Odds & Ends

The hounds and I are doing well. Seven took all of December off to heal her latissimus dorsi strain. She has since been cleared to return to work. It does appear that both wrists are giving her some issues now. We will just see how long we can get away with doing Agility.

All three hounds were invited to the 2015 AKC Agility Invitational, but I decided to only take Riley and Maddie.  It worked out since Seven took the month off anyway.  I will post about that trip soon.

The crazy thing is that 6 greyhounds attended! Usually we are the only ones there. Very exciting!

I have been wanting to get some really nice dog beds for a while now. I finally splurged and got the girls some seriously nice beds from Orvis. They have 4 inches of memory foam, bolstered sides, and they are 50 inches long. 

 The hounds do not spill out of these beds.

Seven never sleeps on her back so I think she approves of the new comfortable bed. 

Recently, Maddie had a bad fall on the dogwalk.  She climbed it crooked with too much speed.  It was the worse fall I have ever seen. Lots of twisting and struggling to hang on and then finally landing flat on her side. Holy crap! My first thought was that she will never get back on another dogwalk. She is the most sensitive and cautious of my hounds and I figured this experience would scar her forever..... but like a good trainer, I hid that fear. Told her how freaking awesome that was. She was obviously hurt and stunned. I gave her a canned dog food jackpot because ... well... canned food makes everything better. It was cold, so I put her coat back on and walked her around. And then she started to get that look like "are we going to do some agility?" So I asked her to do one teeter and one dogwalk.  She did both like nothing happened.  I couldn't have been more happy or proud of her. Unfortunately, she did have some pretty significant wounds and bruising.

Of course, Maddie was entered in a trial three days later. The next day she was gimpy. The wound was especially sore especially when she was lying down and getting up. On Thursday afternoon, I asked her to do some agility. She appeared to be just fine and did not come up sore later. If there had not been a trial, I would have given her more time off. But she was bouncing around and ready to go so I decided not to scratch her........AND she earned TWO double qualifiers!  

The bruise moved further down her leg each day. So thankful the fall was not more serious.