anyone will remember that either. So its time to just relax and look forward to our trip to NY.