Exercise Finished

Happy Ground Hog Day!

2012-02-02T06:33:00.000-08:00

I don't know if Iowa has its own official groundhog or not. But any groundhogs around our part of the state didn't stand a chance of seeing their shadow this morning. The fog was so thick I could actually watch it swirling in the flashlight beam when I went out with the dogs at 5:30. That was kinda creepy.

Today is also Imbolc. Imbolc is a Celtic festival marking the beginning of spring. That might be a little optimistic but I'm all about spring getting here ASAP. Most commonly it is celebrated on Feb. 1 or 2 in the northern hemisphere. These dates fall about halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

From now on, the sunlight hours of the day start getting markedly longer and will continue to lengthen until the summer solstice in late June, when they start getting shorter again.

Can we have spring if we really haven't had winter yet?

Agility video & post-snark followup

2012-01-31T09:56:00.000-08:00

Here's our best run from the weekend. The boy does love his JWW courses - no stinkin' contacts or tables to make a fellow stop.

Referencing one of the comments on yesterday's post, someone asked what I do with Phoenix after he's blown up because someone's dog got in his face.

The first, and possibly most important thing is that I don't scold him for it. His reactivity includes a lot of sound and fury with gnashing teeth. It sounds and looks horrible but it's just a warning. If I punish him for giving that warning, pretty soon he's going to skip the warning and cut straight to the chase, which would probably be a full-fledged bite of the offending dog. Phoenix is big, strong and fast. If he meant to chomp another dog, he would do it.

I'm fine with him warning other dogs away. He's sending a message that says "I do not like you, your behavior is inappropriate, I'm very uncomfortable, go away now."

Beyond that, the first thing I do is to get Phoenix safely out of the area and away from the other dog who has probably either realized the error of his ways and run screaming or decided to bring it on. That dog is not my problem. Let the owner deal with him.

Then I focus on getting Phoenix calmed down. He usually settles pretty quickly with quiet words and stroking. I'll give cookies if I have them. Even though I probably have a tug leash or a toy with me, I'd prefer not to use them because that's just amping up his adrenaline level, which is not what I want after an altercation.

Then it's back to business ASAP. I don't want to stay focused on the incident and I want to get his brain back in a happy place where he's thinking about me and what our job is at the time - practicing obedience, getting ready to run agility, continuing our walk, whatever.

Thanks to everyone who left comments yesterday. I think we've become a society where any canine behavior that deviates from obviously (and frequently obnoxiously) "friendly" is immediately labeled "aggressive" and many folks truly do not understand how dogs relate and react to one another.

The journey continues. Hugs to everyone making that journey with a dog who isn't afraid to speak his mind.

Watch your manners - and your dog

2012-01-30T14:02:00.000-08:00

Can I fly around on my broomstick for a couple of minutes? I really debated about writing this post but it's something that needs saying and it applies to every single person who does dog sports, no matter the breed, the venue or your level of experience.

When I started training dogs through the local 4-H program about a hundred years ago, the very first thing the instructor told us on the first night of class was “Watch your dog.” Pretty sound advice for a bunch of teenagers with a bunch of barely socialized farm dogs.

Such a simple lesson.

So why don’t we — as adults — do it?

In the last two weekends, I’ve had three separate incidences of dogs getting in Phoenix’s face. None of these dogs were being aggressive but Phoenix didn’t know that. Each time he was on leash, under control, minding his own business and all of a sudden - WHAM! There’s a dog invading his personal space! One was loose (approached straight on at a dead run), one (on lead) buried its nose under his tail and another dog (also on lead) leaped up to put his paws on Phoenix’s head.

His reaction was predictable and it wasn’t pretty. Instant fangs and snarls. Whirling and snapping. The kind of noise that has everyone around stopping to stare to see who’s getting killed. The kind that has me elevating his head and hauling him away on his back legs and body blocking the damn dog who came out of nowhere because its owner wasn’t paying any attention and is now wondering why the malinois wants to kill it.

Only it never comes to that because A) I AM watching my dog and B) Phoenix doesn’t really want to kill the offending dog, he just wants it to GO AWAY.

Unlike my previous dogs, who all came with varying degrees of doggie diplomacy, Phoenix has zero tolerance for strange dogs who get in his face. I’m not talking about dogs who approach him quietly and calmly when I’ve given him permission to go sniff. He’ll happily wag his tail and make nice for a brief greeting (he doesn’t need to develop lasting relationships). I’m talking about the SURPRISE IN YOUR FACE dog who comes out of nowhere because its owner has no idea what’s happening on the other end of the leash. I have a reactive dog and I know he’s not the only one. There were a number of dust-ups at a very crowded trial site this weekend and I know one handler got bitten.

In all three of our instances over the last two weekends, Phoenix was engaged and working with me when it happened. In two of them, we were waiting in line for an agility run, practicing attention and tricks. By their very nature, agility trials are crowded and congested. Basic courtesy dictates keeping your dog's nose to himself.

One lady’s dog was walking at the end of a 6-foot leash at the end of her outstretched arm. All was fine and good until the dog (8 feet away from its owner) decided to sniff Phoenix’s butt. While he was sitting at heel. Watching me. With his back turned to the offending dog. Until a nose rooted under his tail. To say that didn’t go over well would be an understatement. I remember the look of irritation on the woman’s face when I whirled around with my dog and saw her dog at the end of its leash, still trying to sniff Phoenix who was going off like a Roman candle.

The second agility incident happened, again, while we were in line for a run, minding our own business. A fellow stopped to visit some friends crated nearby. Pretty soon his dog wandered over and got in Phoenix’s face. Fireworks ensued.

I’ve quit apologizing for my dog roaring like a demon from hell when he’s taken unawares. Should I apologize because someone else wasn’t paying attention to what his or her dog was doing? Yes, my dog is reactive and yes, I am sorry this happened. But know what? He’s not going to bother your dog if you keep your dog out of his face. It’s that simple.

It scares the crap out of me every time it happens. Then I always feel guilty, like I should have seen the offending dog coming and done something to prevent the snarkiness. (Actually, I spend quite a bit of time watching over my shoulder and have, upon occasion, yelled at people to please keep their dog way. Then I feel guilty for being such a crab. But I’d rather be crabby than break up a dog fight.)

Lots of people believe in a Walt Disney-esque vision of performance events where all dogs love one another and frolic happily together through the day. Of course this is unrealistic. Tension, stress and adrenaline levels can turn a simple sniff into a outright challenge.

Please. Watch your dog. It doesn’t matter how friendly it is. Or that it just wants to say hi. I don’t want anyone to get hurt - my dog, your dog, me or you.

Okay, parking my broomstick now.

Hair - good, bad and ugly

2012-01-26T13:45:00.000-08:00

So I got my hair cut last week.

My stylist took off 4 inches.

This was a mildly traumatic event for me because it represented change and once I got past 40, I discovered I do not embrace change with the same enthusiasm I used to.

But when it came to hair, I really needed a change. I tend to get in hair style ruts and once I find something that works, it’s hard to convince me to change. Nope. Not good with change at all. Don't even get me started on my continuing quest to find the perfect hair color.

It was all Jamie’s fault. Again.

Seriously. The Big Red Dog has had more impact on my hair style (or lack thereof) over the last 12 1/2 years than any vagaries of fashion.

When I got Jamie in the fall of 1999, I had long wavy hair that spent most of its life in a pony tail because I wasn’t really given to messing with it. You say “styling.” I say “messing.”

Jamie was a very cuddly puppy (12 1/2 years later, at 60 pounds, he’s still very cuddly) and I spent a lot of time holding him in my arms. He would snuggle up, put his muzzle under my ear, then with a quick snap and grab, he would yank the scrunchie right out of my pony tail. OUCH! A little of that went a long way.

That was the first inspiration to get my hair cut short. I went short. Shorter. Shortest. I look at our HIT pic from Terv nationals in 2004 and holy buckets, I think my hair was shorter than the Farmer’s!

Then a year ago, when Jamie was so sick and we were still chasing the IBD diagnosis, I was overdue to have my hair trimmed but during that horrible month, it seemed like all I had time for were trips to the emergency vet. Once things settled down and Jamie was on the mend, my very short hair had gone into business for itself. It didn’t look too bad. It looked okay. In fact, I kind of liked it. OMG, I wanted long hair again. What was I thinking?

And so I spent the next 12 months growing out my short layers. Fortunately, I’m one of those people who has relatively fast growing hair. There were a few months that were kind of scary (have you ever seen gravity defiant layers being grown out? I swear they were growing horizontally, NOT a good look) but by January of this year, I had shoulder length hair again.

I liked it. For about a week.

Then it made me crazy. It was everywhere it shouldn’t be. It was in my face. It was in my mouth. I’m used to picking dog hair out of everything - my breakfast, my toothbrush, the refrigerator - and it doesn’t bother me a bit but I drew the line at picking HUMAN hair out of the same things. Ewww. Yuck. Gross.

And so the crisis begin. I needed short hair again.

How short? What style? Go back to the short layers? But I’d had that style for years. Try something new? Oh lord, change. I can’t deal. My co-workers were very helpful, offering suggestions on styles that would be “adorable” and “super cute.”

Hmmm. I’m not really an adorable, super cute kind of gal.

When all was said and done, my stylist cut my now-all-one-length-no-longer-layered hair in a bob. Okay. Fine. Good. Low maintenance. Cute enough for who it’s for.

Then she started with the hair goop. Oops, product. She moussed, gelled, scrunched, spritzed and blow dried on the lowest, slowest speed I’ve ever seen a hair dryer produce. I’m used to blasting my head with my trusty old Conair on high. It could blow a pomeranian off a grooming table. More hair goop. More spray. More scrunching.

In the time it took her to style this new cut, I could have taken the dogs out, fed them, showered, dressed and eaten breakfast.

The result was . . . um . . . amazing. I was impressed. Truly. It looked super. It didn’t move. I could have gotten hit by a tornado and that hair would not have moved a fraction. It was kind of scary on a lot of different levels.

There was no way in hell I was going to be able to replicate that look the next morning. But then, I didn’t plan on spending more than five minutes on it, either.

That was a week ago. I’ve mastered slooooow blow drying to retain natural curl and ventured into minimal application of hair goop and the results are acceptable. I’ll probably stick with this style for awhile. I really don’t want to have to deal with change again.

Odds and ends

2012-01-25T06:48:00.000-08:00

A dear friend shared this with me and it is so totally perfect for dog sports I had to post it. Oh yeah. We are so there, somewhere in that snarled up part but heading the right direction.

In other news, well, there really isn't any other news. I'm looking forward to our first agility trial of the year this weekend. Of course Phoenix doesn't know it's the first trial of the year but from the human standpoint, there is a sort of ceremonial element to it. We haven't trialed in nearly two months so I anticipate a few yee-haw moments on course.

You'd think by now I would have changed my header pic to something reflecting the appropriate season but A) this had been a really weird, warm, dry winter and believe me, there's no photogenic snow around here, just half melted, re-frozen dirty snow and muck and razor sharp ice, and B) I really, really, really like the pic I took last autumn. It's all warm and sunny and happy. So it will probably stay until spring.

Phoenix has reverted to a couple of bored-dog-in-the-house behaviors - mostly, stealing ink pens and crunching them up. I don't know where he's getting them but I've taken 3 away from him in the last week. He was chomping on one a few nights ago, I called him, he brought it to me, I took it . . . and the ink cartridge broke just as he dropped it in my hand. Timing is everything.

Michael Ellis seminar

2012-01-24T13:01:00.001-08:00

At this point, it's totally in the planning stage - like trying to find a date that works stage.

A friend mentioned back in December that her Schutzhund group is trying to bring Michael to the Iowa area (might not specifically be IN Iowa) for an obedience seminar some time in the summer of 2012.

That's all I know at this point but will be happy to post details when they emerge.

Wow, this is a record-setting short post.

Have a great day!

Stopping writing now.

Really.

Too much of a good thing

2012-01-23T12:20:00.000-08:00

My experiences with Phoenix over the weekend at the conditioning seminar got me to thinking about a lot more than just the technical stuff we learned (and there was a LOT of it!)

Phoenix was essentially 55 pounds of opposition reflex while we were supposed to be practicing the stretching and massaging techniques. Basically, this meant when I applied pressure to move one of his limbs in a certain direction, he applied counter pressure to hold it in place.

Part of it was probably due to his discomfort level. He’s not into casually relaxing on the floor when there are strange dogs doing unpredictable things nearby.

But then I started thinking about all the different ways I use opposition reflex in training. Poor guy - he probably thought he was SUPPOSED to resist. Clearly he didn’t understand the context of what we were doing.

Here are just a few of the ways I use opposition reflex in obedience. In each instance, the goal is for my dog to actively resist being moved and to work (make effort) at staying in the position I’ve asked for.

Sometimes I will do the pushing or pulling. Sometimes a training partner does it. The goal is never to push or shove the dog totally out of position, just get him to respond to gently increasing physical pressure and work to maintain his position.

When introducing opposition reflex exercises or “pressure stays,” reward your dog immediately for the slightest resistance. Go slowly and you’ll be able to feel the instant he resists. That's the light bulb moment. As the dog shows understanding, increase the pressure. It’s not about how hard you can pull, it’s about your dog understanding his job (watch, sit, heel, etc.)

• With dog sitting in heel position and watching, gently try to push his head out of position (push sideways on the head or muzzle)

• With dog sitting in heel position and watching, use several fingers to gently try to push his muzzle down. The idea is the dog will push back against your fingers as he works to maintain his “watch.”

• Stand-stay: with dog standing, push the gently sideways on his shoulders, push backward on his chest, push forward on his rump; from in front, use a leash and apply pressure forward at different angles (when using a leash to apply pressure, always work on a buckle collar and keep the leash parallel to the floor)

• Sit-stay: again, push dog sideways, forward and backward ; try lifting the front legs. For dogs who know how to shake, try moving their legs by putting pressure on the backs of their elbows, not their paws, which they may interpret as a “shake” cue

• Heeling: attach a long-line to the dog’s collar and have a training partner try to gently pull the dog out of heel position while you are in motion. Praise and reward effort by the dog to stay in position, even if it's not perfect. It’s a laugh out loud moment when you see your dog glance at your training partner as if to say, “Would you STOP that, I’m heeling here!”

There are probably other examples, too, but these were the first that came to mind.

I think some dogs are naturally wired for strong opposition reflex while others will respond to the slightest pressure by moving immediately away from it. Phoenix is clearly of the former mindset while my shelties and Jamie fell into the latter category.

There aren't any corrections. If your dog moves when you push on him, just set him up again and reduce the amount of pressure you’re using so he can realistically be successful.

The year of the seminar

2012-01-22T06:04:00.000-08:00

First things first - I was supposed to be helping with a ring-rental fun match at my club this morning but obviously I am not. A light glaze of ice on everything and freezing mist in the air when I went out with the dogs at 6 a.m. convinced me that trying to skate to Iowa City was not a good idea.

Okay, seminars.

I am not a seminar junkie but you couldn't guess it by looking at my calendar this year. A conditioning seminar and two obedience seminars (Bridget Carlson and Denise Fenzi) are on my list, with the outside chance of a Michael Ellis seminar, pending timing and finances.

Yesterday Phoenix and I spent the day at a canine conditioning and fitness seminar in Muscatine. It was interesting in both material and the way Phoenix reacted to it. I know I need to get a better plan for pre- and post-run routines at trials since what I've been doing is probably the bare minimum in terms of preparing my dog to run safely.

First, the material was great. The presenter (Dr. Laurie McCauley, from TOPS, Grays Lake, Ill.) covered in-depth techniques for warm ups, cool downs and massage for canine athletes, all aimed at preventing injuries. Lecture was mixed with hands-on practice on our own dogs.

This is where things got interesting.

Phoenix did not want to be stretched. He did not want to be massaged. He was clearly out of his comfort zone being asked to lie down (be vulnerable) in close proximity to a bunch of dogs he didn't know. He was so tense it was difficult to do many of the manuevers. Gradually he relaxed but I don't think he really enjoyed it, probably because of the environment (which he perceived as stressful) and I was doing a lot of fumbling and odd things to his back, legs and feet (which he perceived as unnecessary - remember, he is the dog who sees things in black and white: good, fun, right, normal, okay vs. weird, odd, wrong, bad).

He wanted to work.

During the stationary work (stretching, massage), he was . . . um . . . contrary. I asked him to roll left, he rolled right. I asked him to stand up, he laid down. I asked him to face away from me, he stuck his head between my knees. Well, you get the picture. By about 2 p.m., he was thoroughly fed up with being fussed over.

But at breaks or when we did more active work, he lit up. Ears came up, tail came up, eyes were bright and engaged. Going out on the floor to do heelwork or retrieves, he was in his element. THAT was what he wanted to do. YES! That's what I want to take in the obedience ring soon! Sure, I would like him to be more relaxed and compliant when I stretch him out or massage him (we've done a small amount of this but clearly not to the degree we experienced yesterday) but I was happy to see that he clearly thought his job was working, not the touchy-feely stuff.

Toward the end of the day we were able to do more physically active exercises like cavalettis and ladders and he enjoyed those very much, especially working with exercise balls, which was a new concept for him. Plus we learned several tricks and exercises that very much resemble things we already do in obedience training. I think Phoenix breathed a sigh of relief - finally, something he understood!

Due to a weather delay the seminar didn't start until 10 a.m. and it ran until 7 p.m., which was a pretty long day. By the end of it, I was pretty sure I needed to quit my job so I would have time to do all the stretching, massaging and strength and endurance conditioning - let alone training - Dr. McCauley suggested for keeping my dog competing safely. I hope the Farmer will understand.

Sniff, sniff, sniff

2012-01-19T12:59:00.000-08:00

Here's Jamie at a tracking workshop back in his glory days.

Today's post is kind of silly but I haven’t written about Jamie in a while.

Jamie has an incredible nose.

It’s really a shame I didn’t work harder to get his TDX because he loves to use his nose.

At 12 1/2, he can’t hear diddly squat any more and doesn’t see as well as he used to but let me tell ya, he doesn’t miss any sniffers.

His best talent is alerting on new scents. He orients on anything that is different from the day-to-day norm at our house and there’s no stopping him until he’s got the new scent inspected and categorized.

He is REALLY good at sniffing out different stuff on me. This occasionally leads to awkward situations but I have learned through the years that he is just very good at detecting anything that doesn’t fall within the parameters of how he thinks I should “normally” smell.

Oddly, very few of the scents he obsesses about are food oriented (although he’s a champion at finding treats in pockets).

Any new lip balm or toothpaste is guaranteed to get a reaction. Wearing new clothing for the first time draws him like a magnet, even if it’s been laundered. Using new dish soap? He’ll practically stick his head in the sink to sniff it. Back in the day when I actually bothered with makeup, switching brands of cosmetics would get me paws on my shoulders while he sniffed my face. I couldn’t get anything past him.

Jamie has always been very interested in my hair after I have it trimmed. Granted, my stylist loves to use every product available and I always get my money’s worth, leaving her shop with a head of hair that has been shampooed, conditioned, de-tangled, mousse’d, gelled and sprayed within an inch of its life.

When I get home after a hair appointment, Jamie is obsessed with sniffing my head. If I don’t just stop and let him do it, he will stalk me around the house until I happen to lean down to open a drawer or pick something up and then he buries his nose in my hair to sniff. This usually ends with an explosive sneeze.

About 10 years ago, I had a bunch and I mean a BUNCH of dental work done. It didn’t go well. My jaw ached. Ibuprofen barely dulled the pain. I couldn’t eat. Jamie would not leave that side of my face alone. He was constantly trying to sniff my mouth and kept licking my cheek. I went back to the dentist and found out things were not healing properly.

After that, I started paying more attention to him if he sniffed a particular body part. So far, so good. He’s OCD about ears, too — my ears, Phoenix’s ears, your ears. Just sayin’. Look out if he gets near you.

When I came home from the hospital after my heart scare in 2009, Jamie kept sniffing and poking at my midsection. I finally figured out he was sniffing the leftover adhesive from all the places the EKG patches had been stuck. He was also very interested in the spots on my arms and hands where they’d put IVs. If he were a human, I think he might have been a doctor. Or a medical examiner.

He’s the only dog I’ve ever had who seems to care about stuff like this. The Shelties weren’t very sniffy. Phoenix sniffs me but not with the same determination. He’s more of a casual sniffer (“Oh, yeah, it’s you”) and he's all about finding treats in pockets.

When I throw a ball for both dogs outside and it lands in a difficult place, I can see Jamie drop his nose and work to locate it by scent, while Phoenix runs amuck and can’t find it half the time even if he runs over the top of it.

Love my Big Red Dog.

Where are we going in 2012?

2012-01-17T12:37:00.000-08:00

A friend and I were visiting while carpooling to a match last weekend and we both noted that our desire to make long road trips, usually by ourselves, weekend after weekend in pursuit of shows was dwindling. We looked back at the amount of traveling we’d each done while campaigning previous dogs to high achievements over the years (OTCh. for me, NATCH for her) and wondered out loud if we had it in us to continue the demanding pursuit of earning similar titles with our current and future dogs.

Before we start sounding like candidates for rocking chairs, I might add neither of us have plans to move to the retirement home and start knitting tea cozies any time soon. We’re just both at a place where it might be time to re-evalute how we want to invest the large amounts of time and money we devote to our love of dog training and dog sports.

I got Connor’s OTCh. 13 years ago and Jamie’s OTCh. 7 years ago. To be perfectly honest, while I’d love to write those letters in front of Phoenix’s name, I don’t know if I want it badly enough to repeat the damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead campaigns that yielded Connor and Jamie’s championships.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot while goal setting for this year. What do I really want to achieve in 2012? I don’t want to make it sound like I’ve abandoned OTCh. dreams for Phoenix and myself, I’m just trying to decide what’s best for both of us in terms of having fun and being affordable. More emphasis on fun than affordable. If we’re truly having fun, I’ll find a way to make it affordable.

Obedience training has evolved tremendously in the last decade. When I showed Connor, Open B and Utility B class wins typically went to different dog and handler teams every day. Now it’s not unusual for the same person to win both classes and go HIT/HC every single day of a three-day cluster. It will probably be the same person who won them the previous weekend and the same person who will win them then following weekend. I think each region of the country has one or two trainers who simply dominate the sport. While I’m amazed by the level of precision and consistency they’ve managed to achieve with their dogs, this is not an encouraging scene for folks chasing wins for an OTCh. Yes, there are points for second place but you must still have three 1st place wins.

And so the game begins. You try to figure out where Exhibitor A is going to show on any given weekend because you don’t want to be fodder for her endless ring supremacy. You find yourself going to trials not because they’re at a local site or have your favorite judges or that’s where all your friends are going — you go somewhere else in another state to try to escape the exhibitor with the 199 average who rarely, if ever, fails. And for me, that’s where pursuit of the OTCh. starts to erode the simple enjoyment of obedience trials. Showing stops being a let’s-have-fun hobby and starts resembling a military strategy.

Again, I don’t want to sound like I’m going all sour grapes on the OTCh. but quite honestly, I’ve been there, done that. It was a fine achievement and I was tremendously proud of my dogs, but the title didn’t help me win the lottery, guarantee my health for life or earn me a promotion at work. While the title represents something different to each trainer who achieves it, I’m happy to say my own happiness and sense of self-worth are not tied to achieving those four letters and if I don’t ever earn another one, I won’t be any worse for the wear.

On the other hand, earning an OTCh. brings you incredibly close to your dog. You build a relationship that is light years beyond what it takes to earn three legs and get a title. You learn a lot about yourself, your dog and what the two of you can do together. It’s an adrenaline rush, an incredible high, a beautiful thing. But it comes at a price.

So that brings me back to my goals for this year. I want them to fall into the category of being realistically achievable while still being elusive enough to trigger my own prey drive as a trainer.

Whatever Phoenix and I do, I want to enjoy it. What was fun 13 years ago and 7 years ago, may not be as much fun now and I’m realizing that with both a slight pang of loss and a breath of relief and a quiet determination not to give up but to see how things go and not close any doors too quickly.

I love obedience work. I love to train. I love to see my dog enjoy the training and carry that joy into the ring. Those are my goals for 2012. Everything else is icing.

An indoor winter project

2012-01-15T09:51:00.000-08:00

Today's project has been purging.

I started out to purge a big tote of training equipment but the coat tree got in the way. This sort of thing happens a lot at our house.

If our house had closets like a normal house this wouldn't have been an issue. The coats would have been in a closet, out of sight, out of mind. But our house is not normal. It was built in 1919 and I guess people didn't have as much stuff back then because they sure didn't waste any time building closets. There is exactly one closet on the first floor and it's a weird sort of little after-thought affair tucked under the stairs in our bedroom. There are four bedrooms upstairs and only two closets. And they're not big either, let me tell ya.

So there were about 30 coats hanging on the coat tree because where else are ya gonna put them?

Okay, I exaggerate. I think there were 15 coats. Not counting the ones on hooks by the kitchen door and in the basement. The Farmer and I take our coats very seriously.

Anyway, I was carrying the training equipment tote out to the living room to sort through it and something caught on the coat tree when I walked by and pretty soon, the day was turning into one of those deals where each new project I start leads to something else that has to be done first and before long, I have 10 new projects started and nothing actually finished.

But I did purge the coat tree. It was amazing. I have three rain coats. I was not aware of that. It was like a raincoat archaeological dig. At what point in my life, knowing I already had a perfectly good raincoat, did I decide I need to buy another raincoat? What's worse, at what point, knowing I already had two perfectly good raincoats, did I decide, let's get a THIRD!

Aside from the raincoats, I also have a jacket for pretty much every meteorological condition possible. Several of them are going to Goodwill. Trust me - no one needs that many coats.

I finally did get the training tote purged. It confirmed several things. I have the same problem with collars that I have with raincoats, only 10 times worse. The good thing about purging dog gear is that my club has a garage sale table at our spring obedience trial so it's a good time to get rid of all that stuff that seems to accumulate over the year and make some money in the process. We also have a kick-ass raffle which provides excellent donating potential.

Phoenix "helped" by casually walking by, then grabbing something and running off with it. I think he was dismayed by the amount of gently loved odds-and-ends toys that were being donated to the raffle.

Snow day!

2012-01-12T13:48:00.000-08:00

Well, more of a wind day but who's counting.

We got a little snow and a lot of wind out of this storm, which made the little snow look like a lot of snow in a few places. Coming on the heels of several record-setting 50 degree days it was disagreeable to wake up to drifts and below-zero windchills this morning.

Then the kitchen pipes were frozen so I just gave up and took the day off.

Took half the morning to thaw the d*mned pipes. I'd like to meet the rocket scientist who ran all the kitchen and bathroom plumbing along the foundation in the northwest corner of the basement. Then set windows into the foundation.

We've lived in this house for 20 years and no matter how much insulating, caulking, wrapping and swearing we do, they freeze at least once every winter. I've gotten really good at figuring out where to aim the space heater. And which magic words to say to make the pipes thaw faster. I'm sure it's the magic words that really help.

Phoenix was a bit of a nutter about the snow. He got the butt-tucking, crazy-ass-wild zoomies. Would have been cute if it hadn't been below zero and pitch dark at 5:30 a.m. Jamie couldn't get back in the house fast enough.

The Farmer moved the bred cow herd up into a field closer to the house yesterday. Phoenix looked out the living room window and discovered this at about 8:30 am. and had a good 15 minutes of screaming malinois meltdown. He is a wonderful alert dog but he alerts indiscriminately - the same reaction for strangers on the yard, bunnies hopping in the moonlight and a large number of cows where there were no cows yesterday.

I spent part of the day actually working (the chair at my home computer is seriously NOT an office chair, gimme the ibuprofen), catching up with laundry and making food. Made a yummy pasta salad for a party tomorrow night, a meatloaf for tonight's supper and just put two loaves of English muffin bread in the oven.

Mixed up the bread and the recipe said "Cover and place in warm spot to rise." Yeah. Warm spot. Right. And where would THAT be in this house today?

Went out to try shoveling the sidewalks and patio about an hour ago. First I had to find my winter coat. Don't laugh - we haven't had enough nasty weather this winter to justify wearing a winter coat until today.

Wind hasn't gone down a bit. I re-shoveled the same snow I'd already shoveled in the morning and decided it might just be easier to walk around the drifts and wait for it to go away. Fed the cat (who didn't want to come out of her box), convinced Jamie to stay out long enough to actually do his business and convinced Phoenix to stop acting like a crazy idiot long enough to actually do his business.

Played some obedience games indoors with Phoenix and gave Jamie hugs just because. Phoenix has been flinging his toys at me and every single ball, Kong and Nylabone he has is carefully piled at my feet. Now he's bringing me slippers.

Spring is just around the corner, right?

How I feel about today

2012-01-10T09:04:00.000-08:00

I was cleaning out some files on my computer at work and found this. It pretty much says it all.

The spare is WHERE?

2012-01-08T16:24:00.000-08:00

This morning Phoenix and I trained with Michele, Kate, Paula, Tracy and Rilda at 4RK9s. We had a great session and I was looking forward to grabbing lunch and heading home for a lazy afternoon.

Then I walked out to the parking lot and saw R2 had a flat tire. Not low. Flat. I've seen thicker pieces of paper.

I said a lot of very bad words and called the roadside assistance number from my auto insurance. That didn't start well because I spent about five minutes with an automated voice system before I got to talk to a real live person.

I secretly think there was a real live person listening the whole time anyway, because when the system asked for my policy number I said a lot MORE very bad words. Who in the hell knows what their auto insurance policy number is without rooting through their glove box to find it?

Anyway, a very nice woman apparently got tired of listening to me swear and came on the line. Within 30 minutes, a guy in a tow truck arrived to change my tire and put the spare on. Yeah, I'm a weenie. I don't change my own tires. They put lug nuts on with air wrenches and I'm not brawny enough to get them loosened.

I was sure I had a spare tire. I had no idea where it was. I'd never needed it before.

Which was a good thing.

Because it was tucked neatly away in a little compartment UNDERNEATH ALL THE F***ING DOG CRATES!

Oh yeah. Saw that coming.

Every other vehicle I've ever owned (except my Mustang) has had the spare tire mounted underneath the vehicle.

R2 had to be different.

Sigh.

Thank doG Liz was still there. She helped me haul the crates out and held Phoenix while I signed papers and kept an eye on the the tow truck guy as he did his thing. He was the absolute stereotype of tow truck guys: greasy and surly with a big beer belly. Phoenix did not approve of him. Wow, it took 5 years but he finally met someone he didn't like.

Soon I was on the road, bumping along on the 45 mph max "donut." We went to a local farm store that does tire repair. No way was I driving all the way home on the donut.

Some days I wonder if my speech is impaired or people just don't listen.

Me: I need to have a flat tire repaired and put back on my car.

Tire Service Desk: You need a remount?

Me: Um, yeah, I need a tire re-mounted after it's been repaired.

TSD: Is it on the vehicle now?

Me: Um, no, it's flat, so I had it taken off and put on the spare.

TSD: So the spare is on your vehicle?

Me: Yes.

TSD: And you want it taken off?

Silly me. I assumed that would be part of the process.

Me, grinding teeth: You got it. (Wonder if I need to supervise this operation myself. I wasn't totally convinced they weren't going to put the flat tire back on without repairing it first.)

TSD: Okay, you can pull your vehicle up to the service bay door.

Me: I have my dog with me. I don't want to leave him in the car.

TSD: Oh, no, you can't leave him in the car.

Me: Is it okay if I bring him into the store and wait right here?

TSD: OH NO! NO DOGS IN THE STORE! NO DOGS! (This was followed by a treatise on health department regulations. We were surrounded by tires, motor oil and batteries. I didn't think we were a big risk to the foodstuffs on the other side of the store but didn't point that out.)

Me: So I can't leave him in the car and I can't bring him in the store. What do you suggest I do?

TSD: Um . . . . you could sit outside.

Me (giving the MAJOR hairy eyeball): It's 28 degrees outside and you want me to just sit there for 30 minutes?

TSD: Um . . . I guess you could bring him in. If you sit right here and don't go into the store.

Me: Thank you. I think we can manage that.

Things went well after that. The tire got fixed. Phoenix did not wreak any havoc in the store. I paid my bill and down the road we went.

About three minutes after I'd turned onto 1st Avenue and was accelerating out of town, there was a huge WHOOMP CRASH BANG BOOM from the back. I nearly peed my pants.

A quick check revealed the rocket scientists at the tire department had not put the spare tire back in its compartment. Instead, they'd tossed it atop the crates that I'd folded up in order to get the spare out. Do you know what a spare tire sliding off a metal crate and crashing into the rear liftgate sounds like? It's not reassuring.

When we got home, the Farmer just raised his eyebrows when he saw me drag the spare tire out of the back. It was clearly one of those "I can't wait to hear this story" moments. Poor guy. He has a lot of those.

A winter walk

2012-01-07T14:20:00.000-08:00

This afternoon the dogs and I went for a walk on my favorite nature trail. I've never walked this trail in January - you usually can't even get to the trailhead without a snowmobile. This year is different - we have ZERO snow and temps are way above average. There aren't many years you can go for a walk on Jan. 7 in just a sweatshirt, jeans and a down vest.

Before we left, the Farmer said, "Don't get shot." He's great with the words of wisdom. Before we go camping, he either says, "Don't freeze to death" or "Don't get hit by lightning." Before we go walking in the woods, he always says, "Don't get shot." Deer hunting season ended last month but I guess he figured maybe some folks hadn't heard.

Jamie wore his bright yellow pack and carried water bottles and a soft-sided bowl. Phoenix wore his brand new bright blue pack and carried nothing (it was his inaugural trip with the pack). I wore a red hoodie and a bright blue vest. We were a colorful bunch. We didn't get shot.

It's a public trail and my guys always walk on leads. An amazing number of people think it's okay to let their dogs run loose. They're the ones yelling, "It's okay, he's friendly!" when their big goofy dog comes crashing into my guys. I am usually yelling, "Call your dog NOW, my dogs aren't friendly!" Phoenix makes that perfectly clear. Once the people get their idiot dogs back under control, they usually give ME the hairy eyeball. Whatever.

The trail doesn't get a lot of maintenance. Some parts are a little primitive but it's a great hike. We took the three-mile trail that goes back to the river and had the whole thing to ourselves today.

The forestry department who (sort of) maintains the trail calls it an oak savannah. I'm not sure what that means but apparently there aren't a lot of them left in Iowa. There are Indian burial mounds along the trail. The signage assures visitors they are there but is a little vague about exactly where. That's probably a good idea. The green moss-covered rock in the creek was about the only splash of color this time of year. Everything else is shades of brown.

They have put up some new directional signs. I had to laugh. "You are here." Well, I pretty much had that figured out. There was a tiny little asterisk to indicate where I was.

No ice on the Iowa River, which is very, very low. We frequently see Canada geese and bald eagles around the water but it was pretty quiet today.

It was a great walk in the woods on a sunny winter day. It was probably the best time of the year to hike with the dogs there - when we got back to the car, NO BURRS.

Gadgets

2012-01-06T07:18:00.000-08:00

When it comes to training, I'm not big on using a lot of gadgets. They're handy to an extent but A) it's easy to become so dependent on them you can't function if you forget to take them to your training session and B) you eventually have to wean the dog off them.

But there is an exception to every rule and this is it. Keep in mind this is remedial work. If I'd bothered to teach a nice, tight return on retrieves in the first place, I wouldn't be trying to fix it now. Another lesson learned.

In this video, I'm using a small PVC hurdle to work that nice tight turn after the pick up. Phoenix has to jump the hurdle going out to get his glove AND returning to me with the glove. It prevents those big loopy herding dog turns after he picks up the glove, which in turn should make it easier for him to get a nice front.

I initially shaped the over and back behavior by sending him after pieces of cheese. He likes to jump and it didn't take long for him to figure out if he jumped back over the hurdle to me he got another piece of cheese. If he went around it, no cheese. I didn't give him any command at that point. It's like the retrieve over the high but at that point it was NOT a retrieve - it was a jumping and cheese-eating game.

We'd played this over and back game with a full-sized high jump when he was young so that probably helped him pick up on this version so quickly. You could use full-sized jumps if you wanted to but the little hurdles are handier and can be made out of PVC scraps. There's no magic size, just whatever fits your dog.

I'll keep the hurdles out there for a long time as we work gloves in training. Right now, they're about 2 feet from the glove. As Phoenix shows me he is starting to turn tightly after the pick up, I plan to gradually move the hurdles further and further away from the gloves (closer to me), so their presence isn't such a factor in determining the turn.

Like anything else you re-train, it may take a while for the desired behavior to transfer to the ring. In the meantime, this allows us to practice perfect tight turns every time.

Thanks Michele, for making me a hurdle for each glove! And BIG thanks to Joanne Brettschneider for the initial idea!

Recliner, blanket, dog, TV

2012-01-05T10:18:00.000-08:00

I’m not much of a television watcher because A) I always seem to have a list of more important things that need doing and B) I have a really hard time staying up past 9 p.m. So sad. But true.

Winter finds me watching a lot more TV than I do during the summer and I admit I’ve got a couple of serious series addictions going on. Snuggling down with a blanket, a mug of cocoa, Phoenix (if and when he's tired) and the latest adventures of FBI profilers and homicide detectives is a great way to spend a cold winter’s night.

I watch TV for pure entertainment, so my list isn’t exactly filled with intellectual, highbrow stuff. (We don’t have cable or a satellite dish — what a surprise — so we’re basically limited to the network channels and a few extra digital stations. That's fine. I'm easily entertained.)

One of my favorites is “Criminal Minds.” Okay, this show is dark and violent and disturbing and makes me wonder if any of our neighbors might be serial killers but the good guys always catch the bad guys in the end and I can reassure myself that most people are not psychotic killers who hide bodies in the basement. I want computer skills like Garcia’s and a memory like Reed’s.

“NCIS” is lighter version of “Criminal Minds.” The body count usually isn't as high. Again, the good guys always win. Best part is Agent Ziva David’s frequent twisting of the English language.

My favorite addiction is “Grimm.” Back in the day, I took a college course on fairy tales (yeah, seriously) and let me tell you, the instructor was totally into his subject and wasted no time explaining that the real Grimm Brothers fairy tales were not all about happily ever after. Many of them were morality tales used to threaten small children into good behavior least they get drug off and eaten by monsters.

The teaser for the NBC series says, “Remember the fairy tales your parents used to tell you before bedtime? Well, those weren’t stories, they were warnings.” Apparently, a large number of people weren’t listening because they get drug off and eaten by monsters on a regular basis in this series. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and if you’re looking for intense, psycho-drama-thriller stuff this probably isn’t for you. If you love shows that are off the beaten path, this one gives a new twist on classic tales along with a laugh and occasional spook. Reminds me a bit of the Anita Blake vampire hunter series by Laurel Hamilton, minus the porn (if you read any of her stuff, you know what I mean.) Plus the scenery is enjoyable on a number of different levels.

The Farmer watches it, too. Or more exactly, he watches me watching it and yells “BOO!” when he thinks it’s appropriate. I’m wise to him now so I don’t jump anymore. Or at least not quite as high. It disturbs Phoenix.

Finally, “Three and a Half Men.” The show has changed since Charlie Sheen had his crack-up and left the series but how can I not watch Homestead’s own Ashton Kutcher? More eye candy. It’s still a very goofy and irreverent show and exactly what my deadline-fried brain needs by the time I get home from work on Monday night.

To tell the truth, I’m not good at sitting still for very long, so an hour of TV is about my limit for one night. Once warm weather gets here, I’ll end up taping things or watching on-line (yippee, a new bonus of having high speed internet access!)

Games malinois play

2012-01-04T07:16:00.000-08:00

This is a tough time of the year to train if you don't have your own training building or live nearby a building.

It's dark by 5 p.m. so when I get home at 4:30, it's a mad scramble to let the dogs outside to play and do the eternal poop pick-up. Then it's back indoors for the rest of the evening. Jamie is content to snooze on the couch but Phoenix sees the evening hours as time to take advantage of the humans' end-of-the-day stupor by ricocheting off walls and furniture.

Even though this winter has been bizarrely, weirdly warm and the lone 1/2 inch snowfall we got back in December is long gone, training outdoors is still generally out of the question. Thirty-five degrees may be bizarrely, weirdly above average but it's still COLD. It's hard to concentrate on what I'm doing when my nose is dripping and my fingers are too numb for proper cookie delivery or tug-holding. (Phoenix loves it when I intend to deliver one cookie but end up giving him six because I have no feeling in my fingertips. He thinks we should train outside ALL the time.)

Still, the Upper Midwestern native part of my brain that keeps screaming "It's WARM outside, go outside and do something with Phoenix so he's not climbing the walls later" insists we take advantage of this odd climate change for fear that the other shoe will soon drop and we'll get 12 inches of snow which will put us into hibernation mode until April.

So we've been going outside and playing games in those last few precious moments of sunshine at the end of the day.

Hide and seek is becoming a favorite game and I discovered it by accident.

Phoenix loves to go crittering (sniffing, hunting, trying to find things that do not want to be found). He is truly a vermin dog. Fortunately most of the vermin we have around our place are limited to the small and fairly harmless variety, although raccoons, groundhogs and skunks are not out of the question.

In the past, his vermin OCD has prevented him from even acknowledging I exist, let alone actually coming when he's called more than once so I finally decided to stop managing it and start resolving it.

I put him on a 40-foot tracking line and outside we went. We did a few recalls in "safe" places where success was practically guaranteed.

Then we walked down the lane toward the field west of the house. Now we were in Critter Territory. Phoenix was sure there were critters in the fenceline, critters hiding behind bales of hay, critters living in the trees, critters hiding in the old shed, critters hiding in the new shed, critters everywhere!

Again, we did recalls where I was A) sure he could see and hear me and B) sure he was not so over-threshold on critter hunting that he couldn't respond. Yay - success! And yes, he was getting a treat when he came to me but I think the bigger reward for him was that I released him immediately to go back to doing what he wanted to do - hunt critters.

My own laziness led to a natural progression of this game. When he disappeared out of sight around a big hay bale or around the corner of the building, instead of running to keep him in sight, I stood my ground and called him. Since he was on the line, I had 40-foot of bright blue nylon to watch and if trouble was brewing, I could put a stop to it.

As this went well, I let him "disappear," then I disappeared and called him. He had to actively hunt to find me. Apparently this was great fun.

The next step was letting him trot off to do his thing, then quietly fading from his sight line and hiding. I was surprised how quickly he abandoned his critter hunt and came to find me when he realized I wasn't nearby.

This is HUGE for us! It's reassuring to think maybe my dog is starting to put a higher priority on me and my whereabouts than chipmunk or rabbit. I wish I'd played games like this with him when he was a baby and not waited until he was 5. Oh well, live and learn.

He was tired when we went back in the house.

That lasted for about 15 minutes.

Is it spring yet?

2012: The Plan

2012-01-02T06:37:00.001-08:00

I don't do resolutions. They're too stiff and formal.

Goals are better. Goals are flexible. I can tweak them as needed without feeling like a failure if they don't come out quite the way I intended. Look at 2011! I learned a TON of stuff about Phoenix and myself that never would have happened if we'd earned his UD and sailed right into his UDX without any hitches. As it turned out, the year was one hitch after another but I hope what I learned will bring an even better 2012.

I'm great at setting goals. Reaching them is another thing but at least they're out there and I know what I want to do. With that in mind, here are my goals for the new year.

Phoenix - Obedience: pursue his UDX. I can't wait to get back into the Open/Utility rings and make sure we have our feet under us in terms of team attitude. We can move on from there in terms of technical performance. I'd love to see him start getting some awesome scores but that's not what it's all about for us - happy teamwork will be awesome enough for me. I want to keep our trialing pressure-free and stay focussed on my dog giving me the best effort he can and vice versa.

Phoenix - Agility: get an auto down on the table. We had it. We lost it. We had it again. Sort of. I confess to not asking for it consistently, so of course it deteriorated because Phoenix finds STOPPING at any point on a course very annoying and having to lie down makes stopping twice as bad.

Then the AKC eliminated the table position requirement and I thought what the heck, let's not bother. This worked great, except when it didn't. With no position requirement, Phoenix thought it was totally acceptable to fly onto the table and fly right off to the next obstacle with zero decrease in speed. Also need to continue improving my timing and being a proactive handler vs. a reactive one.

Jamie - He'll be 13 this summer. I want these sunset years to be comfortable and happy. This may mean exploring some pain meds since I'm noticing increased stiffness in his hind end. He never acts like he is in pain but he rarely sits any more and stairs are getting to be more of a challenge. But he still chases Phoenix around and gives him hell on a regular basis.

Me - 15 pounds need to go away. It would help if I would quit eating like every meal is my last one. Seriously. And grazing at work. Ugh. It's a bad habit. Thinking about portion control and cutting way back on fast food meals and snacks (or making better choices) should help. My love/hate relationship with my treadmill continues. Maybe it needs to feel the love a little more.

Gardening - I'd like to plant some shrub roses this year. Also, try new combinations of annuals in planters instead of doing the same old thing again. I'm spending a lot of quality time with garden catalogs in preparation.

Have fun setting your goals for the new year!

2011: The final review

2011-12-31T07:09:00.000-08:00

Better to write for yourself and have no public,

than to write for the public and have no self.

— Cyril Connolly

Back in the day when I was in 4-H, we had to write a report on what we learned each year.

Where to start?!

Clearly, the biggest learning curve of 2011 was Phoenix’s obedience work. Or his attitude. Or my attitude. Or all three to varying degrees. Since many of you agonized through it with me, I’d like to summarize things amidst the blinding dazzle that comes with hindsight.

I’d also like to say everything is happily resolved but until we get into the ring (6 weeks until our first obedience trial since September) I can’t say it with absolute certainty. Although I’m feeling much better about our work together, I’m not so naive as to expect a shower of rainbows and 200s the second we step back into Open and Utility. But I do feel certain our journey through 2012 will be much more enjoyable for both of us.

Looking back, Nix got his UD in the spring. He was not happy in ring. Conversely, I was not happy in ring. I’d never had an unhappy obedience dog before. Horrors! What to do? I blamed ring stress for his crappy attitude. Spent a lot of time trying to dissect ring stress. Concluded it is different for every dog and handler team and can’t be singularly defined – but the basis of ours wasn’t lack of treats in the ring, it was lack of trust and understanding coupled with his feeling that he could never do anything right so why bother. It took me awhile to figure this out.

Summer followed. I tried the “You must do it because I said so” training approach. Showed again in the fall. Didn’t think it was possible to look worse in the ring than we already did. I was wrong.

Got totally fed up with the “You have to make him do it” training theory. Neither dog nor I were enjoying training. In fact, I was coming dangerously close to thinking this might be the end of Phoenix’s obedience career and I’d have a lovely agility dog who happened to have a UD. Did some soul-searching. Thought a lot of “What if . . .”

Talked to my dog. I asked him to forgive me for being an idiot. He gave me that Malinois grin. Oh yeah, he forgave me but it came at a price. I’ve had to let go of a lot of training notions I used to think were carved in stone.

Took a HUGE mental step and explored the concept of letting my dog tell me when he’s ready to engage and work instead of the other way around — always before I’d thought the dog had to work whenever I demanded it. Discovered Phoenix can be incredibly pushy and hysterically funny about demanding to work. Discovered I like this much better than begging my dog to work and/or correcting him for not working. (Yeah, there’s a lot more to this, too – you can’t just sit around in your recliner, waiting for your dog to say LET’S GO!) But it's gone a long way in helping re-invent our obedience attitude. You catch more Malinois with honey than you do with vinegar.

Probably the most important thing I learned this year is to listen to my dog and listen to my heart and do what I feel is right when it comes to training. It’s an over-simplification but we both need to find joy in our work together and there were a lot of negatives (mainly, my demands that he perform everything perfectly every time and make corrections – even what I thought were gentle ones - when he didn’t because God forbid you ever allow your dog to “get away with” anything) that drained that energy and joy right out of it. Phoenix would give me the moon and the stars if he knew how. That doesn’t mean he will perform brilliantly just because he loves me but to me, a successful obedience team is more than just one who can get a high score.

The second most important thing I learned this year is TRAIN THE DOG YOU HAVE. (I’m speaking from a psychological standpoint, but if you want to train your neighbor’s dog, go right ahead.) Look at the dog you have and train in response to what he needs from you. You’re not training your previous OTCh. dog or the dog you think you SHOULD have or the dog you want this dog to become. Train the dog you have NOW.

Sitting here in the twilight of 2011, I cannot thank Phoenix enough for being such a talented, impatient, blunt, forgiving partner.

I’ve always believed our dogs come into our lives for a reason. It’s not an accident that we have the dogs we have, whether we choose them or someone chooses them for us or they wander into our hearts by total accident. They’re ours for a reason.

Wishing you all a very happy new year!

2011 Review: September - December

2011-12-30T06:29:00.000-08:00

September: Went back into the obedience ring with Phoenix after our summer off from trialing. It didn’t go well. Work was methodical and uninspired, no joy. Tried having a friend show him, just to see what the heck would happen. That didn’t go well either (but thanks anyway, Michele, you did a great job handling him!) I decided to quit being the Obedience Nazi and get off Phoenix’s skinny little butt for every tiny error he made. My pursuit of having a “good dog” was destroying the relationship I had with my perfectly wonderfully brilliantly awesome dog.

Iowa State beat Iowa in 3 overtimes in football. (You have to be a true Cyclone fan to appreciate the magnitude of this.) Tore ligaments in my foot while giving a program with Phoenix at the school library. Seriously - am I the only person in the world who can get hurt just by standing up? Camped with overnight lows in the upper 30s. Not such a good idea. The sleeping part was fine. The getting up part, not so much.

October: The Farmer got hit by lightning. More accurately, the Farmer got knocked on his butt when lightning hit a nearby tree. He is apparently no worse for the wear. The dogs and I went for lots of walk and played ball. Did some agility. Played some obedience. Enjoyed a dry, fast, safe harvest and did not ignite any farm implements this year.

November: Phoenix and I went to the local prison for a demo with my obedience club. Went back in the obedience ring (Open) at a local UKC trial and went HIT both days with a pretty happy dog. Feeling good about the direction our training is going - we’re both enjoying it with no pressure to achieve mythical "perfection."

I learned how to make Phoenix barf after he ate Bad Things. Learned I can use the heated seats in R2 to keep pizza warm n the way home.

December: After 15 years with dial-up, we got high speed internet at home. I am developing a serious on-line shopping problem. Add To Cart! Apparently nothing else happened in December, just on-line shopping and cookie baking. Lots of cookie baking. Lots and lots of cookie baking.

Phoenix and Jamie think they see 2012 coming down the trail.
Happy New Year!

2011 Review: May - August

2011-12-29T06:20:00.000-08:00

May: Phoenix finished his UD. The fact that he did it in 4 weekends was great. The fact that he was not overly excited to be in the obedience ring was not. I began a serious exploration of What The Hell Was Going On In My Dog’s Head And Why Is He So Miserable In The Ring. There was a great deal of soul searching and re-evaluation of previously held sacred cows. Phoenix continued to embrace his inner doofus by helping me garden.

Is there a more welcome sight after a long, snowy winter than fresh green hosta leaves unrolling in the spring?

Went to a Renaissance festival and had a great time. Marsha and I agreed if we go again, we'll eat more.

June: Got a lot of help, advice and suggestions about Phoenix’s obedience career from people who A) excel in obedience with dogs who love their work and B) have never trained for or competed in obedience. We trained. We played in the pool. We enjoyed summer. I interviewed a woman who owns a haunted house and she invited me to go on a paranormal investigation. Here, Phoenix is clearly deep in contemplation about the mysteries of obedience and how to get his human to perform to her potential.

July: RAGBRAI rolled through Homestead, vaulting the town’s population from 200 to 20,000 for about 12 hours. I continued to learn, write about and get feedback on training, corrections and making a dog work vs having a dog who chooses to work. I went on my first paranormal investigation. The jury is out on that. Here's the haunted Old Hollis Inn, Marengo.

I put agility classes on hold while Phoenix and I concentrated on our obedience work. In hindsight, I don’t think it mattered what kind of training we did - it was our relationship that needed the most work, not the technical aspects of any training venue. Sometimes we didn't train at all, we just played.

Jamie turned 12 in July.

He attacked bubbles to celebrate.
Seriously. You want fun? Blow bubbles for your dogs.

August: The Farmer field dressed an 1,100 pound steer with his pocket knife in the middle of the night when the creature needed to be put out its misery. Now we have 700 pounds of hamburger in our freezer. Phoenix and I went on lots of walks on hot summer night (Jamie doesn’t "do" hot so he stayed home in the AC).

I continued to explore the shaping/luring/compulsion training conundrum. Got my hair colored for the first time in my life. It turned out red. Like so many things, this was not quite what I had in mind.

Tomorrow: the rest of the year.

Five years ago today . . .

2011-12-28T06:03:00.000-08:00

. . . the Wild litter was born. Here's baby Phoenix (he's the upside down puppy on the far left, labeled RWB - red, white, blue) and his littermates and mom, Promise.

(Photos courtesy of Catherine Shields, Carousel Malinois)

Catherine lost Promise in November at age 12 (she was a '99 model, like Jamie). Promise was a beautiful girl who brought so much happiness to so many people through her puppies.

Phoenix will celebrate his birthday tonight with some ball chasing outdoors if I get home from work when the sun is still up (no small thing this time of year) and indoor games with the crazy ball (thanks Rilda), the dragon (a few squeakers remain to be killed, thanks Mary) and the flying, screaming monkey (thanks Renee).

Happy birthday Phoenix and all the Wild kids: Seeker, Cayenne, Joker, Ryder, Passion and Ida.

Returning soon: the rest of 2011 in review. I'm still trying to remember what happened.

2011 Review: January - April

2011-12-27T12:28:00.000-08:00

Here we go with a look back at the year that was. I decided to break it up into several posts. Other wise it would get too long. And I have no idea what happened after April anyway.

January: After a lengthy and scary battle with chronic diarrhea, not eating and vomiting blood, Jamie was eventually diagnosed with moderate inflammatory bowel disease. He started on mega doses of prednisone and a restricted diet. His coat looked like a patchwork quilt after he’d been shaved for multiple IVs and ultrasound. He tried on my '80s legwarmers for the flash dance Belgian look.

February: It snowed. And snowed. And snowed. The dogs took their long winter’s nap very seriously.

March: Went to training to renew my credentials as a storm spotter with the National Weather Service. Learned that Iowa ranks 4th in the nation in terms of the number of violent (EF4 and 5) tornadoes each year. Apparently I did not take any pictures in March.

April: Phoenix debuted in Utility and got his first UD leg. We went to the American Belgian Malinois nationals in Valparaiso, Ind. Nix finished his Versatility title with a 199 to win the class. Yippee for the Skinny Little Dog!

Coming up next: whatever happened after April, if I can remember any of it.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T05:07:00.000-08:00

We're enjoying a green/brown Christmas for the first time in 5 years. Can't say I miss the 12" of snow we had on the ground at this time last year. In fact, we haven't had much of a winter at all so far. (Did I just type that out loud?) We went out for a Christmas Eve ball chasing session in a light jacket yesterday afternoon and my fingers didn't even get numb from throwing a goobery ball.

The Christmas goose is in the oven (okay, smoked pork chops are defrosting in the fridge) and my mom and aunt will be here soon. The dogs are very excited by this (pork chops and four more hands to pet them).

Merry Christmas, everyone! Hope you all enjoy a beautiful day shared with those you love.

7 squeakers down, 11 to go

2011-12-22T09:12:00.000-08:00

Jamie and Phoenix got a toy with 18 squeakers at a Christmas party grab bag. I admit, I wanted it because it was cardinal and gold, Iowa State Cyclones colors. What was I thinking? It should have come with earplugs.

After one very enthusiastic and squeaky evening, the toy is missing 7 squeakers and 1 leg.

Is this the face of innocence?

I suspect he was responsible for the leg amputation.
A leg dangling out of his mouth was the giveaway.

This is the face of squeaker doom.
Jamie takes de-squeaking very seriously.

Between the 18 squeaker dragon and the malinois nirvana ball, we've had a very active and noisy house the last few days. Thanks Mary and Rilda!

Merry freaking Christmas

2011-12-21T07:10:00.000-08:00

This post could be titled a lot of things.

Like, what a major pain in the a**

Or, Santa, I want a hand gun and some grenades.

Well, you get the picture.

When we switched internet providers, I anticipated some hassles.

I did not anticipate our old provider axing our e-mail accounts without notice.

Yep, the Farmer canceled our old provider yesterday. They didn't take it well.

This morning, guess what, no e-mail. Zero. Zippo. Nada. No notice. No warning. No "Thank you for the last 15 years of allowing us to serve you, please be notified we will close your existing e-mail accounts within 48 hours, 2 weeks, 1 month, etc."

Just gone. With all my messages. All my contacts. Photos. Premium lists. Groups. Class and student info.

Son of a b*tch.

Anyway, I am now the proud owner of a sparkly new gmail account: tervnmal@gmail.com

Which nearly F'd things up when I tried to log into this blog. Because it is keyed into my old e-mail address and told me "Exercise Finished" did not exist.

It's not a good thing to be told you do not exist.

Imagine my joy when I discovered I do still exist.

You can contact me at my gmail address and please be patient while I try to reload everyone's contact info.

I need a drink.

Malinois nirvana

2011-12-18T16:10:00.000-08:00

Phoenix got a present from his Aunt Rilda.

He thinks Rilda picks out the coolest toys.

He also thinks there is a steak hidden somewhere in there.

I'm not going to argue with him.

Ma and Pa enter the 21st century

2011-12-16T06:42:00.000-08:00

“Merry Christmas,” said the Farmer. He handed me a flat, white cardboard box.

I opened it with a blend of curiosity and caution. Over the last 20 years, I have opened similar boxes containing barbecue sets from Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Corn, matching cake and pie servers from Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Corn, kitchen knives from Pioneer Hi-Bred Seed Corn . . . well, you get the picture. For those of you who don't live in farming country, seed corn companies give premiums like hats, coats and kitchenware with the purchase of their seed. There are a lot of farm wives around here with $30,000 pie servers.

This box looked, for all the world, like it was going to contain yet another kitchen accessory stamped with the Pioneer logo. Not that that would be a bad thing. I don’t think I have a Pioneer ice cream scoop yet.

I still don’t.

The box contained a wireless broadband router.

We are FINALLY getting high speed internet access at home!

From our first computer, a second (third?) hand Dell 15 years ago to my current iMac (truly, my precious), we’ve limped along with dial-up internet because that’s all that was available in our neck of the woods. Want to determine how close to civilization you live? Can you get high speed internet? Yes? Then you’re practically living in the ‘burbs. No? Then you’re in hoot owl country.

We live in some sort of Bermuda triangle of internet access. All the local phone companies’ high speed service stops just short of our place. We were inaccessible from the north, south, east and west.

Several times, our phone company had excitedly promised us high speed internet. They’ve re-configured our phone service package and sent out a big box containing all sorts of modems and cables. Then, at the 11th hour, just as I’m starting to install things, they’ve called and said, “Um? About that high speed we promised? Sorry. Can’t do it. Our bad. Please send our stuff back.”

I was getting a complex.

But no more!

Perhaps I’m speaking too soon. At the moment we have NO internet service because I’ve uninstalled the phone line modem and have not yet made contact with the techs at our new provider to install the new router. They were supposed to call last night but because of some fax glitch between the local electronics store in Williamsburg where we got the router and the main office in Michigan, our contract did not get transmitted.

The only phone call I got last night was from my mother, who is dog-sitting for a neighbor’s elderly border collie, who had, for reasons known only to him, eaten an entire fabric toy. My mother was concerned and wanted to know if she should make the dog throw up. I seem to be getting entirely too much first-hand experience with this lately. Happily, a spoon full of salt on the back of the tongue quickly remedied the situation and the toy made a hasty re-appearance.

So now the main office is supposed to call late this afternoon and talk me through the set-up.

This is truly one of the better Christmas gifts the Farmer has come up with over the years, although his motives were not entirely pure. While it will delight his lovely and charming wife to be able to watch videos and upload photos much faster and shop the LLBean and Clean Run sites with ease, it will also allow him to watch online cattle auctions, something that was always out of the question with dial-up.

But we still live in hoot owl country.

Winner!

2011-12-13T07:45:00.000-08:00

In addition to at least five cakes (MACH, PACH, PAX, birthday and one for the "old dogs"), we had a great raffle at the ICDOC agility trials over the weekend. I think we came close to raising $2,000, with all money donated to cancer research. Some of the items included a set of bar jumps, a rainbow panel jump and pink 2 x 2 weaves, plus a couple of gift baskets and other stuff.

This fun fleece blanket made by my friend Marsha was one of the "other stuff." She did a great job on it. People who can sew amaze me. I put all my tickets on it, figuring I wouldn't win because I never win anything at raffles. I would usually be money ahead to just go out and buy whatever it is I'm trying to win. But what the heck, it's good karma to donate to the cause.

But yippee! I won it! (Malinois not included. I "won" him earlier.)

Is this a cute print or what? And it's already dirt-colored. I loves me anything that's dirt-colored - shoes, pants, coats, dogs . . .

I spent the rest of the day carrying the blanket around, clutched to my chest, cackling "My precious . . ." and being suspicious of anyone who looked like they were going to steal it.

Malinois and kids

2011-12-12T10:15:00.000-08:00

Phoenix turns 5 at the end of the month (yeah, where does the time go?) and I have noticed a pattern that has formed over the years. It’s not so much about Phoenix’s behavior but about how kids react to him.

Since the Farmer and I have a bunch of nieces, nephews and neighbor kids, we are routinely subjected to requests to buy fruit, cheese, wrapping paper, candles, nuts, magazine subscriptions, candy, popcorn, evergreen wreaths, cookie dough, pizza and a partridge in a pear tree. This means lots of kids come to the house to deliver the goods this time of year.

Jamie has never dealt well with “strangers” in his house and it hasn’t gotten any better as he’s aged, so when headlights come up the lane, I pop him in the bedroom and shut the door. Phoenix can stay loose because he likes to do the meet and greet thing.

Here’s the pattern: WITHOUT FAIL, teenage girls delivering partridges in pear trees immediately start to coo and fuss over him. They want to pet him. He wants to be petted. They can’t keep their hands off him. He can’t leave them alone. They get so involved in one another I wonder if their moms appreciate how much malinois fur they are going to drag home with them.

But the boys? The boys are something else. They are scared to death of him. Of course, they are too cool to admit it. But they keep their hands in their pockets. They don’t make eye contact. They stand sideways, trying to be small, as they edge toward the door.

I assure them Phoenix is friendly and loves to be petted. They might make one small foray with a hand to pet his head, then stuff their hands back in their pocket. No, really, he’s very friendly. You can pet him, he likes people. The look in their eyes, while not totally abject terror, shows a distinct level of discomfort. No doubt they think he likes people with ketchup and a side of fries.

Most of these are farm boys who are used to handling livestock but are totally put off by one li’l ol’ malinois. And he’s not even clacking his teeth.

Again, I am sure Phoenix has some feline DNA somewhere in his genetic makeup because like a cat, he’ll pick the one person who does not want anything to do with him and fawn on them excessively. (He did this a lot when we went to visit Dad in hospice care, too. He’d find the one person in the room who was NOT a dog person and guess what, malinois in the lap.)

Watching him work over the latest neighbor boy to deliver FFA oranges and grapefruit last week, I was reminded of the scene in one of the Harry Potter books where Professor Dumbledore comes to pick Harry up for another year at Hogwarts and conjures drinks for the Dursleys, who are less than impressed. Of course, they refuse to even touch the drinks, which become more and more insistent and go to great lengths to get the Dursleys to acknowledge them, with the glasses eventually banging the reluctant muggles on top of their heads.

I finally rescued Tanner from Phoenix, who was nudging, poking, leaning and turning himself inside out to get some attention. Poor kid. It couldn't have been fear of dog fur. He has a lab of his own.

Poor Phoenix. He’ll do better with the Girl Scouts when it’s cookie time in March.

Hair

2011-12-08T10:03:00.000-08:00

How hard can it be to get your hair colored and get the color you really want? I am a relative newcomer to the hair-coloring scene. Apparently there is a learning curve.

This is not rocket science but I haven't managed to succeed yet. My goal is, was and continues to be light brown. My stylist listens but I think we have a communication problem. Or my hair is willful and defiant.

The first time I got my hair colored, it was waaaaaay too blonde (light sable sheltie).

Next time, better, although still kind of blonde-y (medium golden retriever red).

Got it colored again yesterday. Asked to go one shade darker. One shade. ONE SHADE. Still aiming for the apparently mythical "light brown."

Now I am a shaded sable. Or dark liver. Oh yeah. It's dark, but probably closer to where it was naturally before I started having it colored, just without the gray.

Next time, I am going to take a freaking dog and march in there and show her exactly what color want.

You might be a dog person if . . .

2011-12-07T10:09:00.000-08:00

I love Jeff Foxworthy so in his tradition of "You might be a redneck" lists, here's "You might be a dog person if . . ."

You have to slam the door in at least one furry face if you have the slightest hope of ever going to the bathroom by yourself.

You’ve ever apologized to your dog for slamming the bathroom door in his face.

You really don’t care if you go to the bathroom by yourself or not.

Your dog knows you’ll rub his butt while you’re sitting on the toilet.

You are absolutely not embarrassed to have your dog see you get out of the shower.

Your dog has watched you throw up.

The windows in your house are covered with dog nose goobers from 3 feet down (or from 6 feet down if you own a malinois or a jack russell)

You’ve ever asked your dog, “What should I wear today?” or “Does this look okay?”

You’ve ever put something back in the closet because you thought your dog didn’t like it.

You can sleep through an F5 tornado or a gas line explosion but wake in an instant if you hear the dreaded pre-barfing noise in the middle of the night.

You’ve ever stepped on a Nylabone, barefoot, in the middle of the night, while rushing to let your dog outside because he’s making the pre-barfing noise.

You spend hours pondering the best diet for your performance dog but eat microwave popcorn for your own supper.

You can pick dog hair out of your food without missing a beat but nearly lose your lunch if you find a human hair in your sandwich.

You’ve fed your dog cereal off your spoon, then absent-mindedly gone back to eating cereal with the same spoon.

You realize you’ve fed your dog off your spoon . . . then shrug and keep eating.

You’ve sat at work, crying, because you just got an e-mail that a friend’s dog died.

You donate to OTCh., MACH, PAX, PACH and memorial funds the way some people donate to charities.

You have explained - repeatedly - to family members that no, you cannot attend the birthday party, anniversary party, graduation party, engagement party, confirmation, family dinner for no good reason, Mother’s Day/Father’s Day get-together, wedding, funeral or audience with the Pope because you’re entered in a four-day, out-of-state trial that weekend.

Your cupboards are always well-stocked with salmon oil, Cosequin, Missing Link, Zuke’s treats, Natural Balance rolls, freeze-dried liver and sweet potato chews but you routinely run out of milk, bread and cereal.

You refuse to drive 20 minutes through a blizzard to get to the office but will drive an hour through a blizzard to get to an agility trial.

You’ve ever gone to the emergency room because of a dog-related (but non-dog-bite) accident.

You’ve ever had to explain suspicious bruises to a medical professional and assured them - repeatedly - that you feel safe in your home.

You’ve ever tried to explain an agility trial to a medical professional while trying to have exercise induced asthma diagnosed.

You’ve had a split lip, black eye, broken nose, rope burn or mild concussion caused by a dog belonging to yourself or a friend.

You’ve asked an auto dealer to take the seats out of a van so you could measure for crate space.

You’ve had days where your only goal was to get home from work while there’s enough daylight left so you can see to pick up dog poop in the yard.

Formal vs. informal

2011-12-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

Okay. Finally, a training column because there’s only so much baking and cleaning and shopping a person can do.

I train alone most of the time. This is good because I can do whatever I want without having to share floor time and space. This is bad because A) I don’t have anyone to trouble shoot and make “What if?” suggestions and B) my dog and I get entirely too used to working in a vacuum.

Which brings me to today’s topic:

With Phoenix more than any of my previous dogs, I’ve struggled to find a balance between formal and informal training. Do too much formal stuff and the dog quickly burns out on the (boring - yawn) repetition. Yet I worry if I’m too informal, my dog won’t be realistically prepared to assemble all the pieces when asked to perform complete exercises in the ring. Really, if your job was to build airplane parts and you were very good at building individual airplane parts, would that mean you could assemble an entire airplane if someone suddenly asked?

As we moved through Open and Utility, most of Phoenix’s training was very informal. I focused on individual skills (for example, a quick drop out of motion) rather than complete exercises (formal drop on recall). I didn’t ask for formal set-ups before each skill and I worked fronts and finishes separately from the rest of the exercise. Heck, I worked fronts and finishes separately from each other.

I would occasionally assemble everything and run Phoenix through an entire exercise by myself because I felt it was unfair to him to ask for only 8-second behaviors in training, then expect a smoothly executed 30-second behavior chain in the ring. (Amazing - get a stopwatch and time some of the individual Open and Utility exercises - they don’t take very long to perform from start to finish.)

Even at fun matches, I never went marching around the ring according to the judge’s commands. I did my own thing. Judges laughed and threw their arms in the air. They knew I usually had my own agenda for the day and were always helpful.

Looking back, that may be one of the biggest mistakes I made with Phoenix. When we went into the ring for real and suddenly all my actions were being dictated by someone else’s orders and timing, the picture changed. Phoenix had rarely seen this picture and while you could say, “If the dog is trained it shouldn’t matter and he ought to perform no matter what” (which is true), it DID matter to this particular dog, which means all the “should’s” and “ought to’s” don’t matter at all.

To Phoenix, the formality of the ring didn’t feel anything like our loosely structured informal training sessions. Although it didn’t throw him completely off track, it was enough to cause some slight concern which caused him to stress down a little further, on top all the other weird issues we were dealing with.

For us, it would have been very helpful to do a little more formal work, at least in the sense of having a friend play judge and call commands for one or two exercises each time we had a group training session. We don’t need a steady diet of this, but it would have given me a chance to get better at balancing my handling with responding to judge’s commands and keeping my own timing and rhythms in line. This was a no brainer with Connor and Jamie but, um, Phoenix is not Connor or Jamie.

By doing some things formally, Phoenix can see that yes, the rules are the same and this is indeed a fine and fun thing. Phoenix is a very literal dog. Things are very black and white to him - they are either normal/good/fun/familiar or they are strange/suspicious/odd/uncomfortable. The difference between my informal training and the formality of the ring was painfully apparent to him. I would like this line to eventually become so blurred it doesn’t matter whether we are training alone or responding to a judge’s call.

While some trainers swear they never do anything formally until they step foot in the ring and others swear that drilling is the only way to make the dog understand, once again Phoenix has taught me the important thing is to train the dog you have. What THAT dog needs is what’s important.

One of my goals for this winter is to make better use of group training time when I can get a friend to call an exercise so Phoenix and I can practice being formal with the same enthusiasm we have practiced being informal.

I need to go bake more cookies now.

This and that

2011-12-05T09:05:00.000-08:00

I haven’t been posting much lately because it seems like I’ve been caught up in the Christmas whirlwind of shopping and baking and house cleaning. I don’t mind the shopping, love the baking and hate the cleaning. But time marches forward and with Christmas two and a half weeks out, I think things are relatively under control. Ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha. Bwaaaa-haaaa-haaa-haaaa. I'd like some rum to go with my Diet Coke, please.

***

Over the weekend, I went to take pictures for the newspaper at Amana’s annual Christmas festival. There was a lady demonstrating carding wool and spinning at the Woolen Mill. She had a big clump of white fur in her hand and was making it look pretty easy to spin into thread. I’m pretty sure if I’d tried it, things wouldn’t have gone so well. I was envisioning trying to explain a spinning wheel accident to the ER personnel.

She was spinning fur from a Great Pyrenees. She spins with a lot of dog fur and said dog fur is nine times warmer than lamb’s wool because dog fur is hollow, which gives it better insulating properties. (Kathy S., you probably already knew this!)

That does it - I give up trying to get all the loose dog fur off my clothes this winter. Maybe I won’t be so cold! And maybe I’ll just let the fur drifts pile up in the kitchen corners, too, and tell the Farmer it’s insulation.

***

Had a funny moment this morning. Drove the Farmer’s pickup truck to work today so it could go to the dealer to be serviced. It’s not just a big truck. It’s a Big Truck. It’s a Chevy diesel with one of those super heavy duty engines that come in handy if you want to pull huge rocks or entire mountainsides or possibly small cities down the road. I always feel like a little kid who can barely see over the steering wheel when I drive it but it gives me feel ridiculously powerful to be bigger than pretty much anything else on the road except a semi.

The parking lot of the convenience store where I stop each morning for my coffee/cappuccino mixer is usually a bit of a demo derby with folks coming and going. There’s a great deal of vehicular ducking and dodging as people want to get their morning caffeine hit and get on the road to work or school. Everyone’s in a hurry and people are not always in the mood to take turns.

The beauty of driving The Truck is that everyone gives me the right of way, whether I have it or not. They stop. They wait. Love it. Size matters.

Then I decided to swing by the post office and drop some bills in the outside box on the way to work. I pulled up to the box, rolled down the window, leaned out . . .

. . . and realized I was above the freaking mail slot. I would have to climb halfway out of the window and bend down to stuff the mail in the box. Good grief. I rolled the window up and drove to the office, hoping no one had seen the crazy lady who couldn’t operate the physics of a curb-side mail box.

*****

In case you were wondering, meteorological winter began Dec. 1. This is different from the winter solstice, which happens Dec. 22 and marks the day of the year when us folks in the Northern Hemisphere receive the shortest number of daylight hours. Then the days slowly start growing longer again. Yippee!

Just thought you’d like to know that.

Christmas shopping with the Farmer

2011-12-02T07:09:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I took an afternoon off from work and went Christmas shopping. I power shopped with the grim determination of a woman who knows what she wants and where to get it: Target, Scheel’s (sporting goods), Theisen’s (farm store), PetCo, several restaurants for gift cards, a few specialty stores in Iowa City and, of course, Walmart.

When I got home, exhausted but victorious, with aching feet and bruised MasterCard, I dropped into my recliner and sighed with relief. I wasn’t totally done but I was close.

The Farmer looked at me. “You know what we need to do?” he said. “We need to pick an evening and go Christmas shopping.”

Oblivious.

The man is oblivious. Sweet. Wonderful. Totally oblivious.

While some people view holiday shopping as a religious experience, I tend to see it more as a near death experience and can’t wait to get it done. Shopping trips are carefully orchestrated to happen during weekday hours when most people are at work or school. The last thing I wanted to do was head back into the fray, especially on an evening.

But we went Christmas shopping the next night.

I needn’t have worried. It wasn’t another marathon of long lists and crowded parking lots. It was a typical Farmer Shopping Trip. After being married for 20 years, I should have known better.

First stop: Theisen’s. That’s okay. Never mind I’d been there less than 24 hours before. I can always find something there I need there.

Second stop: supper. No problem finding something I need there, either.

Third stop: Sears for the Farmer, JC Penney, Eddie Bauer and Barnes and Noble for me. By now the Farmer is complaining how all this shopping tires him out. Seriously. I told him we were just getting warmed up. He gave me the Hairy Eyeball.

Fourth stop: his recliner in our living room, after I drove us home.

Who knows, maybe he'll help me bake cookies this weekend.

The early winter crazies

2011-11-29T11:17:00.000-08:00

This is the time of year when I train less and less at home because it’s A) too cold outside B) too dark outside C) the squirrels have taken over the yard and they scare me. I try to go to the club building at least once a week and the rest of the time is spent doodling and working little things like fronts and finishes at home, either in the living room or in an empty upstairs bedroom. The Farmer says the cracks in the dining room ceiling are the result of this doodling. I think he is mistaken but there's no telling him that.

This is also the time of the year the dogs start driving me crazy because they’re spending too much time in the house. Usually in the evenings, after the supper dishes have been washed and I’m ready to settle down in my chair for a long winter’s nap, they get wound up and let ‘er rip. This manifests itself in a variety of ways which include, but are not limited to, climbing the walls (I am so not joking) and emptying the laundry hamper.

I finally decided Phoenix could learn to pick up his toys and put them away. We’d work up to returning purloined laundry to the hamper. I might as well have gone outside and tried to herd squirrels.

Phoenix knows how to mark and retrieve an object. He will deliver to hand. He will hold until asked to release the object. How hard could it be to get him to put his toys away in a small plastic tote?

One of these years I will quit asking questions like that.

Me (pointing at green ball): Get the ball.

Phoenix trots out of the room and returns with a blue ball.

Me: Okay. Whatever.

Phoenix: Throw the ball?

Me: No ball throwing in the house. Put it in the box.

Phoenix: Why?

Me: Because it’s a tidy thing to do. And this way no one trips over them in the middle of the night.

Phoenix: No, why no ball throwing in the house?

Me: Seriously? Our insurance guy still hasn’t gotten over the “a raccoon fell out of the garage rafters and broke the outside rear-view mirror off my van” claim. I am NOT explaining why there is a malinois-sized hole in the picture window.

Phoenix: You’re no fun.

Me (pointing to a Nylabone): Get the bone!

Phoenix trots out of the room and returns with a shoe.

Me: Look! Bone! Get it!

Phoenix drops shoe on my toe.

Me: %$#@! Look! Bone! Get it!

Phoenix brings back a Kong.

Me: Okay. Whatever. Put it in the box.

Phoenix drops the Kong in the box. It bounces off a ball, causing both to go ricocheting out of the box, narrowly missing the glass-front antique secretary.

Me: Bad Word.

Phoenix: You made me do that.

Me (teeth gritted): Look! Bone! Get it!

Phoenix fetches the Nylabone and stabs it into my leg.

Me: Ouch! $#@! Put it in the box.

Phoenix drops it. It misses the box.

Me: Try again.

Phoenix reaches in the box and flings out two balls and another Nylabone before I can stop him.

Me: Ack! No! You put things IN the box, not take them OUT!

Phoenix: You’re no fun.

Me (pointing at a toy): Get it!

Phoenix grabs the toy and gallops off with it. China rattles in the cupboard.

Jamie wanders through, picks up a bone, wanders off, drops the bone and goes back to sleep on the couch.

Phoenix gallops back, exchanges Toy A for Toy B and gallops off again. I have clearly lost control of this lesson.

Farmer (walking through the room on his way to bed, barefoot): You should teach that dog to pick up his toys.

Me: Watch out for the Nyla —

Farmer: OUCH! $#@!

Me: —bone.

Yep, the holidays are here

2011-11-27T14:15:00.000-08:00

I baked the first batch of cut-out sugar cookies today. That pretty much rings the bell to kick off the Christmas season at our house. Baking is my favorite holiday activity.

No. Wait. EATING is my favorite holiday activity. Does that mean I am enabler for myself?

Plus, I spent this long weekend cleaning house and doing a little decorating and today I even wrapped some presents.

Having friends and family gatherings at our house for Christmas is a good excuse for me to actually pay attention to house cleaning for a couple of weeks out of the year. I usually give the house a deep cleaning before Christmas, which I keep telling myself justifies the hit and miss cleaning it gets the rest of the year.

I love having a clean house. I hate making it happen. And I know it won't last, which is very demotivating.

The most time consuming element of house cleaning seems to be putting stuff away. Some days it seems like I spend all my time putting stuff away. Once things are de-cluttered, cleaning goes pretty fast. How can two people have so dang much stuff? And what were they thinking 100 years ago when they built a house with only ONE CLOSET on the first floor!

***

Thanks for asking, the pumpkin pie was great. I'm honestly not that big a fan of pumpkin pie but it is the Farmer's favorite and he gave it rave views. Given that he can be a bit oblivious, I'm not sure he really knew what was going on while I was making it.

***

We are under siege by squirrels. Squirrels are a new arrival at our house. I don't know why we never had them before but they moved in this fall and aside from the fact they are driving Phoenix absolutely insane, they are pretty hysterical.

There were 5 of them ricocheting around the yard this morning, doing all sorts of acrobatics for no apparent reason. Is it possible our squirrels are on crack? Or is that just normal?

I should probably start a pool on how long it takes Phoenix to catch one.

I should probably start another pool on how long it takes Phoenix to start climbing trees.

How to make a pumpkin pie

2011-11-24T18:03:00.000-08:00

I should have titled this post “How to make a pumpkin pie while trying to induce vomiting in a dog who has eaten Bad Things.”

It started the day before Thanksgiving when Phoenix did some un-authorized snacking in the field west of the house. By the time I realized what he was doing, he was happily chomping away at some unidentified substance.

One of Phoenix’s life rules is “Eat fast. If the human catches you eating something you think is Good but they think is Bad, eat faster.” He was eating like there was no tomorrow when I finally put a stop to his fun. I really couldn’t tell exactly WHAT he had been eating but thought it might be the mummified remains of a dead raccoon he had discovered earlier.

Phoenix has the constitution of a goat and didn’t seem any worse for the wear so I put him in his crate and went to work.

I took the afternoon off from work that day and went to train. We were about two blocks from the building when Phoenix threw up in his crate. His crate is directly behind the driver’s seat so this was the equivalent of throwing up on my shoulder. Fortunately, all emissions were contained to his crate but OH DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN THE STENCH WAS INCREDIBLE.

I hit all four power windows and wondered what the odds were that he could projectile vomit right out the window. He didn’t. He kept it neatly in his crate, thus keeping the stink inside the van.

Of course I was in the wrong lane, with no access to a handy parking lot and with heavy late afternoon traffic, a fast lane change was impossible. In the meantime, Phoenix had quit upchucking and was now happily recycling his yummy tossed cookies. The only good thing about this was that the stomach-clenching stink went away.

Two blocks later, I whipped into the building parking lot, parked, jumped out, threw open R2’s back door and yanked open Phoenix’s crate just in time to see him swallow and lick his lips. Every bit of the eye-watering, reeking toxic substance was gone.

No. Wait. There was a little chunk of something peeking out from under his crate pad. I grabbed it. It was small and white and hard and sort of . . . boney? Bone? Raccoon pieces? Well, whatever.

We had a really good training session and headed home. We were a couple of miles from our house when Phoenix vomited again. OH DEAR LORD IN HEAVEN IT WASN’T GETTING ANY BETTER SMELLING. True to form, he had it all cleaned up by the time I pulled into the garage, except, again, a little piece of white stuff . . . semi hard . . . not really bone . . . oh sh*t, it was a piece of corn cob.

Suddenly it was very clear what Phoenix had been eating that morning – manure that fell off of tractor tires coming out of the cattle yard. Manure that contained stuff that came out of cattle that ate silage. Silage is made from chopped up corn, the whole plant – kernel, leaves, stalks, cobs. My dog had a gut full of corn silage, deliciously side-dressed with steer poop.

In all my years with dogs, I’ve never had to deliberately make one vomit. They all seemed to do it just fine on their own, usually when I didn’t want them to. Now that I needed one of them to barf, I had no idea how to make it happen. I had a vague notion of doing something with hydrogen peroxide but wasn’t clear on details.

I called several friends and thankfully, Michele had nothing better to do the night before Thanksgiving than consult her reference book for inducing vomiting in dogs by using hydrogen peroxide. I dosed Phoenix with 1 tablespoon (he took it well, just looked annoyed) and set the kitchen timer for 15 minutes, since this seemed to be the timeframe for expected results.

Did I mention I had to make a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving at my mom’s the next day?

Tentatively, I got out all the pie-making stuff, keeping an eye on Phoenix. No way did I want anything coming out of him in the house.

I was half way through measuring the sugar when Phoenix gave me The Look. You know, THE LOOK.

I abandoned the sugar and sprinted to open doors, then followed him around the yard in the dark with a flashlight.

False alarm. He pooped. Sloppy, goopy poop that amazingly, matched the scent he had barfed in his crate in R2. Big surprise.

Back in the house. Back to the pie. Crap. How much sugar had I measured out? I poured it back in the canister and started over. Martha Stewart would not have approved.

It’s a good thing pumpkin pie only has limited ingredients because I was alternating between measuring with more trips outdoors in response to Malinois eye rolls and posturing.

These yielded more pooping. No barfing. Stuff was coming out of him but not from the end I expected. The 15 minute window for the hydrogen peroxide came and went without the desired results.

I finally got all the pie ingredients assembled. By that point, I wasn’t sure if I’d doubled one ingredient and left another out entirely. By that point, I didn’t care, either. I stuck the pie in the oven, set the timer and looked at Phoenix. He looked distraught. Outside we went again.

We’d been outside, sniffing leaves, walking around, visiting the cat, peeing, having another poop and looking for squirrels in the dark when I suddenly realized CRAP! The pie cooked at a high temp for only 15 minutes, then the oven temp needed to be turned down. Sprinted back to the house. Oh, good, there’s still 3 minutes on the timer. No. Wait. That’s 3 seconds. But that’s fine. Just fine. Turn the oven down. Pie is fine. I am fine. Dog is fine. Well, dog is probably not fine.

What next? Dishes. I can wash the dishes. Thought about dosing Phoenix with another hit of hydrogen peroxide. Thought about calling the emergency clinic. Thought about driving back to Iowa City. Discussed location of dead raccoon near edge of field vs. location of recently killed possum by hoop building with the Farmer. Why couldn't my dog have acted like a CARNIVORE and eaten one of them instead of indigestible cellulose? Thought about keeping hermit crabs as pets.

At that point, Phoenix stood up, stuck out his tongue, roached his back and began vomiting clear down to his toenails. Typical Phoenix. When he decides to do something, he does it. There was no time to get him through 3 doors and outside.

I have no idea what the volume of an average dog’s stomach is but I’d say Phoenix had probably tripled it.

He vomited five times all over the kitchen floor, great big stinking gobs of greenish-blackish-whitish stuff, all swimming in a slimy green liquid.

The good thing was that I could finally see what he was tossing up AND I could keep him from eating it again.

The bad thing was, you guessed it, steer manure mixed with canine stomach acid does not improve with time. The wonderful aroma of cinnamon and cloves wafting from the oven were no match for the huge wadded clumps of corn and corn husks plus an absolutely staggering amount of corn cob pieces.

Now, 24 hours later, the little beast seems fine and totally unconcerned. No more vomiting, his appetite is good and stools are returning to normal. I’ll be watching him closely in the coming days. Anything out of the normal and we’re off to the vet.

Hope you all had a wonderful and uneventful Thanksgiving with dogs who only eat appropriate amounts of appropriate things

The thankfulness list

2011-11-23T07:27:00.001-08:00

It's time to count blessings. Here are just a few of the things I'm thankful for:

Jamie, 12 1/2

Phoenix, 5 next month

the Farmer

20 years with the Farmer

my “dog friends” family

R2

microwave popcorn

living very close to sites that host multiple agility trials a year

training via e-mail with friends

group training with friends

heated seats in R2

mac and cheese

better living through chemistry

Phoenix’s UD this spring and all the lessons that have come with it

good books

good books on CD

road trips with good books on CD

classes to teach

Winnie the Cat, who is always happy in the morning

my treadmill (love/hate relationship)

summer nights, sleeping with the windows open

thunderstorms

snapdragons, geraniums, petunias, impatiens and all the other annual flowers that give max return with minimum input every summer

perennials that look great in spite of heat, drought, insects, hail and rampaging Belgians

going to movies with friends

the ICDOC winter building

Wednesday and/or Thursday "dog nights"

flannel sheets

long underwear

hot showers

Pop Tarts with cake frosting

This list could go on and on. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Count your blessings. There is something to be grateful for every single day.

To shape or not to shape

2011-11-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

When I wrote yesterday about teaching Phoenix to do “scratch” go-outs by shaping the behavior, I thought, wow, that was so easy, he enjoys doing it and it appears to transfer well to new environments. So why didn’t I shape ALL his obedience behaviors?

Well, there are a couple of reasons.

The primary one being I am not patient enough.

The way I understand it, training by shaping largely means waiting for the dog to offer a behavior that is vaguely related to what you want, then you can reward that behavior and progress until the dog eventually gives you what you want. That is probably an over-simplified explanation but you get the idea.

I always want the maximum return on my training time, so even with the behaviors I have successfully shaped with Phoenix, I did everything I could to set him up to succeed. I don’t know if this is “real” shaping or not, because I was controlling a lot of the variables and limiting some of the things he could offer. He has a repertoire of silly tricks, fun go-outs and killer weave poles, all the result of shaping.

But I think the real reason I don’t shape everything (and once again, it’s connected to patience), is that there are some behaviors that I want performed in a specific way and I prefer to cut to the chase, so to speak, in order to ensure the dog learns them the correct way right from the start with as few forays into gray zones of confusion as possible.

For me, this usually means initially luring to make the behavior happen, combined with hands-on positioning to get what I want. I’m not saying you can't get a tight tuck sit or a sphinx down by purely shaping it. I’m saying I choose not to shape those behaviors because I feel there is another way I can help the dog learn what I want quickly and clearly without allowing him to experiment with a lot of different variables. Teaching positions (sit, down, stand) and how to get from one position to another with speed and precision is a critical element in foundation training and quite frankly, I’m not willing to take chances with any variations on theme. (Maybe if I were more adept with shaping this would be different. Just sayin.’)

As soon as my dog shows me he understands what to do (example: tuck his butt forward on the sit, not rock back or roll on a hip) the luring and/or positioning will fade quickly. I don’t want them to become a crutch that we are never able to move beyond.

On the other hand, there are some skills that fairly scream to be shaped, but again it depends on the handler’s overall approach to training and what she is willing to embrace: shaping vs luring vs compulsion/force. Retrieves are prime for shaping and so is heeling. The more I learn about it, the more I want to try with the next dog.

Like any other training method, shaping is only as effective as the trainer who employs it. I’ve seen too many people attempting to “clicker train” dogs who are wandering away from them, sniffing, bored, distracted and clueless while the trainer becomes frustrated and disillusioned. I want to tell them another method might be more appropriate and yield better results in a manner both dog and handler would enjoy more. It's not about latching on to what's popular on today's training scene, it's about what finding what works for you and your dog.

If you have lousy timing or ask for too much, too fast or never move beyond rewarding the initial behavior, shaping will not yield brilliant success. Of course, you can screw up other training methods by doing the same things so it’s six of one and half-dozen of the other. Shaping, clickers and cookies are not miracle answers - they require an element of patience and clear vision on the human end of the process, as well as a dog who is capable of having an original thought and is allowed to think without being led around by a cookie.

I’ve done enough shaping with Phoenix that he’s pretty good at trying different behaviors to see what gets rewarded. It’s fun to teach him new stuff that way because he has to think and figure it out himself, not just sit in a lump and wait for a cookie to appear so he can follow it. I DO like having a "thinking" dog but there are still certain aspects of life and training where mental free-styling is not needed and I need him to understand that I will make some decisions for him about how things are done. My overall goal is a balance that keeps my dog happy to work and eager to learn.

So the bottom line on why I haven’t shaped ALL his obedience skills is that there are a lot of different ways to teach things and I think some are better suited to certain methods than others. It’s good to have a lot of tools in my toolbox and it’s good to learn how to use new tools.

Silly dog

2011-11-21T15:35:00.000-08:00

I'll probably never be a trainer who uses pure shaping for everything but I have used it with great success on some things. Teaching Phoenix to scratch the center stanchion on go-outs is one of them. I've used about every method there is to teach go-outs and each has found great success with different dogs: the shelties loved squeeze cheese on the gate, Jamie loved retrieving his dowels and Phoenix loves to scratch.

Admittedly, this was not how I originally taught his go-outs. He started with food on the gate and that was all fine and good but I saw the "destination behavior" technique at a Laura Romaik seminar this summer and was enchanted. (Seriously. Some women are enchanted by jewelry and shoes. I'm enchanted by training methods.) So I switched. I'm all about making the work as fun as I possibly can for my dog and for whatever reason, Phoenix loves to touch things - nose touch, paw touch, you name it. So I put that to work for us.

Phoenix had been doing "scratch" go-outs with increasing enthusiasm and accuracy throughout the fall. I was eager to test them at the match we went to in Des Moines over the weekend, since he had never done go-outs there.

But they didn't have the back of the Utility ring gated. There was no center stanchion to scratch. Okay. Well then. What to do?

Before our run, I set him up a few feet from a blank wall and asked him to scratch. Apparently that behavior transferred easily from stanchions to walls because was happily scratching the wall in no time. Yes! And treat!

When we did go-outs in the ring, I marked him to his (nonexistent) go-out spot and sent him with the command "Go scratch!" This presumes he will go out and scratch the gate unless I tell him otherwise to sit, in which case he's expected to stop and sit, not keep going to scratch the gate. The turn and sit has been heavily rewarded, too, so it's pretty much a win/win situation for him.

Phoenix ran across the ring. He stopped dead center, he turned sideways, he looked at me . . .

. . . and he pawed the air right where the center stanchion would have been. If it had been there, he would have smacked it good.

What a wonderful brilliant clever talented awesome Skinny Little Dog.

I ran out and he got a cookie and then we practiced scratching the actual wall, which he was happy to do on the next go out.

I wish everything was that easy.

The last autumn hurrah

2011-11-18T12:25:00.000-08:00

I’ve been on the road for some sort of dog-related activity (trials, matches, lessons, group training, road trip to visit mom - yes, in my family that’s a dog-related activity) for the last 15 Saturdays in a row, going back to the first weekend in August.

I’m not sure what compelled me to get out my planner and count backwards to discover that. I guess when the opportunity arose for me to have a Saturday AT HOME I was befuddled. How did this happen? Stay home? On a Saturday? That ain’t right.

Not to worry. Phoenix and I are going to a match in Des Moines tomorrow, keeping our string of dog-activity-related Saturdays in tact a while longer.

When a friend e-mailed the match info, I admit to thinking, “Thanks but no thanks. We’re done showing for awhile. Let’s sit this one out.”

Then I looked at the calendar. It is November. The weather Saturday is forecast to be dry, clear and relatively warm. How long do ya think that’s gonna last?

I couldn’t NOT go. Yeah, it’s another three-plus hours on the road but it’s probably the last time for the next four moths that I’ll be able to jump into R2 with the dogs and hit the highway without the threat of snow, ice, freezing rain, windchills, blizzard warnings and pursuit by the Abominable Snowman.

If I made plans to go to a match in January, then we got 10 inches of snow and howling winds, I know I’d be beating myself over the head, thinking, “Why didn’t you go to that match back in November when it was warm and sunny, you freaking idiot? Your dog will NEVER get better if you just sit at home on your lazy butt.”

Yeah, my conscience gets downright nasty at times. She’s great with the guilt trip.

If I want to realize the goals I’ve set for Phoenix in 2012, we need to take advantage of every training opportunity that comes our way in the months before we head back into the ring.

Which is why I’m getting up at 5:15 on a Saturday morning and playing dodge-the-deer all the way to Des Moines — so I can work my dog in a new site, reinforce the good stuff, take note of the not-so-good-stuff and adjust my plan for what we need to work on this winter.

Time flies. Pretty soon, so will the snow. Training nights at the club building and weekend group sessions with friends will be dependent on weather and there will probably be plenty of disappointing “better stay home” nights while the roads turn to skating rinks.

I'll have some "home" weekends before long to bake cookies, clean house, wrap presents and do all kinds of fun Christmas stuff. But tomorrow, it’s one last glorious hurrah for autumn sunshine and warmth on the open road.

Phoenix, 0; Winnie The Cat, 1

2011-11-17T09:39:00.000-08:00

Regular readers of this blog know that Phoenix has an obsessive/compulsive disorder about cats. This started when he was a baby and we had a lot of farm cats. By the time I realized his prey drive was pretty much out of control where cats were involved, he’d already been practicing some bad behaviors. Well, they were just naughty, not lethal. He chased with an almost religious zeal but he didn’t catch and he didn’t kill. Mostly because he could never focus on just one cat and tried pursuing multiple cats at the same time, which meant none of them were ever in any danger.

Over the last few years, our farm cat population has dwindled. There’s always natural attrition when it comes to semi-feral farm cats and I admit to helping it along when “cat flu” swept through the population last year. A number of infected cats made a one-way trip to the vet.

Now we have only one cat, not counting the neighbor’s cats who bop in and out. Winnie The Cat is my antique cat. She is about 15 years old and looks half that age. She is the ONLY farm cat I have ever had spayed and vaccinated who lived longer than six months after I wrote a big check for their care at the vet’s. While I had tried the responsible spay/neuter/vaccinate route with our farm cats a number of years ago, this seemed to be a death sentence for them. Inevitably, they got hit on the road, caught in engines or just disappeared in short order, taking all my carefully planned and paid for health benefits with them.

As Phoenix has gotten older (notice I did not say “grown up”), he has gotten better about behaving himself around Winnie. I worked hard this summer at “cat desensitization.” Winnie is a good cat for this because she does not run. If you are a malinois, stationary cats are not a great deal of fun. The program consisted mostly of “Look at the cat, get a cookie. Sniff the cat, get a cookie. Co-exist peacefully in the same sphere of existence with a cat, get a cookie.”

By this fall, Phoenix could actually be loose in the garage with Winnie and not engage in OCD behavior, which included, but was not limited to: active pursuit, muzzle punching or squishing (squashing her to the ground with a paw.) In fact, he occasionally seemed to go out of his way to avoid her. He spent a lot of time following me around, looking for a cookie. I was delighted. (I was also under no illusion that this behavior was transfer to other cats.) When Winnie was in a mood, she would rub against both dogs and try to wash their faces. Phoenix took a dim view of this and would flee rather than be subjected to cat indignities.

Last weekend, I was putting stuff in the van to go to an agility trial. Phoenix and Jamie were in the garage. Winnie was in the garage. I called Phoenix to put him in his crate. He didn’t come. I looked all around the van. No Phoenix. I looked under the big grain truck that is parked next to my van. No Phoenix.

Then I found him. There is a stack of four old pickup tires from 1982 (because you never know when you might need four bald tires), topped with a sheet of plywood. This is where I put Winnie’s food and water dishes. It keeps them out of the way of errant dogs running through the garage and they’re within easy leaping distance from her cat box atop a nearby old wooden telephone cable spool.

Phoenix was balanced atop the plywood sheet, which was wobbling precariously atop the tires. The whole thing had been engineered for a seven-pound cat, not a 55-pound dog. To make matters worse, Winnie had joined Phoenix and was lovingly rubbing around his legs and belly. She was trying to reach his face to wash it. Phoenix had his head stretched as high as he could, to avoid her, and the look on her face clearly said, “MAKE HER STOP IT!” I suspect he went up there in the first place to get away from her and she followed him.

Poor Phoenix. Paybacks are hell.

Agility video

2011-11-14T12:52:00.000-08:00

Here are Phoenix's QQ runs from the weekend. Thanks, Rilda, for video-ing us! I think this breaks our "If someone tapes us we never Q but if I don't ask anyone to tape, we will Q for sure" superstition.

I'm really, really happy with the Skinny Little Dog. Aside from a very naughty start-line creep-and-scoot on the JWW run, he was sooooo very good. It helps when I make sensible handling choices and actually cue things appropriately.

Okay, there were only two tunnel traps on the Standard run, not 14. It just seemed that way. When you run a dog who has been known to fly off the top of the A-frame to run through a tunnel he saw on the other side of the course, these things become larger than life.

The blind cross at the end of the poles may not have been the best-timed maneuver in the history of agility but my wonderful dog read what I intended and carried through. Okay that's just scary - Phoenix is saving my butt.

I think what I like most about these runs is that they're not the frantic, desperate racing that has been typical of so many of our previous assaults on courses. Is it possible Phoenix and I are actually starting to communicate through an entire run?

Wonderful weekend!

2011-11-13T15:52:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, it doesn't have anything to do with your dog.

This weekend, I got to watch friends reach milestones with their dogs.

Bill and Airee finished their MACH!

Tracy and Syd finished their PAX!

Marsha and Frank finished their PACH, PAX2, MXP5 and MJP5! (I think that's right? Seriously, if you finish more than 1 title per weekend you can't expect your friends to remember!)

Phoenix went 3/6 (holy freakin' cow - we had a 50% weekend!) including a QQ today. Yippee for the Skinny Little Dog!

All the title runs were exciting. It's great to see friends running with their dogs and enjoying those moments of perfect teamwork that so often elude us by one dropped bar or one too-late cue. It's dang hard to sit in the stands, not breathing, until they clear the last jump and the last QQ or final speed points are confirmed.

Congrats to everyone who enjoyed lovely runs with their dogs this weekend — there were a lot of them. There are a lot of tired dogs and happy handlers in eastern Iowa tonight.

I hope to post video of Phoenix's QQ runs soon. I'm especially proud of him for today's Standard run because he didn't take a single one of the tunnel traps and there were at least 14 of them. Seriously. Would I kid you about tunnel traps?

Prison break

2011-11-10T07:20:00.000-08:00

Last night, Phoenix and I went to prison. We go every year with my obedience club and give and obedience and agility demonstration that is a “reward for good behavior” kind of thing for the inmates.

The club member who organizes this annual event calls Phoenix the “Prison Dog” because she used to work in corrections and remembers the mals and German shepherds used by the guards. She says Phoenix secretly aspires to be a prison dog. Not sure how she is privy to this information but I’ve added “Prison Dog” to his list of nicknames.

Here’s part of the e-mail Carol sent to all participants before the demo:

“Hi Folks,

Just a reminder that tomorrow night- Wednesday- is the night Phoenix dreams about all year long . . . We meet at 6:30 in the prison lobby. You will need to sign in and need a photo ID. You will also sign a statement that you are taking responsibility for your dog. Don’t bring in wallets, phones, medications . . . Travel light! There will be a place to leave car keys in the building.

Its ok to bring what you need for your dog . . . treats, props for tricks, etc. Good chance Melinda’s article bag will be searched by someone who has no idea of what should be in an article bag, but would recognize a wire cutter.

We go as a group to the gym. We all hold our breath and sometimes muzzles so we all fit into the interlock. Be aware the floor in the hall can be slick for dog paws. Our program starts at 7:00. We introduce ourselves with first names only. During meet and greet-visit about your dog not about you. . . And there may be some folks who remember you or your dog from previous visits or have done community service with us. We will be out by 8:00.”

As promised, a guard searched my article bag before we went in. He also searched the canvas tote I brought to carry treats, a toy, dumbbell, water and a bowl. TG I’d left my great big gear bag at home. They would have had a field day searching that! After the manual search, both bags were put through an x-ray machine. All the handlers had to pass through a metal detector before entering the facility. This was all new this year. The dogs were neither searched nor scanned.

Giving a prison demo gives a whole new meaning to playing to a captive audience. The evening was fast and intense. We did an obedience demo and then an agility demo. The more the dogs mess up, the better the inmates like it it so there’s no pressure to be perfect. Phoenix tore the chute off the closed tunnel (it hadn’t been attached right) and I had one of those OMG moments of panic while he was rolling around all wrapped up in the chute. He popped out with help from me and Jennifer and thought it was all a grand adventure.

The evening ended with a 20-30 minute meet and greet with the inmates. This always proves that Phoenix is no judge of character because he fawned all over the inmates and got scratched and petted and thumped and was a total suck-up. The guys really enjoy the interaction with the dogs. We were told time after time, "Thanks for coming, thanks for bringing your dogs, thanks for doing this."

I haven’t taken Jamie to the prison demo for 5 years. He always liked the demo part but not the meet and greet part, so when Phoenix came on the scene, he got to go and Jamie stayed home. There is one inmate who always asks about Jamie. It’s both sweet and creepy. I mean, he remembers him by name and always asks how he is. Weird.

When we came out, the guards searched my bags again. They said they wanted to make sure I hadn't left any of those "metal things" behind. I told the guy they were too expensive to "leave behind." Clearly he's never had to pay for a set of new scent articles for a dog Phoenix's size.

Best part of the evening is hearing those door clang shut with us on the RIGHT side!

Agility pics

2011-11-09T10:32:00.000-08:00

I don't order pictures from trial photographers very often any more. I've got a ton of great pics taken by some talented friends and if I ever want anything "special," I know they'll work to get whatever shot I want.

But I went a little crazy ordering pictures from the DMOTC trials back in October. There are shots from some new and different angles and they make me appreciate what athletes our agility dogs are.

Phoenix is by far the most athletic dog I've ever run. Connor had lousy structure. He tried, bless his heart, but it didn't come easily and Jamie was sound but not insane about agility so he did the "pretty dog lope" through most of his career.

Then there's Phoenix . . . who firmly believes in "Go big or go home!"

Launching off the start line.
Note tongue sticking out in uber concentration

This picture says a lot.
Most of it's not good, from a handling standpoint.
Except that he DID clear the jump that's not even in the frame.
Someone needs to set her dog up better for that first jump.

This is just a fun pic.
Love the steering with the tail.

So is this.
Ears clamped back for max streamlinabilty.
(Is that even a word?)

A pretty basic tire pic.
But he's such a handsome fellow.

Phoenix loves to weave.
It baffles me.

I mean seriously.
What part of this looks comfortable?
Or rewarding?
His body is going in about 6 different directions.

And then there's the "wild eye at end of the weaves" look.

These pics brought to you by Nieder Arts Photography and my MasterCard.

Probably not this year's Christmas card pic

2011-11-07T10:40:00.000-08:00

Dude, you been eatin' the cat food again?

Phoenix's excellent weekend

2011-11-06T11:27:00.000-08:00

Remember back in September after the Labor Day trials when things absolutely went to hell in the ring for Phoenix and me and I swore we were going to take a looooong break from obedience and stay home and work on rebuilding our foundation and not show again until spring?

I lied.

I showed Phoenix in Open B at a UKC trial this weekend.

After two months of playing with some new training ideas, I wanted to see if anything was ready to transfer into the ring. Phoenix already has his U-CDX, so there wasn't anything on the line. I just wanted to have a happy dog in the ring. It was an experiment.

Phoenix was great. He trotted through the ring gate and bounced and wagged his tail all the way to the set up point. He was silly between exercises. His work was brisk, efficient and thoughtful. (I say 'thoughtful' because Phoenix will never be a frivolous dog, if you know what I mean.) He only lost half point on heeling and gave me 4 perfect fronts on Saturday, confirming my theory that when he's relaxed and happy, he understands his job and is willing to make the effort to be right.

He won Open B and went High In Trial both days, plus nice bonus rosettes for Highest Scoring Herding Dog both days.

I'd like to say all our problems are fixed and the troubled past is behind us but that would not be realistic. We've still got a lot of work to do on building the "want to" element of some exercises (especially in Utility where his confidence is not as high as with the Open exercises) but the weekend showed me that what I'm doing (letting him be right and helping him be right vs telling him his work is never good enough), is starting to pay off.

This weekend was a tremendous confidence boost for both of us. FINALLY I feel good about my training again. I feel good about going into the ring with my dog. Phoenix had fun in the ring (#1 goal achieved!) and it was beautiful to look down and see him looking back at me with a "What are we doing next?" look on his face, so different from the stress yawning, sniffing and looking away we've struggled with. He was an actively engaged partner, not just going through the motions.

Today his heeling was amazing (40 pts.) but he missed most of his fronts and finishes. This slight decrease in his second day performance tells me the obedience scene is still mentally exhausting for him and that's something to take into consideration as we train. I'm looking for the reason behind his errors so I can address them specifically (lack of engagement, distraction, etc.), not just assume if we train "harder," those problems will disappear.

NOW we're off for about 4 months, until our next obedience trial in February, when we'll jump back into the Open and Utility rings again. I mean it this time.

Good boy, Phoenix!

Friends with cookies: good or evil?

2011-11-04T10:32:00.000-07:00

Obviously any friends with (people) cookies are GOOD! Linda's snickerdoodles. Meg's sugar cookies! Michele's Rice Krispie treats in all their varied forms. Paula's cranberry and white chocolate chip. Vern cookies (not sure exactly what they are, they're just Vern cookies).

But that's not quite what today's post is about.

Yesterday Graydogz asked, “Do you let your friends treat your dog?”

This brings up a whole bunch of interesting ideas and theories.

In a nutshell, yes.

But there are rules.

Sigh. So many rules. So sad. Poor deprived dogs.

Rule #1: Dog cannot self-release and rush to greet Cookie Dispensing Friend when she appears. Dog must remain engaged and on-task until (if/when) I choose to release him specifically to “go say hi.” Simply releasing from an exercise is not permission to take off. If dog is a little too interested in going to say hi vs staying and working with me, I don't let him. Yep, I'm mean that way. But I'll make it worth his while.

Rule #2: If dog is demanding or pushy, Cookie Dispensing Friend has complete authorization to tell him to knock it off or ignore him. Some of my friends are mean that way, too.

Rule #3: Cookie Dispensing Friend is under absolutely no obligation to dispense cookies just because dog presents himself, drooling, in her vicinity. Petting and sweet words are perfectly acceptable substitutes.

Rule #4: Cookie Dispensing Friend is encouraged to ask dog to do something before handing over the cookie. Anything. Front. Touch. Git yer tail. Give air snaps. (This is ridiculously popular with some of my friends for some bizarre reason.) Since friends’ performance criteria may or may not match my own this isn’t exactly making the dog work for his treat but at least it’s not a total freebie just because he wanted it.

Rule #5: Dog is not allowed to start a deep and involved relationship with Cookie Dispensing Friend just because she has treats in her pocket. In other words — this is a casual “hi,” not a long term commitment.

The bottom line — for me — is that a few cookies from friends now and then aren’t going to spoil anything. This is kind of a personal thing, though, because different trainers have different goals for their dogs and while having a social butterfly might be acceptable for one person, it might not be for another. It's one of those "It depends . . ." answers.

I want Phoenix to understand that staying connected with me is his number one priority when we are working, no matter who else is around. I believe he understands this. For example: he adores the Farmer and they do all sorts of wild wrestling and silly play but on the rare occasions the Farmer helps me train, he is essentially invisible as far as Phoenix is concerned. This drives the Farmer crazy. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard, “Your dog won’t listen to me!”

I also think Phoenix understands environmental context: this is how I behave at the training building, at the agility trial, at the school demonstration, at the nursing home, when we visit Grandma, at a holiday party at home, etc. I also believe he looks to me for cues about what is expected if we’re in a “new” environment. If I ever felt his interactions with other people were having a negative effect on our training and performance, then I’d make some changes.

Denise Fenzi shares her thoughts on a very similar topic today at her blog, www.denisefenzi.com.

Ready? Really?

2011-11-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

Something I’ve learned this fall is the importance of making sure Phoenix is ready before we start a training session. Just being physically present isn’t enough. I want him to be in a happy mental place, comfortable and engaged before I ask him to do anything. Frequently this means dealing with distractions BEFORE we start training.

This doesn’t mean waiting until he gets done sniffing mice out of the corners of the building or begging cookies off friends. But if he shows visible concern about nearby dogs or anything in the environment, asking him to work and then “correcting” him for making an error is not going to get happy results.

Doing that lays another layer of worry on top of the already existing dog-worry or environment-worry, which is going to contaminate whatever skill we’re working and make it even more stressful than it may have been to begin with. Experience has taught me that “make him do it no matter what” style training may produce technically correct results but they are likely to come at the expense of the dog’s enthusiasm for the project.

As trainers, we all know distractions are a part of life and a dog’s ability to work through them can determine the level of success we enjoy as a team. Knowing the difference between a fear/worry distraction and a “Squirrel!” distraction is vital to helping your dog close the gap between what he thinks is important and what you think is important. If you’ve trained for longer than five minutes, you know these two things are often miles apart!

While some dogs are instantly at home and have their head in the game no matter what’s going on around them, the reality for many of us is that our dogs need a mental warm up before they can walk onto the training floor or into the ring with perfect confidence and clear mental focus, ready to learn and perform. A great deal has been written about physical warm ups but I think the mental end of the equation gets neglected more often than not.

If your dog is a worrier, has fear issues or doesn’t settle into a building quickly, give him a bit of time to get his act together before begin your training agenda. This doesn’t mean he gets a ticket to run off and do as he pleases. He can do a quiet stay while you get your equipment organized or set up the ring. He can just sit next to you and look around. Reward him for voluntarily checking in, even if it’s just a smile and a happy word. If he’s scared of something new in the building, you can go investigate it together. He can do some simple tricks or toy play. When he seems settled and able to give you voluntary (not forced) attention, THEN begin your training session. Otherwise you’re making things harder than they need to be.

Dealing with what I call the “dingbat dog” is another thing entirely. If Phoenix is getting obsessed about another dog’s toy or wants the squirrel on the fence I’ll:

A) first make sure those distractions are not attainable (let’s NOT self-reward!)
B) make it impossible for him to obsess about the distraction, usually by running with him in the opposite direction until we’re out of the distraction zone, then producing a toy for play or asking for rewardable behaviors (making ME more rewarding that whatever else might be going on, now at a distance).
C) use a “look at that!” exercise from “Control Unleashed,” where I can reward him for acknowledging the distraction and checking back in.

None of these methods rely on traditional jerk and yank “corrections” for inattention and they help him learn that just because he wants something doesn’t mean he can have it (this is an ongoing lesson for a very impulsive dog) and if he plays MY game MY way, he’ll get a reward — even though the reward won’t be a squirrel, it WILL be attainable, unlike the squirrel.

Getting in a good place mentally before training is one more block in building the foundation of a happy, trusting relationship that you can eventually take into the ring.

Not-so-rhetorical questions

2011-11-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

Are you a redneck if you use the heated seats in your van to keep a carry-out pizza warm on the drive home? Cuz it works really well.

Can a dog wear out a Kong? Cuz I just ordered a couple of new ones for the Belgians. Their old collection of Kongs was starting to show some serious wear and tear. Jamie isn’t quite as tough on them as he used to be but Phoenix chews on them even after whatever goodies I’ve stuffed inside are long gone. He chews and chews and chews. I shudder to think about the jaw muscles he’s building, chewing, chewing, chewing. Sometimes I swear he looks at me and smiles and flexes his jaw muscles. Show off.

What exactly is a “varmint dog”? Cuz I think I have one. You hear that term tossed around in places like the local farm store or sale barn, as in “I got me a good varmint dog” or “You’re gonna need a good varmint dog to get rid of them pesky critters.” The reason I ask is Phoenix took off after a groundhog over the weekend. Or as one might say, “He lit out after that pesky varmint.”

We were out walking. He spotted the groundhog. The groundhog spotted him. Hot pursuit followed. Phoenix ran the critter to ground in its den under some big round bales, then proceeded to try digging it out. If his career in obedience and agility doesn’t work out, apparently I could open an excavating business. He did some serious earth-moving in a very short period of time.

Groundhogs are not something to be trifled with, so I’m glad it didn’t come to that. But now I can add another varmint to the list of creatures Phoenix has pursued, caught, eaten and/or alerted to: moles, voles, ground squirrels, tree squirrels, rabbits, birds, cats, raccoons and now groundhogs. Also, he’s had a rifle fired over his head on more than one occasion and took absolutely no notice of it so I’m not sure if that adds to his “varmint dog” street cred or not.

Happy Hallowe'en!

2011-10-31T07:19:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Marsha, for giving me something to post today!

Wow, and we call Phoenix the Skinny Little Dog!

The ancient Celts felt that on All Hallow's Eve, the veil between the worlds (living world and spirit world) was thinner than any other time of the year and spirits of the departed could pass through. Since not all of these spirits were friendly, the tradition of masks and costumes came into play so the spirits couldn't tell who was who. Fire (either bonfires or in carved jack-o-lanterns) was also used to keep evil spirits at bay.

There you go. Hallowe'en explained in a paragraph.

Boo. Have a great day and many happy tricks and treats to all!

Bye-bye, Obedience Nazi

2011-10-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve had lots of ideas to blog lately but never enough time to get it done. Since my morning started with an oatmeal disaster in the microwave, resulting in the need to eat a wonderful donut for breakfast instead, that might be an indicator I probably shouldn’t tackle anything very complicated today.

Phoenix and I went to an obedience show-n-go last night. I felt like our teamwork was comfortable and happy, with mutual enjoyment of the evening both in and out of the ring. He had several meet-and-greets with other dogs without getting snarky, even though a couple of shelties tag-teamed him unexpectedly for a group sniff.

After one run, a friend commented, “He looks really nice and he looks like he’s having fun. What are you doing different?” (She’s seen Phoenix and I in the ring at our ohgodmakeitstop worst so I appreciated her observation.)

Honestly? I quit being the Obedience Nazi and said to heck with getting on his case for every little thing when we train.

I don't see this as letting him "get away" with stuff but instead focusing on elements that are more important than the technical precision of obedience work.

I started obedience training in the era when using treats and toys were unheard of and the predominant theory was A) you trained your dog and B) once you felt he’d had enough “training,” you “corrected” any mistakes because you didn’t want the dog to think he could “get away” with anything. As if the dog would deliberately and maliciously do things wrong just to annoy you and “earn” a collar pop or ear pinch.

Although I’d like to think I’ve evolved light years beyond those methods, enough of the “make him do it right” mindset has lingered that it is hard for me to overlook even the smallest errors in training. I’m constantly mentally critiquing and nit-picking our performances when we train.

While this is beneficial from the standpoint of technical performance improvement, it had the unintended side effect of being toxic to my obedience relationship with Phoenix. (Our agility relationship was fine, I’ve never taken agility seriously enough to get to that level of nit-pickiness. I tend to have a much more relaxed good-enough-for-who-its-for attitude, which Phoenix responded to with enthusiasm and joy.)

No wonder the poor guy was a stress-ball in the obedience ring. He’d been told he was wrong so many times, frequently when he wasn’t confident of how to be right in the first place, he just started going through the motions, hoping maybe he would eventually get a cookie or a tug. This created the illusion of a dog who knew what he was doing but wasn’t making enough effort. Things got worse when I tried to correct him for lack of effort.

So I quit being the Obedience Nazi. I stopped looking for things that needed correcting and started looking for WHY the behavior was less than what I wanted in the first place.

Some readers will smile and think, “It’s about time.” Others will recoil in horror, thinking “But you can’t let a dog get away with making mistakes!”

It’s my choice. I tried the drill-and-correct route. The corrections weren’t harsh or abusive. But it was terribly demotivating for BOTH of us. If we didn’t in enjoy training, no way in hell would we enjoy showing.

When I stopped nagging my dog about every little error he made, we both relaxed. If he made an error, instead of a traditional “correction,” I asked him to do it again from the point of the error and helped him be successful. Then I asked for a repeat of that skill or exercise and we had a party when he got it right all by himself. Right now I'm more interested in confidence than precision. It should have been this way all along but, well, live and learn and get over it and move forward.

I started asking Phoenix “Why can’t you (fill in the blank)?” and he started telling me “Because I don’t understand what you want” or “Because I’m worried or distracted” Then I worked to figure out how to help him understand and how to eliminate the worry or deal with the distraction. I suspect some of his answers have also been "Because it's stupid and $#@!-ing boring." He's a very honest fellow.

At the match last night, he bounced on his heeling. He wagged his tail. He gave me eye contact with his ears up (ears are a big deal with him, he talks a lot with his ears). He made some little mistakes and the gal who was doing my run-through and I laughed and shouted, “Half point, who cares!”

Yeah, down the road I’ll care about the half points. But until I re-build our foundation of fun and trust, they don’t matter.

Re-thinking the whole “ring stress” scenario, when I see unhappy, unfocussed dogs in the ring, now I wonder if it has less to do with the no-cookies-in-the-ring factor and more to do with confusion and uncertainty stemming from training issues and/or lack of trust in their trainer. Ring problems are training problems first, even when they try to masquerade as something else. Training problems are a complex tapestry of relationship issues and skill issues that should not hinge on bits of cheese or tennis balls.

Of course, these are the ramblings of a 40-something who apparently can’t even cook a bowl of oatmeal without causing an environmental disaster. Tomorrow, I’m not taking chances. They make Pop Tarts for people like us.

Decisions, decisions

2011-10-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

Our sensible weekend was a great deal of fun. The thermometer on R2 read 28 degrees when we left home Friday morning so I’m really glad we didn’t try to be tough and camp, although the weekend ended up being overall warmer than expected. Staying at the Motel 6 didn’t provide any good stories — although they tell me I was at the QUIET end of the building and missed the dumpster diving and the late night sidewalk cook-out.

The only bad thing about the motel (and I hesitate to call it truly bad), was that they’ve upgraded the rooms and replaced the carpet with laminate flooring. Good from a cleaning standpoint but bad from an old-dog-trying-to-jump-onto-the-bed standpoint. Jamie really had a hard time getting onto the bed as his hind legs went out from under him on the smooth floor. That would be enough for me not to stay there again if he was with me.

The courses were consistently beautiful all weekend long, not a single “OMG did you see THAT?” course among them. Phoenix and I were 2/6 for the weekend, with one Standard Q and one JWW Q. Of course, they were on two different days.

Being the slow learner that I am (i.e., have to make a mistake, learn from it, then go out and make a brand new mistake), I have come to the reluctant but obvious conclusion that I suck at analyzing courses. With Connor and Jamie, this didn’t matter so much because let’s face it, they weren’t fast by anyone’s definition and I had plenty of time to fix things in mid-run before they got totally screwed up.

Phoenix has taken that handling approach, chewed it up, thrown it in the dust and stomped on it. With him, the margin of error is a fraction of a second and if he’s already committed to a wrong course, there’s essentially no turning back. I’m not big on screaming at him for a call-off (although I admit to doing it from time to time) because A) it means I wasn’t doing my job in the first place B) it makes me sound really stupid and C) he probably isn’t going to listen anyway.

But I always seem to realize, while he is sailing over an off-course jump or into an off-course tunnel, that once again, I am at the wrong place at the wrong time saying the wrong thing.

Maybe it’s not that I’m so bad at analyzing courses, it’s just that I’m not always in touch with the reality of finding the best way of handling them for me and Phoenix. I can see how I WANT to run the course (with my perfectly trained and highly skilled dog and my impeccable handling) but that’s not always the same thing as how I SHOULD run the course (with my dog who is extremely athletic but probably only moderately skilled and running with a handler who frequently leaves much to be desired) if I want to have a snowballs chance of Q-ing. Sometimes I think I need someone to smack me upside the head and say "What are you thinking?" BEFORE I commit some kind of handling stupidity during our run.

I walk the course and I hear a dozen different ways to handle any given part. Cross here. Cross there. Blind cross. Don’t cross. Get lateral distance. Stay close. Layer. Don’t layer. It seems like I choose the wrong approach about half the time but it always seems like the absolute right approach at the time I decide to do it. Sometimes I wonder if I’d be better off just doing the opposite of what I think is the “right” way.

I tend to watch people whose dogs have the same running style as Phoenix and follow them when I walk a course (great, I’m turning into a psycho agility stalker). I don’t necessarily want to copy their every move but I am definitely interested in their approach. It’s great if I can watch a number of dogs run before we do but seems like most of the time these days, trials start with big dogs and I end up being one of the first to run in the 24” class. So much for being able to learn from others’ mistakes!

One thing I try to do on every course is have a "looser's challenge" — if we have already NQ'd, I'll try something I would never dream of trying if we were still Q-ing at that point. Amazingly enough, sometimes these work really well and it's good to know, hey, we CAN do that.

I know even the "super" handlers don't make the right decisions about every single course and it's encouraging to see some of the top people in the game make less-than-ideal decisions, too. They just seem to make them a lot less frequently!

We have another agility trial this coming weekend and I'm looking forward to yet another opportunity to practice better course-reading and decision-making skills. Not to mention a projected abundance of goodies - since we were restricted on bringing in "outside" food to last weekend's trial. But first I have to replace all the Halloween candy I snuck out to the van to eat.

A sensible weekend

2011-10-20T08:48:00.001-07:00

The Belgians and I are going to an agility trial this weekend. We are not camping.

We talked about camping. Well, the dogs didn't talk much. My friends and I talked about camping.

We all wanted to camp. We could camp right at the site. It would be inexpensive. It would be fun.

Sort of. Right up to the point where we froze to death or suffered cardiac arrest in the shower house.

Eventually, sensible minds prevailed. This is somewhat of a first for our group. We may be crazy but we're not stupid.

After camping on the autumnal equinox weekend back in September when Mother Nature decided it would be funny if night time lows were about 20 degrees below normal, I think we all realized that while bad decisions make great stories, they also make for very unpleasant overnight conditions and what may have been great fun when you are 25 loses a bit of its appeal when you are 45.

So we're camping at the Motel 6. Probably not as many good stories will come out of this. But you never know. The last time we stayed at this particular Motel 6, there was an incident involving margaritas, an overflowing toilet and having to be transferred to the only room left available - an handicapped room - which ironically was the most difficult room in the entire motel to access.

You just never know what's going to happen next.

Best part of life in the Midwest

2011-10-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

One of our neighbors has cancer. He's been in and out of the hospital a lot this summer and fall. Today, a group of farmers from the township got together to harvest his corn crop. There were about 40 men who donated their equipment, fuel and time. They showed up shortly after dawn with combines, wagons, grain carts and semi tractor-trailers to haul the grain to the elevator. They will get done in one day what might normally take a couple of guys about a month.

This is the best part of living in the Midwest. Yeah, we're generally a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps, independent sort of people who don't expect everyone else to come rushing to help when things are bad. We'll handle it ourselves, thank you.

But sometimes you need help. That's what neighbors are for. It's good to live in a place where people care.

The ice cream theory

2011-10-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

Phoenix and I are rediscovering brief training sessions. I realize “brief” is a relative term. For me, 15 minutes or less is brief. For some trainers, 15 minutes is barely a warm up. For others, 15 minutes would be an eternity.

I have always been used to “long” training sessions and I’m blaming it on my young and impressionable years as a kid enrolled in the 4-H dog project. Our leader told us to train our dogs for 30 minutes every day. I think our leader was desperately hoping this would cause us to work our dogs for 10 minutes every other day. (Believe me, if you've had any experience with 4-H kids and dogs, you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about.) She wasn’t reckoning on my parents, who took her at her word and enforced the 30 minutes of training a day, whether my dog and I needed them or not.

Now, with 4-H years behind me, I realize the length of a session is less important than my dog’s response to what we’re doing.

I want to leave Phoenix wanting more, which means quitting when we’re having a grand time and things are going super good. This is hard because when things are going super good, I want to keep going so we can practice more super good stuff.

Of course, repeating stuff seems to eventually lead to variations on theme as the dog’s performance either disintegrates from boredom or physical tiredness or he starts re-inventing the wheel because he doesn't get WHY we're doing it over and over and over (and for many dogs "Because I told you to" doesn't cut it). Pretty soon, the super good stuff isn’t so great and you can either start making corrections (for problems you’ve created in the first place) or quit in frustration.

It’s kind of like eating a big ice cream cone. The first half tastes really, really good, then you eat the rest of it just to keep it from melting all over your car’s upholstery, not because you really want it. I want our training to always be like the first half of the ice cream cone.

This is why I have gray hair

2011-10-14T07:01:00.000-07:00

Well, actually, I don't have gray hair. I have pleasantly light brownish, sun-streaked sort of hair. But left to its own devices, it would probably be gray. And getting grayer by the minute.

I came home from work earlier this week and the Farmer said, "I got hit by lightning today."

WTF!!!!

Really, this is not the sort of thing one expects to hear when one asks, "And how was your day, honey?"

Then he admitted he hadn't actually got hit by lightning but lightning did hit a tree about 50 feet away from him and the blast was so powerful it knocked him off his feet. He said chunks of bark and limbs went flying. So did he. He thought he'd broken his wrist because he landed on it when he fell but it turned out to just be really bruised. It wasn't even raining at the time, although a thunderstorm cell was starting to push into the area.

Of course I gave him my best "safety first" lecture, the same one they gave us at National Weather Service storm spotter training. Lightning is dangerous! A couple of hundred thousand volts of electricity coming out of the sky is not going to do anyone any favors.

Being a typical man, the Farmer obviously needed a near death experience before listening to anything his wife tells him. I reminded him about the JW Memorial Training Building I am going to build with his life insurance policy if he goes out and does something stupid like actually getting hit by lightning the next time. He gave me the big eye roll.

Here's a scene from a much less stormy day this fall. The Farmer is at the top of the grain bin steps, checking the grain level while unloading soy beans from truck to bin.

Random training thoughts

2011-10-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

Phoenix and I have enjoyed some great training time through September and October. I know this is partly because I don’t plan to enter him in Open/Utility again until spring, so there’s no “gotta fix this by next weekend” pressure. (I really hate that self-inflicted pressure, it often ends up doing more harm than good.) We’re just relaxing and taking time to address a few things that need some patient long term work. We might do Open at a local UKC trial next month just for kicks.

Part of what we’re doing with training is new, part isn’t. A lot of it has to do with rewards: what kind, how often, when to use them and when not to. Food (reward-based) training isn’t evil but I know I’ve used it badly in the past. That’s the big problem with using food - it’s a powerful thing and it’s sooooo easy to fall into really bad habits with it and let it get in the way of developing an honest relationship with your dog.

It’s hard to write clearly about relationship issues because everyone views their relationship with their dogs differently — we all have different dreams and expectations for them in terms of daily life and ring achievement. Yes, I would like Phoenix and I to be competitive in obedience but it’s not my number one priority right now. It’s been amazingly easy to put that on a back burner while we work to re-establish the simple basics of trust and fun that we lost somewhere between his CDX and his UD.

I never thought much about the relationships I had with my dogs until I realized Phoenix and I weren’t clicking like my previous furkids. I’ve screwed up (but not damaged beyond the point of no return) my relationship with him by putting too much pressure on him to perform before he was ready (even though I thought he was) and by letting my disappointment show too much when things didn’t go well, not realizing what a sensitive, emotional little beast he is. Throw in a complete misunderstanding of some of his behaviors and we had the perfect storm of confusion, doubt and mistrust that sent us crashing into an obedience black hole in spite of finishing his UD this spring. We weren’t a complete train wreck but I didn’t have the happy, flowing ring work under any conditions that marked my relationships with Connor and Jamie.

A lot of what we’re doing this fall is addressing some issues that have absolutely nothing to do with working on technical obedience skills. I’m pretty sure that while Phoenix loves his mama and adores her as an agility handler (although she’s not always a very good one), he is reserved and hesitant when it comes to trusting her as an obedience partner. I don’t think he is being dominant or willful or any other kind of “naughty” dog. There’s no “correction” in the world that can fix our problems.

I think one of our biggest issues came from doing too much formal work, which I thought was the yellow brick road to success. Instead of creating a dog who worked with confident focus, all I did was convince Phoenix he could never be right, was always causing me some degree of displeasure and that obedience was a pretty dull job that made Mom unhappy. Great fun, huh?

With that in mind, we’re spending a lot of time flipping between formal (1/4 of the time or less) and informal (3/4 of the time or more) work in our training sessions, which are short, sweet, to the point and do not happen every day. We might do an informal dumbbell retrieve, an informal glove retrieve, play tug with the glove, do a formal drop on recall and then do a formal go-out, releasing to a food reward for scratching the stanchion on command.

Phoenix KNOWS how to do the exercises. He doesn’t need to be beat over the head by endless repetition. He needs to view them as fun, not drudgery, which was where we were getting bogged down. It’s easy to tell someone to “make it fun” but it’s hard for me to break out of a 15-year habit of doing pretty much everything with a calm, serious, formal approach. Granted, this worked just fine with Connor and Jamie — with Phoenix, not so much. I’m really not a lampshade-on-my-head type of person so I feel like I’m reinventing myself to a certain extent.

I’m laughing more, trying a few new approaches and not taking training so seriously. I’m learning to see Phoenix’ stress reactions for what they are — not defiance but discomfort because of a new environment or a strange dog coming too close — and responding in a way that helps him deal with that stress.

Our autumn training time is precious. Daylight is dwindling. In a few weeks the time will change and training outdoors in the evening after work will end until spring. I need to clean out the spare bedroom that serves as our indoor training room at home. We can work fronts and finishes, lots of tricks, small heeling doodles and signals and retrieves down the hallway. The Farmer points out this means there will soon be more cracks in the dining room ceiling.

Fall fun

2011-10-12T07:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday after work, the dogs and I went to the Amana Park. We had a short training session, since there were about a million flies buzzing and biting. We have cattle and manure at home and don't have that many flies! I almost wondered if there was a body stuffed into one of the trees.

I wanted to work signals but the flies were so bad Phoenix was nearly dysfunctional. He would do each signal, then start snapping his teeth. It took me a while to figure out he was snapping at flies. It didn't help that the darn things were biting me, too. Between his snapping and my swatting, it was not conducive to much quality time working signals.

We did some heeling and retrieves and those went much better. I guess flies can't bite you when you're a moving target. I did a lot of racing him out to the dumbbell and glove (guess who won?), then turning and letting him chase me. I wasn't going to stand still and be fly bait!

These pic aren't too great in terms of exposure. This is what you get when you shoot into the sun on a late October afternoon. But the dogs had a great time.

Trick or treat

2011-10-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

A lot has been written about “high value” vs “low value” treats but my experience is that my dogs have eaten leftover bits of ribeye steak, salmon fudge, shaved deli luncheon meat, string cheese, hotdogs, Charlie Bears, bits of toast, cold cereal, peas and their kibble with the same level of enthusiasm — like they are starving creatures who haven’t been fed for weeks. I suspect they might eat drywall and roofing nails with equal levels of delight, although I have no intention of testing that theory.

I don’t totally buy into the theory of “high value” treats, not just because the dogs' enthusiasm level doesn’t seem to change between Cheerios and garlic chicken but because I’m not sure my dogs have ever actually TASTED their treats in the first place.

The first two dogs who shared my adult life were shelties and while I hate breed stereotyping, shelties really do eat anything. And they eat it in a hurry. There is no leisurely savoring of flavors or appreciative sniffing and chewing. It’s just in and gone. Snap, snap. Got more?

I always joked that Jamie was so food driven because he was raised by shelties. He spent a number of years with Jess and Connor and apparently they imprinted upon him the importance of 1) eat everything you can get 2) eat it fast 3) demand more 4) steal it if you have to.

When Phoenix arrived, his breeder told me he was the “slow eater” of his litter. Dear God in Heaven, I was scared to see how the other puppies ate because putting a bowl in front of him triggered some cosmic vacuum that sucked his meal and anything else within a four-foot vicinity into his maw.

In short, I have never had a picky eater. This is a blessing because it’s convenient to grab whatever treats are at hand without worrying about having the “special” treat that is the magic cure to all our training problems. (If only it were that easy!)

That’s not to say I haven’t pulled out the “big guns” from time to time when I hoped to make a statement about a particular skill or exercise. While I suspect this may have been more to make me feel better about it than increase any potential learning by my dogs, I do recognize that leftover prime rib ranks much higher than Cheerios.

The classic stand-bys of string cheese and hot dogs may be viewed as boring by the gourmands among us but I’m not sure my dogs have ever met food they thought was boring. Like any reward, it’s what the dog thinks that counts.

A perfect autumn morning

2011-10-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

This morning I planted tulip bulbs while the dogs chased squirrels. Squirrels are a relatively new presence at our house. I don't know why we never had any before. We just didn't. Now we do. And they drive Phoenix crazy. Crazier. Whatever. Jamie is fairly oblivious although he'll give it the ol' college try now and then.

Fortunately for the squirrels, they have taken up residence in the trees outside of the dog yard. This means Phoenix can run the fence and squeak and bark and spin and ricochet off the house all he likes. No squirrels will be harmed while entertaining the malinois.

Once I got the tulip bulbs in the ground (three different varieties - early spring, mid spring and late spring), we went for a walk at the nature trail.

I played with the idea of getting this year's Christmas card picture taken but it didn't happen. Although if I don't get anything better in the next two months, you may be seeing this one in your mailbox in December.

Do I have the only two dogs who will alert on falling leaves? Granted, there were a LOT of falling leaves on this fine breezy morning but you would have thought pork chops were falling from the sky.

Phoenix was still in squirrel mode.

Or looking for more pork chops.

You never know with him.

Phoenix: Didja see that? SQUIRREL!

Jamie: My brother is a doofus. See my ear flick in annoyance.

Now there's homemade mac and cheese in the oven for lunch and I hope to get some more garden clean-up done this afternoon. We're going to run out of these gorgeous sunny, 80-degree days eventually.

Winter is coming! Winter is coming!

2011-10-07T06:20:00.000-07:00

In spite of the fact we’ve had temps in the mid-80s for the last week, I know this isn’t going to last. In fact, all this heat and sunshine is getting a bit tiresome. How do people in Hawaii deal with it?

The outlooks for the 2011-2012 winter have been released. For people like me, who enjoy obsessing about the weather, this is fabulous stuff. Yes. I’m a geek. I should have studied meteorology, not journalism.

I love the changing seasons and am not sure I could live in a climate where a season change was marked by a temperature swing of 10 degrees and perhaps a passing cloud. Guess I like it a little more extreme. I haven’t lived in the Midwest all my life for nothing.

So here ya go. Accuweather.com, the Farmers Almanac and Snow-Day.org have put their best and brilliantest minds to work at figuring out what this winter is going to be like. Enjoy.

My doofy dog

2011-10-06T06:50:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I was working in the kitchen when I heard a weird noise in the bedroom. I went to check it out and found Phoenix with his hind feet on the bed and his front feet on the nearby window sill, wiggling, wagging, squeaking and staring with rapt attention at something outside the window. This is not unusual behavior. While I frequently think he sees things that are not there, who am I to say what he is looking at?

The window was open (it was a very warm day). The screen had been neatly sliced from top to bottom and was flapping in the breeze.

My theory (with no proof to back it up and Phoenix isn’t telling) is that my darling, sweet, clever baby dog was squirrel hunting from inside the house, got carried away, smacked the screen with a paw in his excitement, snagged a nail in the screen and ended up splitting the darn thing right down the center.

No big deal. The screen needed repaired anyway, from where the Farmer stuck the end of a ladder through it earlier this summer while working behind the house.

Silly boys.

And for all his excitement over the squirrels, it never occurred to Phoenix that he could have jumped out the window. It’s a ground floor bedroom so only a two foot drop to the ground. He could have been off on a lark to have his way with the squirrels or whatever other invisible creature he was hunting.

Some days I am really happy to have him think outside the box. Other days, I’m really glad he doesn’t.

Playing with shaping

2011-10-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

I’ve never done much with shaping when it comes to dog training. Oh, sure, a few things here and there but it’s never been my go-to technique for teaching obedience exercises. In fact, I think the only two things I have ever seriously, intentionally shaped were Phoenix’s weave poles and the “four feet in a box” trick — so I know it does work.

His weave poles are a thing of beauty - consistently fast and accurate. He rarely misses an entry, providing I do my part as a handler. The “four feet in a box,” well, that got me a dog who still tries to put all four feet in anything that faintly resembles a box. He’s nothing if not entertaining.

Earlier this week, I got home late from work one night and wanted to do something with Phoenix but didn’t have the ambition to tackle anything that might require a genuine expenditure of mental or physical energy. So I decided to try shaping him to go lie down on a crate pad.

Within three minutes, Phoenix was racing to the crate pad and plopping down on it. All with nothing but a clicker and treats. I didn’t say anything but “Yes!” and “Good boy!” as I delivered the food.

His progression was to poke the crate pad with his nose, bite it (this is standard operating procedure when presented with any new challenge), paw at it, put his front feet on it, put all four feet on it, sit on it and finally, lie down.

I was amazed at the speed at which he tried and discarded new behaviors to see what got rewarded and what didn’t. It was clear he liked doing this sort of thing and I enjoyed watching him work to solve the “problem” I’d presented him with.

His quick learning could be a reflection of several elements: Phoenix is a brilliant dog (high probability). I am a brilliant trainer (much lower probability). Phoenix already knew how to lie down and knew he might be rewarded for lying down, so he brought that to the table. He also knew how to “go” somewhere, since in the context of daily life and Utility exercises, he understands that going to specific places (crate, outdoor kennel, grooming table, into the van, go-out spot) gets rewarded. And since he’d never seen a crate pad laying on the patio before it was pretty obvious this was a special object and thus the focus of whatever was going on.

Was this truly shaping since he already had the necessary skills to perform this behavior and only needed to assemble them? The credit goes to his flexible little brain, since I was not saying anything or pointing to the crate pad or doing anything to indicate what I wanted except rewarding incremental moves toward the final desired behavior. He put it together on his own.

Will I start using shaping as a training tool for everything now? Probably not. Will I use it more? Possibly. With winter just around the corner (I’m firmly in denial, it’s been in the low 80s with blazing sunshine here all week!), I’ll be looking for mental games to play in the house when it’s too cold and dark to work outside.

How to get a puppy

2011-10-03T12:05:00.000-07:00

I am NOT getting a puppy any time in the foreseeable future but it’s always fun to dream. Several friends have gotten puppies this year and I got to thinking about all the different ways dogs come into our lives.

Even when we don’t have immediate plans to add another fur-kid, it’s fun to play the “next dog” game and explore all the possible combinations of breed, age and gender that intrigue us. I’ve always felt that dogs come into our lives for specific reasons. In other words, we get the dog we are meant to have.

When all is said and done, there are a number of ways to acquire a dog.

1) The Great Plan — doing research, getting references, choosing a breeder, waiting for the desired breeding to take place, waiting for confirmation the breeding took, waiting the litter to be born, waiting for the litter to grow up, waiting to be sure the breeder feels there is a puppy in that litter that is a good match for your criteria. This is how I got Phoenix.

2) The Great Plan Gone Awry — you ricochet from one breeder to the next in an agony of decision making when planned breedings either don’t take or only produce litters of one or two. This is how I got Jamie.

3) The Great Plan On Time Delay — you choose a breeder and/or a line and you wait. And wait. And wait. Two years later, you get a puppy.

3) The “I wasn’t looking for a puppy but now I’ve got one” plan —this happens when getting a puppy is absolutely the last thing on your mind but you see a litter a club meeting or a friend says, “I know of this great litter . . .” and before you know it, you’ve got a puppy. That is how I got Connor.

4) The Sunday night surprise — “Honey, I’m home from the trial weekend and guess what, I got a puppy!” I have friends who have done this. They’re still married. Or whatever.

5) The “Here, foster this dog for awhile” plan. The alleged foster dog moves in and never leaves.

6) The “I found her in a ditch” plan. Seriously.

7) The “Screw good sense, I’m buying a dog from a newspaper classified.” And it seems to be working out.

8) The pet store puppy. Not going there.

9) The rescue/animal shelter dog. I cannot say enough about the truly beautiful relationships I’ve seen develop from difficult beginnings.

10) The “inherited” dog who comes to live with you when a relative/friend/neighbor can no longer care for it and trusts you enough to give you their precious best friend.

Oddly enough (I’d say great minds think alike but that may be pushing it), over at her blog, Denise Fenzi has a very well-written post about what to consider when picking a puppy. I need to print and post it on my fridge because I know, too, that what I WANT in my next dog may not be anywhere close to what I NEED.

IBD

2011-10-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Several folks have asked lately how Jamie is doing since his diagnosis with Inflammatory Bowel Disease back in January. I'm very happy to say he's GREAT!

Some people have also asked "How did you find out it was IBD?" so I'll review our journey, which began about this time last fall.

IBD is one of those things you never think about until your dog gets it. For me, it was one of those weird, rare diseases that "someone else's dog" got. I knew dogs with IBD and I knew dogs who had died from it, but when Jamie's symptoms began last October and November, it was the furthest thing from my mind.

In fact, I was pretty sure he had stomach cancer. Stomach cancer in Belgian tervuren is nearly epidemic. It presents in tervs at something like 20 percent higher than the normal canine population. It's also high in Belgian sheepdogs (although not as high as tervs) and is practically non-existent in Belgian malinois.

Jamie's symptoms started mildly. He occasionally vomited, occasionally had diarrhea, occasionally wouldn't eat. It wasn't every day, just now and then. A trip to our family vet yielded a possible diagnosis of acid reflux. We went home with meds to treat the symptoms (we'd done no diagnostics yet so at this point, that's all we were doing - treating symptoms).

Initially, this seemed to help. The vomiting and diarrhea episodes were further and further apart and his appetite seemed regular.

Of course, that didn't last.

Before long, he was back to regular vomiting and his appetite was becoming increasingly picky. He got to the point he would take the boiled egg off his breakfast kibble and place it to the side of his bowl. What previously elicited delight and drooling was now relegated to "yuck" status.

A return to the vet yielded blood work that showed nothing out of the norm. A change of meds to address a possible ulcer was the next step.

This helped. Sort of. Kind of. And eventually, not really. Jamie was losing weight. He was mildly lethargic. He ate very little. If he did eat, he vomited. If he didn't vomit, he had diarrhea. Our vet referred us to the emergency clinic in Iowa City. After preliminary diagnostics, the vet there felt it was a bacterial overgrowth in his gut. Jamie spent the night in ICU and came home the next day, re-hydrated thanks to IVs and with a massive dose of antibiotics.

This whole journey was a roller coaster. One day we were up, the next we were down. Just when I thought we needed to go back to the vet to pursue the problem, he acted and ate just fine. Soon as I thought he was fine, he crashed.

Jan. 6, 2011 (one of those dates that you remember just because) Jamie vomited and it was laced with blood. He also began having bloody diarrhea. Off we went to the emergency clinic to start the panel of diagnostics that eventually resulted in the IBD confirmation.

Initially, everything was normal: bloodwork, x-rays, ultrasound. There were no tumors, lumps, growths, foreign bodies or ulcers. He was perfectly normal. Except that he was literally bleeding from both ends, wouldn't eat and was now a walking skeleton. Jamie was spending several nights in the ICU, hooked up to IVs to keep him hydrated and living.

I was seriously starting to wonder if this was going to be the end. You never envision your dog's possible death until it smacks you along side the head that neither he nor you can go on living this way.

The final diagnostic was an endoscopy. This would allow the vet to see the condition of his digestive tract and take biopsies from various spots along the way to be evaluated in a lab at the Iowa State University (go Cyclones!) vet school.

It is my understanding that an endoscopy and the subsequent biopsies are the only way to confirm Inflammatory Bowel Disease. You can study the symptoms and make an educated guess (well, if you're a vet and qualified to do that sort of thing) but IBD symptoms mimic so many other conditions, if you want a definitive answer, the endoscopy is the only way to get it it. In addition to going down his throat to look at his stomach, they also scoped through the rectum to look at the large intestine.

The vet who did Jamie's scopes said his esophagus was the only part of his digestive tract that looked normal. His stomach and intestines looked, in her words, "like raw meat." The entire surface was raw and bloody. The texture was pebbled, like cobblestones.

Poor guy. If he managed to eat food and keep it in his system, he couldn't digest it. He was getting no nutritional value from what little food he managed to eat. Left untreated, this certainly would have killed him.

Treatment was A) prednisone B) restricted diet and C) prednisone. A lot of prednisone.

Due to a clinical mis-labeling, Jamie started at 50 mg of pred twice a day. This seemed like an absolutely ridiculous amount and after counting the available tablets they sent home with me, I called back to the clinic to question the dosage. It was supposed to be 25 mg twice a day.

Thanks to the pred, Jamie ate like the proverbial horse. I think he would have eaten horse if he could have gotten hold of one. His diet was restricted to a single protein source (venison) and a single carb (potato).

Over the next 5 months, I was able to gradually taper down his dosage of pred: 20 mg twice a day, 15 mg twice a day, 10 mg twice a day, etc., until he was taking 2.5 mg every other day. We were now back under the treatment of our family vet and she cautioned that Jamie might take pred for the rest of his life.

By May, he was very stable. He stopped throwing up, his stools were normal, he loved food again and he had regained his Belgian joi de vrie. We stopped the pred completely, with the caveat that if his symptoms flared, he would go back on it.

His diet continues to be restricted but that's not as bad as it sounds. There are a LOT of venison and potato dog treats available on the market, plus Natural Balance makes a canned venison and potato formula that is great for stuffing Kongs. And Jamie is lucky - the Farmer and I both love potatoes so he enjoys "table scraps" of baked, boiled, mashed, fried 'taters.

Almost six months later, life is good. Jamie still has IBD, it's not something that can be cured, only managed. He was diagnosed at a moderate level of the disease, at the midpoint between mild and severe. There's no telling how long it had been chewing away at his gut until the symptoms grew strong enough for me to notice.

I felt horribly guilt - why hadn't I noticed this sooner? Why hadn't I pushed for more diagnostics earlier? Why didn't I just cut to the chase and have them do the endoscopy first thing instead of spending six weeks treating symptoms and running tests that were non-conclusive?

Well, realistically, very few of us are going to run out and do a $1,300 procedure just because our dog throws up. Knowing what I do now, it WOULD have been the right thing to do but how in the world could anyone have known that? Certainly not me or any of the vets that treated Jamie along the way. The route we took was sensible, moving from the least invasive to the "last chance" tests.

I remain in awe of the medical advances now available to our pets. And I can't say enough good things about the vets who treated Jamie. As a whole, I found them more compassionate and genuinely caring than several of the cardiologists and other medical staff I encountered when hospitalized with my irregular heart beat a few years back.

And I am very, very happy Jamie is still with me, spending his twilight years dozing on "his" leather couch, pestering his little brother and giving "butt gooses" as he sees fit.

Autumn colors

2011-09-28T06:46:00.000-07:00

There's frost in the forecast for the weekend and we'll probably have a hard freeze in the next couple of weeks but for now, my flowers still look great. Well, some of them have taken a beating over the summer and it's time for them to go away but apparently these don't know the end is near.

Snapdragons are one of my favorite annuals. They can take a light frost and keep on blooming. There were tons of little bees and big bumblebees buzzing around yesterday afternoon when I took these pics. You can see one of the little guys sitting on a petal.

Love, love, love my miniature roses. They are tough as nails. I added two pink ones this spring (thanks, Michele!), but the Russian sage fell over on top of them. They're fine but not photograph-able. That sage is out of control. Yet another thing on my gardening to-do list - whack the sage.

Coleus will not withstand any kind of frost so I'm enjoying this while it lasts. Isn't the color wonderful? This plant has been through wind, drought, hail, grasshoppers and crazed malinois and still looks this great.

I bought a little container of cheap asters a few years back, no idea they'd be this big and pretty. The bees LOVE them. The whole plant was buzzing in the sunshine yesterday afternoon.

I'm fixing this picture in my mind to think about in January.

Going camping

2011-09-26T15:22:00.000-07:00

Camping at the DMOTC agility trials last weekend was one of those things that fell into the “You really should have known better but you did it anyway” category.

We’ve had a mild and pleasant September here in Iowa with nighttime lows in the 50s. That is perfect weather for camping. So of course, the weekend I planned to sleep outdoors in a tent, the lows immediately dropped to the low 40s and upper 30s. That is perfectly ridiculous weather for camping in a tent and any sensible person would have recognized that.

But we did it anyway.

The group included me and a couple of other friends who are veterans of camping with dogs. We are the sole remnants of the original band of agility gypsies who used to pitch tents on the shores of Saylorville Lake in late September. The number has dwindled over the years as the agility gypsies have apparently wised up and now all camp at the Motel 6.

The weather was clear and dry and we enjoyed annual camping traditions like building a campfire, getting chased around by the smoke, having a potluck meal, eating more toasted marshmallows than is probably healthy and laughing like loons about a lot of things that normal people probably wouldn’t think was funny at all. Spam. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!!

See what I mean?

Then it was time for bed. I was nothing if not prepared. I changed into my sleeping attire: sweat pants over long underwear, wool socks, a turtleneck sweater under a sweatshirt and a fleece jacket. I jammed a stocking cap on my head, which let me tell you, made me the poster child for sexy camping chic. The Farmer didn’t know what he was missing by staying home. Or maybe he did.

I crawled onto an air mattress covered with a fleece blanket, pulled another fleece blanket over that, pulled an unzipped sleeping bag on top of everything and then realized - I can’t move. Fleece sticks to fleece like Velcro. It was clear that I’d better get comfortable because changing positions was not something to be undertaken lightly.

Jamie flopped on one side of me. Phoenix flopped on the other side. I looked at him. He looked at me. I asked him if he’d like to sleep under the blankets. He gave me a malinois sneer. Okay, fine. I knew that wouldn’t last. Phoenix is a firm believer in creature comforts.

Ten minutes later, he slithered over me like some weird furry reptile and began burrowing under the sleeping bag. Uh-huh. Thought so. I covered him up and we all settled down for a long winter’s nap. Technically that was the first full day of autumn and I thought it was a little snarky of Mother Nature to throw unseasonal overnight lows at us.

Really, sleeping in a tent when it’s that cold isn’t bad at all. I was warm from tip to toe, Phoenix cuddled close under the blankets and Jamie sprawled in furry splendor atop the sleeping bag. I don’t know how he did it but every time I checked him, he was warm as toast and seemed to defy the elements. This is the dog who pants in January so I wasn’t really surprised.

We had a variety of sounds to keep us entertained: raccoon fights, coyotes howling and people from other campsites who were either fighting, howling or singing. It all sounded the same. The sound of walnuts launching themselves from nearby tree branches woke me up at regular intervals. After a couple hours of that, I thought they had morphed to the size of coconuts or bowling balls. How can something so small be so loud?

The part that sucked was getting up in the morning. First, I had to dislodge the dogs, who like to greet the pending dawn by dancing on my head. Then I had to peel myself out of my fleece-induced Velcro state. Then I had to get off the air mattress, which, predictably, was not quite as fully inflated as it had started out the night before, leaving me lurching around like an unbalanced drunk.

Once I found my shoes and flashlight, got leashes clipped on the dogs and unzipped two tent doors, we stumbled out into the predawn darkness and headed for the shower house.

There I discovered that showering when it’s 42 degrees is highly over-rated. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the water had been A) warm B) ran in a consistent stream and C) warm. We were camping in a conservation area and they take their conservation seriously in Polk County.

The showers are those annoying timed affairs where you push a button and the water runs for a minute or so, then it stops and you have to push the button again. I am sure this discourages lengthy water-wasting showers. This is all fine and good except the button in my shower stall shut off after about 6 seconds (yes, I timed it), leaving me to lather, rinse and repeat with one hand while continually smacking the button with the desperation of drug addicted rat in a lab experiment.

That was truly one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life and the fact that it was self-induced doesn’t change it any. Trust me, I did not repeat the experience Sunday morning and settled for washing my hair in the sink. I may be crazy but I’m not stupid. If anyone got close enough to tell I hadn't showered that morning, they were going to have bigger problems than any lingering eau de dirt horse arena.

The second night, I amped up the human snugness factor by zipping up the sleeping bag and sleeping inside it, with the blanket over the top. The combination of fleece jacket vs flannel-lined sleeping bag was no better than fleece jacket vs. fleece blanket and any bodily motion met with great resistance.

Phoenix wasted no time curling up under the blanket. Jamie was delighted to discover he could now re-arrange the blanket as he saw fit. Which meant wadding it up in a ball and flinging it as far away from him as he could get it. Phoenix and I both took a dim view of this. By morning, the Skinny Little Dog had managed to scratch open the sleeping bag and maneuver himself inside it. He didn't really fit but it didn't matter since I couldn't move anyway. The blanket was covering a lot of him and a little of me and Jamie was the only one who looked happy.

We’re done camping for the year. I have lots of happy memories of pleasant evenings with friends, perfectly toasted marshmallows, mesmerizing campfires, snuggly dogs and near hypothermia experiences. Who knows what next year will bring.

A top 10 list

2011-09-25T16:18:00.000-07:00

Here are the top 10 ways to tell if you've been running agility and camping at Jester Park for three days.

1) Everything you own smells like campfire smoke, including your dog and your van.

2) You slap your knee and dust puffs out of your jeans.

3) Enjoying the sounds of nature while camping includes a screaming raccoon fight at 2 a.m.

4) Enjoying the sounds of nature while camping includes listening to the coyotes howl at 1 a.m.

5) Enjoying the sounds of nature while camping includes listening to the drunken yahoos a few campsites down singing "Happy Birthday" for the seventh time in two hours.

6) You have damp camping gear draped across all the furniture in the spare bedroom.

7) You took a shower in an unheated bath house on a 42 degree morning and can safely add the experience to your F-It List (Rhymes with Bucket List) of things you never want to do again in your life.

8) You came home and took the longest, hottest, soapiest shower you can remember.

9) By Sunday, your jeans could run an agility course by themselves.

10) By 6 p.m. on Sunday, you've done 4 loads of laundry.

Okay, 10 isn't enough.

11) You learned that wearing a fleece jacket while crawling into a flannel-lined sleeping bag means you won't be able to move. Whatever position you collapse in is how you're going to stay all night because fleece sticks to flannel like velcro.

12) You're sitting at the computer at home, your dogs walk by and you catch a whiff of campfire smoke.

13) The most beautiful thing in your house (after the shower) is your bed.

14) You got to watch the vast number of penguins . . . err . . . pelicans . . . migrating on Saylorville Lake.

15) What happens in the tent, stays in the tent.

16) You've eaten more roasted marshmallows in the last two nights than you have since this weekend last year.

17) You've eaten so many roasted marshmallows, you can elaborate at length about the style and technique used to achieve a delicate brown with slightly puffed top.

18) Camping in a tent when overnight temps drop to 40 can be a very snug and toasty experience if you observe proper protocol for layering blankets, sleeping bags and dogs.

19) The malinois prefers to be included in the base layer.

20) The tervuren should be applied to the top layer. He may re-arrange all layers to suit himself with little regard to other occupants of the tent.

21) This may lead to dissention in the ranks of the lower layers.

22) Doing a happy dance on the air mattress at 5:15 a.m. is highly frowned upon by the human element.

23) The canine element does not care.

24) When it's 41 degrees outside, getting up in the morning is a genuinely unpleasant experience.

25) Genuinely unpleasant experiences tend to spark new and creative uses of the English language.

Insight

2011-09-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

I intended to write about the Port-A-Potty that nearly flew off its trailer while going down the road in front of me but that will have to wait. Sometimes, things just hit you out of the blue (hopefully not a Port-A-Potty) and you feel compelled to share your epiphany with everyone. Or at least that's how it works for me.

Yesterday afternoon Phoenix went to see the chiropractor. He has a standing appointment when a chiropractic vet from an eastern Iowa practice does a “house call” at a local training building and saves a bunch of area people the approximately 100 mile round trip to his clinic.

Anyway, Nix and I went early, because I wanted to train for just a bit before his appointment. That would free up the evening for packing for the weekend and watching the season premiere of “Criminal Minds.” Important stuff.

All I wanted to work were articles and gloves - 10 minutes, max, in keeping with my "less is more" approach. It was such a lovely afternoon, several people who had arrived before me were hanging around outside the building. Nix and I went inside. He had done two (informal) articles with speed and happy attitude when a couple of people and their dogs came into the building. They sat down on one end of the building, very politely, with their dogs not being disruptive.

The change in Phoenix was phenomenal.

He went from being up, bouncy and totally engaged to tense and slow. His body carriage changed. His whole demeanor went from “This is fun!” to “Oh crap.”

I’ve known for a long time that he has no use for most “strange” dogs. He doesn’t have a lot of use for many dogs he knows, either. He has a few doggie friends (two lab girls, a pack of field spaniels, a couple of shelties and a pomeranian, go figure) but otherwise, prefers to pretend other dogs do not exist.

I didn’t realize, however, how much impact the simple presence of other dogs had on his work until seeing the stark before and after contrast yesterday. He was extremely concerned about the new dogs in the building. He wasn’t dysfunctional. He was still working and it was passable but certainly not the dog I’d had 2 minutes before.

He wasn’t distracted in the usual sense. He didn’t want to go see the people and dogs but their presence was clearly disturbing to him. He started giving me slow and sloppy responses, exactly what we’d experienced in the ring.

Hmmm . . .

A few months ago, my reaction would have been “correct it.” Even though my correction wouldn’t have been harsh, I wouldn’t have let him “get away with that.” At least I learned enough from our summer training to know this was not the answer.

Instead, I asked him for the barest element of the exercises, a simple retrieve. When he fronted with the glove and dropped it, body posture still obviously stressed, I laughed at him, grabbed the glove, ran around the building with it (safely away from the dogs and people) and let him chase me and eventually catch the glove. We did the same with articles.

I let him make the choice: fret or play. He lightened up visibly. The focus shifted from the strange dogs to me. No food or toys were needed. No correction was involved. Chasing me and getting to play tug with the glove and article became the reward. If he hadn't responded well, I would have backed down to something he COULD do successfully, maybe just simple attention.

When I thought he was relaxed and back in a comfortable place mentally, I asked for a semi-formal article (sent him from a stand facing the pile, goosed his butt on the way out, asked for a front but no finish and let him leap up an grab the article), then a semi-formal glove (same thing) and ended the session. He was much happier and he was trying. Not perfect but who cares.

Phoenix seems to be a dog who understands WHAT to do but hits a lot of mental walls that inhibit his ability to do it. Just making him do it wasn’t going to help him deal with the elements he found disturbing. By not turning it into a confrontational “me vs. him” situation, I think (again, time will tell), I moved us one step up the ladder in terms of “Hey! Isn’t it more fun to play with ME than worry about THEM?”

Don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out. To paraphrase Thomas Edison, I haven’t failed, just found a lot of ways that don’t work.

Feet, weather, training and a mission statement

2011-09-21T10:40:00.000-07:00

The foot ligaments: are better! Not at 100 percent yet but I think with timely applications of adrenaline and ibuprofen I’ll be able to run Phoenix this weekend. The swelling is pretty much gone, my foot is still kind of bruised-looking and definitely sore, but if I wear stiff-soled shoes, I can walk without pain. Give me another 36 hours and I’ll be able to sprint like the wind. Or something like that.

The training: What exactly AM I doing with Phoenix’s obedience work now? At the moment, we’re on the “less is more” plan. I’m making it a point to keep our daily sessions at 15 minutes or less. And I’ve quit training every day. OMG! THIS IS HARD FOR ME! I’m a training junkie and always had dogs who felt the same way. We could train FOREVER. Phoenix thinks that much training, for a dog who knows what he is doing, is highly over-rated.

While some trainers might argue “But he HAS to understand that he HAS to do it,” I think the “We will train as long as I want to and you will like it” approach is counter-productive for where we are right now. I’ve been down that road. Yes, I absolutely agree the dog has to understand that non-compliance is not an option, but he also has to WANT to do the work or all the HAVE TO in the world is not going to create the kind of teamwork I want. If you get the WANT TO, the HAVE TO is kind of a non-issue, providing the dog understands his job.

So we’re doing less training but we’re doing it with more intensity and stopping while whatever we're doing is absolutely the most freaking fun either one of us has ever had. Talk about hard! When things are going so well, I want to keep going. But I want the game to stay fresh and fun and grinding him into the ground just to prove the point that I can MAKE him do it is not the answer.

Something that helps is keeping a training journal. I’ve done this for years, but now I use it to pinpoint what I want to work each session and how I want to make it challenging or new. This keeps me from trying to work everything at once (over-training, ugh), which seems to be my training default, and also helps make sure we work each of the Open/Utility exercises on a regular basis. Left to my own devices, I would totally ignore the moving stand and broad jump. Just because I can. Because they are stupidly, deceptively simple. And they need to go away.

The weather: sounds awesome for camping this weekend. With an extra blanket. And long underwear. And thick socks. And I’ll probably be sleeping in my stocking cap, something that hasn’t happened since the ice storm power outage of February ‘07.

The weather dudes can’t seem to agree on nighttime lows, which are ranging from 38 to the mid 40s for the weekend. Well, I camped one year in the spring and the water froze in the dogs’ water buckets. We lived.

The mission: when I started ExerciseFinished, I never intended it to be a training blog. And it isn’t, because there’s always of bunch of weird crap on here that is just reflections of my life and has nothing to do with dog training.

But when I do write about training, I truly hope my thoughts, experiences, reflections, etc. can help trainers with the same kinds of issues to reasonably think things through, not just follow the training approach that often seems to value making the dog perform no matter what - instead of trying to figure out what the dog really needs in order to give a happy, willing performance that is not based on constant cookies OR fear or pain avoidance training.

In keeping with these thoughts, you might like Denise Fenzi’s new blog, www.denisefenzi.com. She is much of the same mind and expresses it in a more sensible and organized fashion, unlike my rambling discourses.

Smarter than the average bear?

2011-09-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

A lot has been written about the intelligence of dogs and most of it has been written by people who know more about the subject than me. But Jennie’s comment last week about how intelligent dogs are harder to train than “slightly dim” dogs got me to thinking. Here are a few of those thoughts. As usual, I probably have more questions than answers.

Remember the study that came out a few years back that said border collies were the smartest breed? Ask any BC owner and they’ll tell you that doesn’t mean they’re automatically a breeze to train or live with!

Measuring canine intelligence is a dicey proposition and too often we tend to decide which breeds are smart or not by the numbers of each represented among winners in the obedience ring. Somewhere along the line, the ability to win in the obedience ring has come to equate a higher level of intelligence.

Of course this is ridiculous. Folks who have played the obedience game with an open mind know every dog is an individual and words like smart or dumb often reflect the person holding the leash much more than the dog.

A more accurate declaration would be “Easier to train” equals “Wins in the obedience ring.” There’s a reason golden retrievers, not whippets, dominate the obedience scene. How many times have you heard someone say, “I’m getting a golden/sheltie/fill-in-the-blank next time because they’re easy to train”?

I think most folks would agree, some breeds ARE easier to train than others, especially for higher-end competition where tiny performance details may separate the top four winners. At a recent trial I attended, golden retrievers accounted for nearly 2/3 of the entry in Open and Utility. This is not an accident. They are well suited for demanding obedience competition.

Notice I did not say some breeds are EASY to train. I said EASIER. Even if done well, with patience, respect, realistic goals and a lot of time, training ANY dog to the UDX level or beyond is never easy. It takes a tremendous amount of effort and dedication on the handler’s part to make it happen. And that’s never easy. If it were, everyone would have an OTCh.

But some breeds seem to excel, while others rarely make an appearance in the obedience ring. Is it because certain breeds are so mentally superior they understand what we are trying to communicate in spite of our clumsy and often flawed training efforts? Or is it because they don’t object to the constant repetition/correction approach some trainers feel is necessary? Or because they are willing to tolerate heavy-handed training methods that would have other breeds saying, “Screw this, I quit.”

I’ve always felt that the relationship between dog and trainer was more responsible for a team’s success than the dog’s genetic material. But let’s not deny the facts — if you get a puppy from a litter with OTChs. going back for generations on either side of the pedigree, chances are that puppy is going to be extremely “trainable,” regardless of the breed.

The pedigree proves that genetic line is mentally predisposed to successfully work with humans and physically able to do so for long enough to earn high-end titles. This is a wonderful thing. Breeders would be foolish not to make it part of their programs and exhibitors who enjoy that particular breed would be foolish not to recognize it. Does this mean everyone should rush out and get a golden retriever or sheltie from a specific kennel so they can "win"? Of course not. Not unless you truly, truly love goldens or shelties. But if you love Fluegelhunds, then keep loving and training Fluegelhunds.

I don’t think an OTCh.-loaded pedigree necessarily means those dogs are “smarter” than dogs who might not be achieving on such high levels - they are just very amenable to working happily with humans and have been trained by experienced owners, leading to a high rate of success, as measured by titles and scores, in competitive venues. Which, ideally, is what many of us want.

We often don’t recognize intelligence when it’s living with us. The “slightly dim” dog is willing to keep repeating things over and over, exactly the same way each time, while we tell him how SMART he is, while the “smart” dog may start asking questions or re-inventing the wheel or doing God knows how many crazy ass things that make the trainer think “What is WRONG with that dumb dog?”

Looking back at the dogs I’ve trained as an adult, I think my shelties were of average intelligence but they possessed a joie de vivre for training and showing that amplified it. I do feel my Belgians have been on the higher end of the intelligence scale (some of their problem solving has been freaky scary) but Phoenix is by far the most difficult dog I’ve trained. Although a lot of that is of my own doing, he is a free-thinker, creative, inventive, pushy, sensitive, reactive and absolutely un-interested in doing the same old, same old day after day. This is not a recipe for an "easy" dog to train.

He can be a total sweetheart or a complete challenge to live with. One thing is for sure, now that I’ve come to realize he needs more from me than commands and consequences, our training is NEVER boring.

Regardless of how brilliant or dim-witted we think our dogs are, we need to be more invested in building a relationship with them that allows us to learn together. Phoenix has made it very clear that I need to learn more about HIM — not just what I can train him to do — before our obedience ring work is going to improve.

You might be a redneck if . . .

2011-09-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

. . . you've ever used vet-wrap to keep an ice pack in place. Yep. That's my foot with an ice pack vet-wrapped around it.

You might be a middle-aged woman if you pulled ligaments in your foot by . . . get ready for this . . . it's crazy wild . . .

. . . standing up.

In keeping with my long history of getting hurt in odd ways (vacuum cleaner handle in the eye, bungee cord to the face, etc.), I have once again found a totally ridiculous way to get hurt without trying.

It happened at the school program I did with Phoenix on Thursday. We were almost done. The kids were petting Phoenix and I was crouching on the balls of my feet, giving him treats, which was totally stupid because A) Phoenix adores kids and B) crouching like that is really hard on my knees. It was about to be really hard on something else, too.

I stood up and something in my left foot went POP! Ouch! WTF??? SOB!!! The pain was incredible. Like someone had driven a truck over my big toe. I seriously could have thrown up. But image is everything. We finished the program, with me balancing on one wobbly leg. Then I limped out to the van, took Phoenix home and went back to work. My foot hurt so bad I called the local clinic.

"There's not much we can do for toe injuries," the nurse said, her tone of voice clearly indicating that unless it was hanging by a flap of skin or had a bone poking out of it, I should just hang up and get on with my life.

It FELT like a bone was poking out of it. It felt like red hot nails were poking into it. She asked how it happened and I tried to explain that one minute I was fine, then I stood up and well, that was that.

"Sounds like you've hyper-extended your big toe," the nurse told me. Apparently this happens when you have a sudden shift of weight or balance and your toes end up trying to compensate for your whole body. It's fairly common in athletes.

Yeah. Ha-ha. How common is it in middle aged women giving dog obedience programs in the library?

"You've probably pulled or torn some ligaments," the nurse continued helpfully. "There's really nothing to do but put ice on it, elevate it and take an anti-inflammatory. And stay off it. It will take a week or two to heal."

A week or TWO? Stay OFF it? Yeah, sure.

Oh, and I was supposed to keep flexing it so it didn't stiffen up.

Flex it? I wanted to cut it off!

TG the Granger agility trials aren't THIS weekend or I'd be hiring a rent-a-handler. Let's see . . . two runs a day times three days . . . Michele, Rilda, Tammy, Marsha, Paula and Tracy . . . that comes out nicely. If the boys want to play, Jeff, Terry and Bill could take a turn.

As it turns out, I THINK I'll be okay to run my own dog next weekend. The last 48 hours have been pretty crappy but my foot feels a lot better today. Do you know how hard it is to ice and elevate a foot? You can elevate a foot or you can ice a foot but doing both at once is not easy. Hence the vet wrap idea (thanks, Renee!).

The part of my foot that hurts most is the right half, top and bottom. That part was so swollen by Thursday night my toes couldn't even touch the floor. It's bad when you can't touch your toes. It's even worse when your toes can't touch the floor.

Thanks to gimping around at work Thursday and Friday, my entire foot ached by the end of the day. The right side hurt from the pulled ligaments. The left side hurt from me walking on it funny. My left knee hurt from the awkward way I had my foot propped up on my desk at work (finally, an excuse to put my feet on the desk!). And the right side of my body was complaining because the left side was out of kilter and it was being asked to over-compensate.

Seriously, if you had told me when I was 20 that life after 40 was going to be like this . . .

Kids say the darnedest things

2011-09-16T06:39:00.001-07:00

The school programs yesterday were fun. Phoenix has done demos for community groups, Kiwanis, etc., but not for a bunch of kids who would laugh at him. He loved it and was quite the goofball.

The kids had a problem distinguishing between German and Belgian shepherds, though. I am probably getting paid back for posting the funny script from Hogan's Heroes about Belgians being smarter than Germans.

Here are a few of the best quotes from yesterday:

Girl: “What kind of dog is he?”
Me: “He’s a Belgian shepherd.”
Girl: “Oh. So he’s not a REAL shepherd.”

Boy: “What kind of dog is he?”
Me: “He’s a Belgian shepherd.”
Boy: “What kind of a dog is THAT?!”

Boy: “We have a German shepherd, too.”
Me: “Phoenix is a Belgian shepherd.”
Boy: “We have REAL German shepherd.”

Boy: “What kind of treats are you giving him?”
Me: “Cheese.”
Boy: “You need to give him more. He’s too skinny.”

(This one is my absolute favorite)

Boy: “How many dogs do you have?”
Me: “Two.”
Boy: “So the other one is a normal dog?”

I can't help it, I have to . . .

2011-09-15T06:19:00.000-07:00

In case you have zero interest in college football, the huge Iowa-Iowa State rivalry game was last Saturday. The Iowa Hawkeyes are usually the kick-ass powerhouse and the Iowa State Cyclones are usually the kickees. But not this year! I graduated from Iowa State so need to wave my cardinal and gold pride one more time.

Moving on to other things - I love Jennie's comment from earlier this week (Sept. 13, Obedience Stereotypes). She wrote (paraphrasing here): truly intelligent dogs are harder to train than slightly dim dogs. I love this concept! And I seriously want to explore it further, just not today. No time.

And no, it isn't going to be hard for me to give up obedience trials between now and April because there are only two obedience weekends I would have entered anyway. If Phoenix and I were totally rocking our teamwork, I might be willing to travel a bit more to pick up some other shows, but given that our current status is very un-rocking, I'm content to put trialing on hold. Besides, we've got tons of agility trials to go to, so not like we'll be staying home for the next 7 months.

Later this morning, Phoenix and I are going to the local high school to give a program. Actually, we'll give three 15-minutes programs. Phoenix hasn't ever done the school scene but he is such a dork about kids I'm have no doubt he'll enjoy it.

The 7-month vacation

2011-09-14T10:58:00.000-07:00

Well, it's not exactly going to be a vacation.

But Phoenix and I are staying out of the obedience ring for the next 7 months. That's not a magic number, it just happens that a lot of the nice local (day trip) trials start in 7 months (April) and I'd like to start showing him again then.

April. That seems like years away. We've got a lot to do between now and then!

A lot of people have asked what I'm going to do in terms of training now. I've gotten lots of suggestions, ranging from give him a year off from obedience to try rally to get a puppy.

You people are funny. Really, really funny.

I do not think I could go an entire year without training obedience. Seriously. I can train less, do fewer and shorter sessions. But I cannot NOT train. Working with my dog is like an addiction. If I miss a couple of days, I start craving it, needing a fix. I treasure the time we spend together and that's even more important to me now, as Phoenix and I face the challenge of re-establishing that obedience is something to be enjoyed, not something to be endured without enthusiasm and constant reminders that he's not doing it well enough to suit me.

Rally. Hmmm. Theoretically, I have nothing against Rally. It has its place. I will not be in that place with Phoenix until they stop cramming Rally courses into 40 x 50-foot rings where there are only three steps between stations. It seems counter-productive to teach a dog to heel with power and impulsion, then take him into a ring where he has to stop or turn just as he hits his stride. But maybe that's just me.

Finally - get a puppy. While I have no doubt that would shake Phoenix out of his funk (whether it would be for good or bad is anybody's guess), it would also throw our entire household into chaos and upheaval. I'm so not ready for that! I promised Jamie that I would not get a puppy while was still with me. I want to enjoy his senior years and I know if I get a puppy, Jamie would slip quietly into that place where old dogs simply exist on the fringes of the household while the younger dog(s) demand all the attention.

So what are we going to do?

I'm shifting our focus from "re-training" to "re-animating."

There is no doubt in my mind that Phoenix understands how to do the Open and Utility exercises and how to do them well (straight, fast, clean, smooth, etc.) That may seem like a profoundly foolish statement from a dog and handler team who hasn't managed to pass Utility since finishing our UD last spring and has, for all intents and purposes, fallen completely to pieces.

But in keeping with my theory that Phoenix has lost the "want to," thanks largely to me putting so much pressure on him that he felt he could never be right so why bother (once again, what I TAUGHT was not what he LEARNED), he doesn't need any more "training." He's been "trained" to the nines and that has not gotten us to a good place.

He needs to know he's right. With previous dogs, I could always tell when they had a "light bulb moment" and figured something out - they KNEW they were right and there was no stopping them after that. The confidence and joy in their work carried into the ring and they were brilliant. Somehow, I missed that with Phoenix even though he showed me he had mastered the skills and could do the exercises. He never had the light bulb moment where HE knew he could do them and that I was truly pleased with and proud of him.

In other words - I'm going to get off his case. Training is going to be much less formal. There will be rewards but he will work for them, no luring, no over-treating, no cookies for no reason. Well, maybe a few. Because he's awfully cute. Especially when he does that Malinois tooth clack thing. Mal owners know what I'm talking about. (Do other breeds do that??)

My immediate goal is to have a happy dog in the ring. Not a perfect dog. Not a dog who never makes a mistake. Just a dog who enjoys his job and is happy to make an effort to do it with me. Once we have that, I'll decide where to go next.

Obedience stereotypes?

2011-09-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

I hate breed stereotypes. You know, “Shelties are shy,” “Rottweilers are mean,” “Hounds are stupid,” “Toy dogs are yappy,” etc.

My two un-favorites are “Tervs have no work ethic” and “Malinois have rotten temperaments.” Guess they forgot to tell Jamie that when he got his OTCh. or Phoenix when he was giving the wheelchair-bound, special needs person kisses to their mutual delight over the weekend.

Most stereotypes are perpetrated by people who have never lived with or trained the breeds they’re passing judgment on. Yeah, there is probably a grain of truth (a single, tiny grain) in each statement because heaven knows not every single dog born on this planet has exceptional temperament and intelligence but automatically condemning a dog because of his physical appearance is the product of ignorance.

You and I know better than to believe blanket stereotypes and we spend a lot of time trying to show John Q. Public that how a dog is treated and trained usually has more influence on the final product than the dog’s genetics.

Sometimes I wonder if we need to transfer a similar approach to training methods. How many obedience “stereotypes” have you followed blindly, never questioning them, even though you’ve never tried any other method to see if it might work for your dog because you were afraid that would be against the "rules"?

Here are a few "rules" I followed without question for years before Phoenix started changing things:

• You can’t let your dog “get away” with anything. (By the time you realize he’s gotten away with something, well, um, he’s already gotten away with it and it’s too late to do anything about it.)

• You have to show your dog who’s the boss or he won’t respect you. (Respect and fear are not the same.)

• You have to make him do it. (Yeah. Right. And what if you can’t? Then what?)

• You have to teach a forced retrieve or your dog will never be a reliable retriever. (No. You don’t.)

There are probably more that I can’t think of at the moment. If you're running up against a brick wall in your training, maybe it's time to re-think some of those "carved in stone" rules.

Things that make me crazy

2011-09-12T13:52:00.000-07:00

Granted, there are a lot of them.

Most of them have to do with my job.

Which is stupid, because I should just shut up and be happy I have a job.

I am happy I have a job.

It involves dealing with the public a lot.

Which makes me crazy.

This morning Funeral Home A sends me an obituary for the paper.

This afternoon, they send me a revised copy of the obituary.

An hour later, they call me with changes to the revised copy.

An hour after that, they e-mail to say oops, we sent it to you by mistake and the family doesn't want to pay to have it run in your paper.

Which leaves me wondering at what point did anyone actually TALK TO THE FAMILY or let them proofread the obituary before sending it out.

See what I mean?

This happens all the time.

Thing number two: we have been without an editor at our paper for six months. I have absorbed a lot of the editor's duties. I have not absorbed any of that position's salary.

We finally hired a new editor. He started today. He is in his office. The lights are on. I presume he is home. People keep giving me his work, like he is not there. This is not making either one of us feel very good. It is making me want to hit someone very hard with a large, blunt object.

But I am not a violent person. I smile. I say, you need to give that to Brian. Brian is the new editor. I am not Brian. I am no longer doing Brian's work. Well, actually, I am still doing a fair amount of it. I hope that will change soon. I am not holding my breath.

And finally, crazy-making thing number three: what ever happened to commitment?

I scheduled an interview a week ago. Before I hung up the phone, the party I was going to interview said, you'd better call us that morning to see if we're going to be around that day.

WTF? I thought we just made an appointment. Why WOULDN'T you be around? That's why I called to MAKE the appointment in the first place, so we could find a time that was mutually agreeable.

Ack!

Okay. Done. Rant over. Still crazy.

Autumn rituals

2011-09-11T14:34:00.000-07:00

One autumn ritual for me is showing at the Des Moines cluster. I'll get to that in a minute.

Another autumn ritual is the Iowa State Cyclones vs Iowa Hawkeyes intrastate college football rivalry. I would be acting in a manner very unbecoming an Iowa State graduate if I didn't take this moment to let you know that the CYCLONES KICKED MAJOR HAWKEYE ASS ON SATURDAY AND WON AFTER THREE OVERTIMES!

This from a team who is the perennial underdog in the rivalry and usually slinks home with their tail tucked between their legs. Fans sigh and mutter "There's always next year," although we know next year will probably bring more of the same. Hell, we're just happy if we get on the scoreboard and it's not a total shut-out. Cyclone football is not exactly the powerhouse of the Big 12.

Okay, back to the Des Moines shows. The Belgians and I set off on Friday morning with R2 loaded to the ceiling. I think he looked like one of those clown cars where you open the doors and everything comes flying out. I just hoped we made it to Des Moines before anything started popping out of windows or the sunroof. You laugh but I had show gear and camping gear for 2 big dogs and 1 person for 3 days. Just getting packed and loaded up was a major undertaking.

The camping was great. Perfect weather - dry, sunny days and cool nights. Since my Mountain Hardware tent is still on the DL after breaking a pole last fall (um . . . I had a whole year to fix it . . . guess THAT didn't get done) I ended up using the very first tent I ever bought, a cheap little Coleman. It's a great little tent but obviously for use only during fair weather only. If it had rained, things wouldn't have been pretty. The rain fly is a silly little affair that barely covers the screen mesh on two sides.

It was wonderfully cool at night and Phoenix decided he liked sleeping UNDER my unzipped sleeping bag with me. Too funny. I've never had an "under" dog. Jamie thinks it's still too hot when it's 35 degrees and no way does he want to be covered up.

Saturday, Phoenix and I entered Versatility and Wild Card Utility. Before going into Versatility, I let Renee take Phoenix to warm him up. It was another experiment. It was NOT the type of warm up that seems to be fashionable in some parts of the Midwest - handing your dog off to someone who basically abuses it for 10 minutes then hands it back just as you go into the ring. Renee had him do some heeling and finishes and play a little, then delivered him to me as the judge called our number. The goal was to have him happy to be in the ring with me. Even though he likes Renee and she wasn't being horrible to him, he's very much MY dog and was happy to get back to me.

It worked! He WAS happier in the ring and gave me some good attitude and some definitely improved work. We even had a trot-in after the drop on recall (yay!) and a passable Glove #3 turn (double yay!). We ended up placing 3rd out of 10, which was just icing on the cake as he already has his VER title and I'd entered just to work on ring attitude.

We did Wild Card Utility later and used the same approach. It didn't work quite as well the second time. I think Phoenix may have just been pushed to his limit by then, as the show site is very, very demanding and overwhelming in terms of noise and congestion. Ironically, we ended up winning the class with a score of something like 135 points, which was pretty hysterical. His go-outs remained good but the directed jumping part was broken. I'm not sure if it was sensory overload or if he had trouble seeing my signal against a very busy background. He also got stuck on the first article. It was in the center and he was standing with his front paws in the center, working the outside of the pile. On the second article, the judge asked if I would like it back in the middle again and I said absolutely! Phoenix did a better job of checking the WHOLE pile, not just the outside and found it right away. It's great when judges really try to help and aren't just going through the motions.

After much shopping at the vendors (seriously, I need an intervention), eating cookies (the food concession bakes chocolate chip cookies fresh all day long), looking at what everyone else bought at the vendors (okay, maybe I don't need an intervention after all, I'm still an amateur compared to Michele and Beth!) and watching team, everyone headed home and the dogs and I headed to the huge Bass Pro Shop store nearby. It was late enough in the day I found a totally shaded parking spot and the dogs napped while I shopped. Again.

Grabbed supper on the way back to the campgrounds, ate, walked dogs, crawled into the tent and fell asleep by 9 p.m. Phoenix cuddled up under the sleeping bag at some point in the night and we all slept snugly.

The only class we entered today was Versatility. We managed to have our absolutely worst ring entry in the history of obedience. He was bouncing and tugging a toy and we were all ready to go in. I turned to set the toy down and just as the judge called my number, Phoenix plopped down and went butt-scooting across the floor, hind legs sticking up in the air while two little boys ran straight at him, screeching "Can we pet your dog!!!" (Well, at least they asked.)

I got him off his butt and intercepted the two little boys (parents were somewhere in the general vicinity but basically ineffective) and stumbled into the ring. Then things got a lot better - all I wanted was "up" attitude and he delivered. He even did his signals in that zoo! Not every part of every exercise was brilliant but it was a marked improvement over recent performances.

Several times he tried to leave the ring (odd) and he did the butt-scooting thing again between exercises. I know I'd expressed anal glands when he had a bath a couple of weeks ago but the poor guy was clearly having some discomfort. Soon as we got out of the ring I took him outside and he had a major dump. Figures. He'd already pooped once this morning and he'd been out a couple of other times and didn't have to go but guess obedience is just stressful that way.

It's good to be home.

Bye-bye, Front and Finish

2011-09-08T13:46:00.000-07:00

As several of you have mentioned, yes, I've stopped writing for Front and Finish. I enjoyed it tremendously but after 15 years, well, it was a good run. I see on their Web site my final column did not get posted in its entirety, a bit is missing at the end, so here's the whole darn thing.

IF YOU LIE DOWN WITH DOGS . . .

People frequently ask me, “Do your dogs sleep in your bed with you?” The people asking this question are usually not dog people. Dog people would take one look at Jamie and Phoenix and know better.

Outdated dominance and leadership theories aside, my dogs don’t sleep on our bed because they don’t fit. There are nights when our bed, albeit queen sized, does not seem big enough for two humans, let alone adding more creatures whose combined weight tops out at 110 pounds.

That’s not to say they don’t try. Like most dog owning households, we have a set of rather complicated rules governing who is allowed on the bed and under what circumstances. These rules have a certain amount of flexibility built into them. Most of this flexibility comes from the dogs’ interpretation of the rules.

When Jeff and I got married, the initial rule was no dogs on the bed because back then, we had a waterbed. Not a problem, since neither of my shelties showed any indication of wanting to sleep there. In fact, Jess was scared to death of the thing because it moved. (Jess was scared of a lot of things.)

This lasted until our farm was hit by a straightline windstorm in 1998. The devastation was immense. Jess and Connor were alone in the house during the storm. That night when we went to bed (our house was one of the few structures on our farm that escaped being flattened, although it sustained some damage), Connor jumped up onto the bed — rules be damned — curled up and pretended he wasn’t there.

“Your dog is on the bed,” Jeff pointed out. I thought we had bigger things to worry about and told him so. He got up, picked Connor off the bed, put him on floor and by the time Jeff got back into bed, Connor was already back in it, too. Conn slept on the foot of our bed for years and years after that. He was just the right size to shove my cold feet under in the winter. If he objected to this, he never said anything. When we got rid of the waterbed and replaced it with a traditional mattress and frame, the fact that Connor nearly had to pole vault to get onto it didn’t stop him.

When Connor died in 2009, I no longer had a “bed dog.” Jamie thought humans were hot, lumpy and thrashed around too much. He wanted no part of sleeping on the bed and slept happily on the floor.

The only exception was during thunderstorms. Then he would vault onto the bed in a panic, not caring where he landed or if that spot might already be occupied by a tender part of human anatomy. Jamie has been storm phobic his entire life so after 12 years, Jeff and I have both become resigned to having a terrified, 60 pound furry missile launching onto the bed in the middle of the night. Depending on the severity of the storm, being on the bed with us provides some degree of comfort. During mild storms, Jamie will curl up close and go to sleep, relieved to be safe with his people. Apparently the safety factor is much higher if one is sleeping two feet above the floor.

Jamie could have had a career with the National Weather Service. Garden variety thunderstorms in the night are met with mild trembling that frequently resolves itself once he is ensconced on the bed with human hands to touch and provide reassurance. He’ll go to sleep, enduring the hot, lumpy people for the sake of security. Once the storm passes, he’ll jump off like he was doing us the biggest favor in the world by sleeping there.

But if he is really distraught there is a great deal of fussing, shifting, stomping around (again, paying zero attention to where he’s stomping), trembling, panting and general inability to settle. Before long, my weather radio will go off with a severe storm warning that Belgian radar had already predicted.

Jamie sees no point in sleeping anywhere when there’s seriously rough weather and thinks no one else needs to, either. However he’s not content to be wide awake on the floor. He gets lots more reaction and attention from the humans if he’s stomping on them. I’m willing to endure a bit of this behavior for the sake of loving this crazy dog, but when storm induced behavior turns my night’s sleep into a trampoline routine, Jamie goes in a crate — where oddly enough, he settles almost immediately. Probably because he’s exhausted from jumping up and down on my head.

Phoenix is oblivious to storms but sees no point in being the only one who is NOT on the bed when one strikes. Once Jamie leaps up to join us, Phoenix is usually right behind him. Fortunately, Phoenix spins in a tight circle, plops down and won’t move unless bodily evicted – no panicked thrashing.

Phoenix did enjoy a brief stint of being allowed to sleep at the foot of the bed, although it was not sanctioned by either me or Jeff. Once he grew up enough not to eat the house and was allowed loose-in-the-house-at-night privileges, his main goal in life became sleeping on the bed. He was a dog on a mission. I don’t know how many times I woke up to find him perched on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, one paw already on the quilt and one paw raised in anticipation of sneaking on the rest of the way. No doubt he thought if he crept up slowly and silently enough, he could curl up undetected and spend the night. I’m ashamed (or amazed!) to say this occasionally worked. The dog has definite feline tendencies and can move with considerable stealth for something that weighs 50 pounds and usually careens around the house like he’s been shot from a cannon.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time chucking Phoenix (usually verbally, occasionally physically) off the bed. He finally decided it was a battle not worth fighting and made a happy nest on the floor next to my side of the bed.

Once we had established that the bed was not an extension of his own personal lounging space, I would invite Phoenix to come up and cuddle while Jeff and I read or watched TV. The rule was “When the lights and/or the TV go off, the dog goes off, too.” This worked well and usually the very act of reaching for the remote control resulted in a polite exit.

That fall, when Jeff began working late hours during the harvest, I amended the “Dogs off the bed when the lights go out” rule. If I went to bed before Jeff, Phoenix could snuggle and sleep on the bed until Jeff came in, then he had to get off.

Well, that’s what I thought the rule was. Phoenix interpreted it more like “Finders keepers, I have a warm spot and I’m not leaving and you can’t make me.” He never growled at Jeff when he came in or showed any sign of resource (bed) guarding. He suddenly developed total deafness, put his head down, closed his eyes and wouldn’t move.

Jeff was usually too tired to argue with him so Phoenix thought he’d won that battle. The bed was warm and soft and the human didn’t seem to object to him being there, at least not enough to do anything about it. It was a classic example of “If you allow it, you train it.”

Then I started waking up in the middle of the night to find both husband and dog wedged onto the same side of the bed. Phoenix looked happy. Jeff, not so much. Not for the first time in my life, I realized here was another problem not of my own creating that I was going to have to solve. Phoenix simply could not be allowed to sleep on the bed full-time. He took up too much room.

Ever notice how dogs expand in every direction when they get on the bed? Phoenix was a blanket hog. He was so heavy if he rolled onto your feet, he cut off circulation. He was given to having chasing dreams (cats, I suspect) which always seemed to come to a violent conclusion. It’s cute to watch your dog dreaming when he’s laying on the floor. It’s not so cute to wake up to find him sound asleep, growling and thrashing and baring his teeth six inches from your ankle.

It took a lot of insistent reinforcing to convince Phoenix that his own bed was where he needed to sleep. I’m still not sure he really buys that but he’s gracious enough to play by our rules now.

*****

This is my last column for Front and Finish. I’m sad. I’ve written for 15 years, since 1996. It’s been a wonderful experience but time and circumstances have a way of changing life’s priorities.

My job (which I’m happy to still have) has changed tremendously in the last year and while I’m writing more than ever for the paper, other responsibilities have been added as well and the down time that allowed me to craft these columns in spare moments has virtually disappeared. Time for writing at home? In my dreams. Household demands, helping with our farming operation, training Phoenix for his UDX career, teaching classes and the inevitable family demands have a way of occupying every available second. Funny how time can become such an elusive and precious commodity. I knew it was time to bow out when I found myself facing column deadlines with a sense of desperation, not enjoyment.

Unfortunately, my access to the digital version of Front and Finish is also severely limited. With dial-up Internet at home, loading the pages progresses at an agonizingly slow pace. After spending 8 hours or more a day working on a computer, I’m not eager to sit in front of one again for any length of time when I get home. I understand the economic pressures that led to launching the digital version of F&F but I very much miss the hard copy edition that fit in purse and training bag. I find myself in the awkward position of writing for a publication I no longer have access to reading.

Sigh. I will miss you all. I will miss Bob Jr.’s support and Teresa and Thomi’s silly comments back and forth when I e-mail columns.

Thank you for reading. As always, I invite you to share my world at http://exercisefinished.blogspot.com.

'This will make you a better trainer'

2011-09-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

Random thoughts about me, Phoenix, training, the past, the future, stupidity, hindsight and forgiveness

Over the years, I’ve frequently heard people say “My dog hates obedience.” I never really understood what they meant because I’d never had a dog who hated obedience. That was something I had no point of reference for. Jess, Connor and Jamie all had hang-ups on certain exercises but as a whole, they loved going into the ring. I think this was just who they were, not the result of any brilliant training skill on my part.

“My dog hates obedience” have always been fightin’ words for me. I thought “Well, it must be your fault, what have you done to make him hate it?” Never thought I’d be asking myself that question!

Maybe that’s a little extreme. I don’t think Phoenix hates obedience. After this summer’s training experiences, I absolutely believe he KNOWS what to do, he just doesn’t have the “want to” to do it in the ring when the pressure is on. After a great deal of woolgathering on this, I’ve decided the problem is not rooted in Training Method A vs Training Method B.

I think I have managed to convince him he can never be right so why should he even bother. Wish I could pinpoint when this happened in our training but of course, it wasn’t during any particular year or at any particular level. It just happened.

Although I thought I was helping him understand what to do by tweaking, adjusting, correcting and repeating, repeating, repeating the individual skills and complete exercises, the message I was actually sending was “You’re never right. You cannot make me happy.”

Well, that sucks! No wonder the poor guy looked miserable in the ring. He was pretty sure he was being set up to fail and there wasn’t even the outside chance of getting a cookie or a ball there to offset the constant reminders that he was wrong.

Here’s one of the places I totally misread my dog: on one hand, I have Phoenix, Dog Of Steel. He is the most incredibly athletic and physically hard dog I have ever owned. No wonder the military jumps out of airplanes with malinois! On the other hand I have Phoenix, Dog of Marshmallow Fluff. He is by far mentally the softest dog I have ever trained. (Not to say he is soft in the head. I think that’s ME.)

He reads and reacts to my emotions to a much higher degree than any dog I’ve trained. Although I was trying so hard to teach him how to be a brilliant obedience dog, instead I taught him frustration. Training and showing was an endless void of performances that just weren’t good enough, all wrapped up with my disappointment in the ring. Since I wanted more than just qualifying scores, I put a tremendous amount of pressure on both of us. Neither of us handled it well!

So maybe there is another type of performance crisis in addition to the dog who can’t perform without cookies — the dog who can’t perform, no matter how careful his training has been, because he has no self-confidence?

More than once this year I’ve found myself wondering if Phoenix’s obedience career was going to end with his UD. While that wouldn’t be the end of the world, it wasn’t the picture I’d always held in my mind of our journey together. I contemplated an obedience-less future for Phoenix for about 5 minutes. Then I thought, this is absurd. I can’t NOT do obedience with him.

I am convinced beyond a doubt he knows how to do the exercises. It’s not a training problem. It’s not dependent on the show site or the time of day or who the judge is. It’s a relationship problem. You can’t correct a dog for being unhappy. I don’t think the answer is throwing cookies at him all the time but I don’t think the answer is grinding away with drilling and constant formal training, either. I refuse to show a dog who doesn’t want to be in the ring with me. I don’t care how technically perfect we might become as a team, if we can’t do it happily, then we’re not going to do it. I've never been a fan of "making" a dog do something - it's akin to dragging a terrified dog across the teeter in agility and then saying "There! He did it!"

With Jess, Connor and Jamie, building the “want to” for obedience was never a problem. They CAME with it. How did I get so lucky! (Of course, now I am clueless about what to do with a dog who DIDN'T come with it.) I could tweak their “have to” without unbalancing their “want to.” Right now, Phoenix and I are seriously unbalanced. He isn’t being deliberately disobedient in the ring. He’s doing the best he can — and given that he clearly doesn’t want to be doing it at all, I’m amazed he’s even bothering to try. He loves me even though he probably thinks I am a flaming idiot.

I never put much stock in a dog’s “desire to please” until now. My previous dogs all had plenty of desire to please — desire to please THEMSELVES. But maybe with Phoenix, he really cares about making me happy, even though I’ve been pretty oblivious to it.

So what’s next for us? We’re entered in Wild Card Utility and Versatility this weekend, then nothing after that. What exactly are we going to do in training now? First, nothing formal. Forget being OCD about everything. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten. I want to recapture that "I don't care about scores I just want to have fun" attitude I had with my very first sheltie. If that means sacrificing precision for the time being, that's fine. If we don't get the joy back, there's no need to worry about precision.

Having a dog who’s not crazy about obedience is very much a new experience for me. Everyone tells me it will make me a better trainer and I know they’re right! Oddly enough, I’m not totally devastated by the fact my dog is a total mess in the obedience ring. Disappointed and frustrated, yeah, cuz I sure didn’t see any of this coming and I really hate that I’ve put Phoenix through this. He is being very patient with me. I know he forgives me for my blundering and bad training decisions.

This is getting long. I’m babbling.

Tonight I’m going to take my tree climbing, bubble chasing, flower-pot-carrying, tooth snapping, funny, silly, goofy dog to a park. We’re going to chase a ball, do some recalls, go for a walk and enjoy the wonderful cool pre-autumn weather we’re having.

I can't make this stuff up

2011-09-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

The Farmer was flipping through TV channels the other day and came across “Hogan’s Heroes.” Since we are both children of the 70s and 80s, of course we had to watch it. Hogan and Klink were having a discussion about prisoners who had escaped from Stalag 13 and a neighboring stalag.

Hogan: Stalag 19 will catch their escaped prisoners much faster than you will here at Stalag 13.

Klink: Why?

Hogan: Stalag 19 has smarter dogs.

Klink: Smarter dogs? What do you mean?

Hogan: You use German shepherds. They use Belgian shepherds.

Of course, I was roaring with laughter, thinking this was the funniest thing I’d ever heard on a sitcom and the Farmer was looking at me like I had horns. That happens a lot around our house.

And my apologies to all the beautiful German shepherds out there who I am sure are just as smart as any Belgian shepherd and, from what I've seen of Phoenix lately, probably a good deal more sensible. The Skinny Little Dog has taken up tree climbing. He's not any good at it but he keeps trying to climb the big maple tree south of our house. He is sure there is a cat up there somewhere. I guess everyone needs a hobby.

A few funny photos

2011-09-05T12:59:00.000-07:00

I just happened to be ringside with my camera when they were judging groups one day this weekend. This St. Bernard wasn't having any of it.

Love the handler's reaction. I mean really, what are ya gonna do when 120 pounds of dog says "I don't think so"?

Trust me, I am the last person who should be critiquing others' fashion choices but leopard skin print boots? Really? Oh well, what else would you wear with your leopard skin print skirt?

We live just a few miles from the show site and got 3.6 inches of rain Saturday so the boots were not overrated.

Today at the trial was just plain odd. Phoenix and I had possibly our worst run ever in the history of Utility, an NQ or major deduction on every exercise . . . broken only by stunningly perfect go-outs. Silly boy.

Open was much better. With the exception of refusing to release the dumbbell on the retrieve on flat.

Me: Out.

Phoenix: No.

Me: Um . . . out.

Phoenix: Um . . . no.

Me: Seriously, OUT!

Phoenix: Seriously, NO!

So he finished with his dumbbell in his mouth and seemed very pleased with himself.

The experiment

2011-09-04T04:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I showed Phoenix again. Our Utility run was not a thing of beauty but it WAS better than Thursday's. Even though we NQ'd 2 exercises, I felt like he was working a little better and giving a little more effort.

The longer we were in the ring, the more relaxed he seemed to get. He was still pretty "sticky," not the relaxed, happy dog I ultimately want but he managed a couple of perfect exercises and had lovely straight go-outs and didn't sniff the gate this time. This tells me he was at least trying. By the end of the run, I was seeing little signs he was relaxing, like "up" ears, more eye contact and a willingness to bounce.

I realize 3 months of a new training method won't create overnight results but I had expected to see some indication that what we were doing was working this weekend, even if the finished product wasn't complete. And now I feel like I did.

Then Michele took Phoenix into Open for me. This was a total experiment. I wanted to see if any of his ring issues were connected to me and if I weren't in the picture, would that make any difference in how he worked.

I told Michele if things didn't go well and she wanted to be excused, that was fine with me. She took Phoenix outside and spent some time working heeling, drops and playing with the dumbbell. He worked for her but was constantly scanning, looking for me.

I debated about leaving the building entirely but thought maybe if I just stood in one place and stayed there, so he could get a fix on where I was, that would be the best idea.

It wasn't. In hindsight, leaving the building probably wouldn't have made any difference. And let me tell you, if I ever thought I was nervous before going into the ring, it was NOTHING compared to watching someone else take my dog in!

The judge was Phil Rustad and he was incredibly patient. It took Michele a long time to get set up for the first exercise, the retrieve on flat, because Phoenix kept circling her, scanning the crowd, and wouldn't come to heel. Once they got going, he retrieved fine but didn't front, went straight to heel, then began circling again, with the dumbbell still in his mouth.

The drop on recall followed and it was lovely, complete with front and finish. Retrieve over the high was next and again, the set up was difficult. He was circling and scanning, clearly concerned about where I was.

He went out over the jump, grabbed the dumbbell and then turned to the crowd, scanning. He missed the jump coming back, Michele released him and Phil asked if she would like to be excused. She said yes, which was the perfect decision.

So . . . what did I learn from this? I think the biggest lesson was that Phoenix may not be the picture of ultimate joy in the obedience ring at the moment but he'd still rather be in the ring with me than with anyone else, even a friend who he likes very much and knows is a generous hand when it comes to treats. That's not to say I'm not part of the problem but at least now I know I'm not the ENTIRE problem!

Thank you, Michele, for being part of this experiment. You and Phoenix look good together! I think with a little practice, he would happily work for her. It was fun standing back and watching my own dog in the ring, at least when things were going well!

We have today off, then back to the show tomorrow.

I'm already starting to build a new training plan for the coming months. We're definitely not going to show again until until spring (not counting Wild Card and Versatility at Des Moines next weekend) but I'm getting a clearer picture of what Phoenix and I really need to be doing (and not doing) until then. Will explore that in a future post.

What comes before Square One?

2011-09-02T10:58:00.000-07:00

Cuz that's where we need to go back to.

I debated about posting today because I'm not sure where things are headed and as a writer, I always think I need to have a clear position to present before I start putting something into words.

I showed Phoenix in a local trial yesterday and it did not go well. I feel like all of our hard work over the summer was a complete waste of time. (Although spending time with your dog is never really a waste, is it?) He was not a happy dog in the ring. He barely managed to go through the motions. We Q'd in Open with a mediocre score. We NQ'd Utility on signals and barely skated through the rest of the exercises.

I tried hard to find something good about the day but "good" just wasn't on the agenda. I figure the purely compulsion trainers will say we just haven't worked long enough to instill the "have to" and the purely positive trainers will say "I told you so" for pulling the rewards out of the picture and asking him to work "just because."

But now I don't think it's either one of those things. He worked just as badly in the ring after 3 months of patient and constructive "no cookies" training as he worked after years of being trained generously with food. He was just plain miserable. A friend watching outside the ring said "He doesn't want to be in there." She was absolutely right.

He had been working well in training and I had high hopes that his confidence had returned with improved understanding and that he could give me some solid effort in the ring. But it didn't happen. Again, Phoenix warmed up nicely outside the ring, ears up, eyes bright, happy tugging on the leash, a few big bounces, into the ring and . . . flat as yesterday's beer.

We're entered two more days this weekend (regular classes), then two days next weekend (Wild Card Utility and Versatility). After that, I do not anticipate showing in obedience for a very long time.

After chatting with a dear training friend this morning (okay, wailing and gnashing my teeth!), I'm going to experiment and have two friends show Phoenix for me - once this weekend and once next weekend. They won't show him in all the classes, just one class each day. I don't expect this to miraculously cause him to start performing like the obedience ring is the best place in the world. Hell, I don't even know if he'll stay in the ring with them. But it can't hurt (and will probably make Michele and Renee appreciate their own dogs even more!)

Like Renee said, no matter what happens, at the end of the day, I still get to take my beautiful, amazing, smart, strong, funny dog home with me. If we need to take a break from obedience, we will. We can play more agility. We can start tracking. I will love him no matter what.

An experiment on an August evening

2011-08-30T07:05:00.001-07:00

Last night Phoenix and I were working on heeling in the back yard. One thing I've been doing to reward for sustained effort on heeling is releasing to a toy that's laying on the ground or in a nearby lawn chair. He races to get the toy, brings it to me and we play. This is NOT a formal retrieve.

Then I drop the toy and we heel again, maybe for a few feet feet, maybe for a few minutes. Sometimes I release after a halt, sometimes during a successful speed change, sometimes after a turn, sometimes during a long straight stretch.

The first toy I used was his french linen tug. He loves his tug. I love his tug. It's very tough and finger friendly.

Then I decided to do an experiment. Since putting some food back into our training, I've been filling a little treat bag, the kind with the drawstring closure. As part of the reward, I throw the bag, Phoenix retrieves it, we tug briefly, then he gets his cookie. So it's not just shove a cookie in his mouth and done. I definitely want to keep play a big part of the picture.

I left the tug on the ground and put the treat bag next to it. Well, duh, that was a no-brainer. Of course he brought me the treat bag the next time I released him.

Then I added a tennis ball on a rope. The tug and the treat bag (which still had food in it) were still on the ground. The ball on a rope was next to them. I truly do not care which toy he brings - it's totally his choice.

On the next release, Phoenix raced to the pile and grabbed the ball on the rope. Well. Surprise. He chose a ball over food. We tugged and I put the ball on a rope back into the pile.

Next, I added a single tennis ball, the kind that squeaks. We heeled and I released. Phoenix didn't hesitate. He grabbed the ball and brought it to me, squeaking madly.

I thought maybe he was just picking the "new" toy each time but for the next 3 releases, he brought the squeaky ball. Then I put the squeaky ball on top of the patio table and covered it up. We heeled, I released, he ran to the pile . . . and stopped . . . and sniffed . . . and ran around the yard, sniffing and hunting for that squeaky ball even though two other toys and a bag of treats were available.

Finally, I grabbed one of the toys, he gave up his hunt and came to play with me. We played with the ball on a rope and the tug and I had him retrieve the treat bag a couple of times. Then I gave him the squeaky ball. It was obviously his toy of choice and it even outranked food.

I don't mind my dog having a "favorite" toy but I want him to engage with me, no matter what toy I have. It really surprised me he would ignore food in favor of a ball. Since the squeaky ball is clearly his favorite, I'll reward with it on a somewhat limited basis. I don't want him to become so obsessed with it that he doesn't think he can play with anything else. Whatever rewards you use, you "build." If you use only food, the dog's enjoyment of toy play will decrease and if you only use one particular toy, the dog may soon lose interest in other toys.

The Farmer, in his eternal wisdom, watched this whole thing and wanted to know "What's wrong with that dog!" that he would choose a ball over food. Obviously he wasn't raised by Shelties!

Know when to say when

2011-08-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

On Thursday of this week, Phoenix and I are going to jump back into the Open/Utility rings after our summer off. We're entered in 3 days of a local 5 day cluster.

I honestly don't expect all of our training issues to have been miraculously resolved in the last two months but I do feel much better about the direction our training is going.

In keeping with my training goal of focusing on what we CAN do this week, not what we CAN'T, here's a list of how to know it's time to end a training session. Yes, I have ended a training session at one time or another because of every single one of these reasons. (Some are while training at home, others while training away from home or at a motel with friends during a trial weekend.)

I didn't say they were GOOD reasons. Well, at the time, they sounded like very good reasons. And some of them were. It's probably a wonder Phoenix has gotten as far as he has.

• Your fingers are bleeding and you need a band-aid(s).

• You have a split lip.

• You ran out of cheese because you ate too much of it yourself.

• Your dumbbell broke.

• The gloves are shredded.

• The toy got ripped in half.

• The toy got stuck in the limb of a tree (really, who threw it up there?)

• The neighbor was walking up the lane.

• The neighbor's dog was walking up the lane.

• A skunk was walking up the lane.

• The Farmer was yelling out the window "YOURMOTHERISONTHEPHONE."

• The wind keeps blowing the ring gates over.

• You were tired of listening to your older dog howling.

• You can't stand getting one more hole in your shirt.

• A lightning strike.

• It started to rain.

• It started to snow.

• There was a tornado on the ground.

• The pizza came.

• Your dog is so obsessed with a nearby cat that he is basically dysfunctional.

• You are so hungry you are basically dysfunctional.

• Friends with margaritas arrived.

• The Farmer is yelling out the window "MICHELEISONTHEPHONE!"

• "NCIS" starts in 3 minutes.

• A new Harry Potter book arrived that afternoon.

• The wind is blowing the jumps across the yard.

• Things were going so well you decided to quit while you were ahead.

• Things were going so badly you decided to quit while you were ahead.

Happy training, everyone!

I can't drive 55 . . . seriously

2011-08-26T08:25:00.000-07:00

Between the first Coralville exit coming from the west off Interstate 80 and the building where I teach classes, about 6 miles to the north, the speed limit changes 327 times.

Maybe that's an exaggeration.

But it changes a lot. From 65 mph on I-80 (yeah right, like anybody does THAT), to 35 through all the lights by the mall to 55 mph on Hwy. 965 north of Coralville (good luck with that at the 5:30 p.m. rush hour, more like 15 mph), then you hit the speed limit nightmare of North Liberty. Or the policeman's paradise. I guess it depends which end of the radar gun you're behind.

Last spring, I was behind the wrong end and made an $80 donation to the City of North Liberty. I hope they spent it wisely.

"Ma'm, do you know what the speed limit is here?" the officer asked.

Well, I think it's pretty obvious I either didn't know or didn't care. You'd think policemen would get really tired of asking rhetorical questions.

I was out in the middle of the country, north of town. I was surrounded by cornfields.

"Um? 55?"

It was 35. He clocked me at 48. I thought that was pretty good, given that I thought it was 55. I thought I was safely 7 miles under the limit.

He didn't see it that way and wrote me a ticket.

Sigh. I bitched and moaned and wrote a check that would have paid entries for an agility or obedience weekend.

I am now officially the World Most Paranoid Driver when it comes to that stretch between the north city limits of North Liberty and SueAnn's building. The speed limit changes at least 36 times in that stretch of a couple of miles. It makes me crazy. It's really hard to drive 35 mph when you're going through the middle of nowhere. And the North Liberty police know this.

Cutting over to I-380 on the way home isn't any better. That street (Penn St.?) is under construction. It was under construction last spring. It's still under construction. It looks like it may be under construction until the end of time. It has signs for speed limit 35 mph immediately followed by signs that say construction zone speed limit 25 mph.

None of that matters because you're swerving back and forth between orange cones so much and switching from one side of the road to the other that you can't accelerate past 10 mph. Then suddenly - it ends and you're faced with a wide open road. I have absolutely no idea what the speed limit is there.

Happily ever after

2011-08-24T08:42:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago today, the Farmer and I got married. I meant to scan a picture from our wedding album to post today but like so many other things, it didn't get done. Phoenix got worked last night, though. You have to have your priorities.

We're not having a big celebration or anything. In fact, I'm working late tonight and will probably get carry-out pizza for supper. We might get away this weekend for a nice dinner out. Maybe. If the Farmer isn't baling hay.

I drug our wedding video out last night. Wow. We were SKINNY back then! The Farmer asked if I would still fit in my wedding dress. Maybe . . . if you didn't try to button up the back. We both had more hair back then, too. Mine was long, over-the-shoulder and very blonde. The Farmer's was . . . there.

In the last two decades, we've survived the straightline windstorm that trashed our farm in 1998 and the day in 2007 when the Farmer left baby Phoenix loose in the house all afternoon. We've had calves in the basement, bats in the bedroom and dogs everywhere. We know each other well enough to know any sentence that starts with "Honey? Can you . . .?" is going to elicit The Hairy Eyeball, followed by doing whatever is requested. This includes pulling my van out of the mud, pulling my van out of the snow and explaining (with limited patience) that the tire BLEW OUT and no, I can't just air it up and drive home. We've buried a parent together, put up with each other's eccentric relatives and lived through multiple home improvement projects. He's learned that letting the dogs out needs to be followed by letting the dogs back in. I've learned how to help back the cornplanter into the machine shed without putting a dent in the back wall. More or less.

No wonder his hair is falling out.

More things I learned this summer

2011-08-23T11:53:00.000-07:00

School started here today. Does this mean summer is officially over? Autumn doesn't start, technically, until Sept. 23. I guess it's summer until Labor Day, THEN it's autumn, no matter what the calendar says.

Here are a few more random thought about things Phoenix and I have learned this summer.

• There’s nothing wrong with using food in training, but there are frequently a LOT of things wrong in the WAY people use it and I was a prime example. I used it as a crutch for too long and when it was gone, my dog was dysfunctional through no fault of his own. I need to use it in such a way that my dog does not learn to expect food for every single thing he does. I had unintentionally created this unrealistic expectation. No wonder my poor dog was disillusioned in the ring. I want him to understand sometimes he might get cookies and sometimes he might not get cookies but my expectations for, and enforcement of, his behavior never changes.

• One of the biggest problems with food training is that it’s so DAMNED easy to keep plugging food in your dog for every little thing, even when he’s done nothing in particular to earn it. Or you’re giving the same reward for a slow sloppy sit as you did for a fast, tight sit. The dog probably has NO idea why he’s getting the food half the time. I know because I’ve done this! OMG! Make me stop! Imagine that food is a gold nugget. It’s going to be given ONLY in exchange for something of extremely high value that the dog delivers.

• Letting go of the cookies can be as big a deal for the trainer as it is for the dog. It’s been a whole new experience for me to train using little to no food during a session. Yes, I have put some food back into our training but no where near the previous level. Oddly enough, I think Phoenix finds it MORE rewarding now, since it's become somewhat of a precious commodity for him.

• The dog has to produce the effort before you produce the reward. Leave the food in your bag. Go out on the training floor. Do whatever. Did the dog make a genuine effort to be right? (“Effort” is going to be defined differently for different dogs.) Was it worth a gold nugget? Then by all means, go and have one!

• It’s easy to let performance criteria slide when the food leaves the picture and the behavior slips a little. Does my dog need a mild correction or does he need more training to understand how to do his job? “Good enough” is only good enough if you won’t be upset by the same behavior in the ring after you’ve paid a $25 entry fee, put $3.50/gallon gas in your car and driven for 3 hours. Having a clear picture in my head of how I want things to look makes it easier to stay focused and not settle for less.

• Exercises can be fun without any food at all. Have you ever goosed your dog in the butt as he runs away from you on a retrieve exercise? Not to grab or pinch, just an open handed goose that comes from directly behind as the dog is leaving. This drives Phoenix insane! He bunny-tucks his butt underneath him, his tail goes straight up and he drives out harder for his dumbbell or glove. He thinks the butt-gooser is going to get him. Actually, I think he kind of LIKES it. He's getting faster though, and I can't always goose him quick enough. Which is actually the whole point.

• Silence needs to be a GOOD thing. It’s an easy habit to chatter happily at your dog when he’s doing well, then lapse into stony silence when something goes wrong. If your dog believes silence = oh-crap-I’m-wrong, can you imagine what he thinks during exercises in the ring when you’re only speaking to give commands? This is something I really, really, really need to get better at.

• Hindsight being what it is, I can now look back at the problems Phoenix and I had in the obedience ring during the spring and early summer and understand them better. There was no single “This is what you’re doing wrong” solution. It was a combination of things - lack of understanding, lack of confidence, lack of understanding “have to,” lack of drive for “want to” and lack of ability to see ME as the primary reinforcer.

• Things have improved over the summer but I know we haven’t “fixed” everything in two months. I’m looking forward to fall — my absolute favorite season — and continued training and limited trialing to see what’s working and what’s not.

Moo - the rest of the story

2011-08-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

I stand corrected. The Farmer informs me it was not a 1,300 pound steer. It was not quite market ready so more like 1,000 or 1,100 pounds. Silly me.

He buried the head and hide. The guts went out in a field for enjoyment by the local coyotes.

The knife thing puzzled me, too, since we have a number of fairly decent sized kitchen knives that surely would have been more useful. All he had to do was come back in the house to get one. However, they ARE kitchen knives with thin blades and not really meant for dealing with food "on the hoof," so to speak. Having dealt with the Farmer's pocket knife before — nearly running it through the washer when he forgets to take it out of his jeans — he was probably better off using it as it's a pretty sturdy item.

We frequently have beef custom butchered for people who want to buy a half or quarter of a steer to stock their freezers. On our end, this means loading the steer into a trailer and driving it to the locker, where it is humanely killed and then processed into roasts, steaks, hamburger, etc. according to the buyers wants and wishes.

In this case, given the untimely demise of the steer and the slightly questionable hygienic practices under which it was dressed, we'll be keeping the meat for ourselves. Although it only hung outdoors for a couple of hours, if the quality has been reduced, like the Farmer told Phoenix, "You might get a lot of hamburger for supper." This would be the ultimate break for a raw-feeder!

Okay, the weekend's matches and the state fair report.

Overall, things were improved. Not perfect. Not totally brilliant. But better. And that's what I wanted - to do our runs with no food and no toys and see that he understood his job better than he did last May and June. Both Saturday and Sunday's matches brought better attention and, to my great delight, he was trying to work his fronts, didn't give me any walk-ins and did lovely go-outs in spite of people hanging over the railing above the Utility ring at the state fair.

I noticed a couple of things - the sound of silence is a problem. I have worked (obviously not hard enough) to help Phoenix understand that me being quiet is GOOD thing and it means he's right. We need more work on that and I need to shut up already.

The eternal quest for balance between formal and informal training continues. I do not want to drill my dog through exercise after exercise day after day, complete with formal set ups, fronts and finishes on every exercise. This may produce qualifying results but it will not produce a happy attitude. IT'S BORING.

On the other paw, Phoenix occasionally NEEDS to see these exercises from start to finish in training as I expect him to do them in the ring. Informal training is fun and good and you won't ruin your dog by using treats and toys. That keeps obedience work from disentegrating into a pit of boredom and monotony . . . but . . . at least now and then, I feel I need to put everything together and ask for it several times in a row so he understands he has to perform ALL the behaviors, not just bits and pieces of them here and there. Train like you show, show like you train. Some trainers claim they never do formal run-throughs except at trials. Wow. Okay. Glad that works for you. Know your dog.

When the match was over Sunday, I walked around the state fair for a little bit. Went to the Varied Industries Building and got a 2011 Iowa State Cyclones football poster to annoy my co-workers. We are located just 30 minutes from the University of Iowa so right in the heart of Hawkeye country where Iowa State's cardinal and gold are not the predominant colors. It looks wonderful on my cubicle wall.

Then I checked out the new Jacobsen exhibit center, which is a fabulous indoor horse show arena where the Des Moines club will be holding its agility trials beginning this fall. It's amazingly fabulous. Did I mention that? Can't wait to show there.

I wandered through the 4-H exhibits building and relived my glory days as a Louisa County 4-H'er, did some people watching (always hysterical - you truly see EVERYTHING at a state fair). Would liked to have spent more time wandering around, there is SO MUCH to see, but I'd been up since 4 a.m., not to mention loosing several hours of sleep before that.

So I ate a deep fried Twinkie and headed home. Now before you start rolling your eyes and wretching in disgust, remember, the Iowa State Fair is ALL ABOUT food on a stick. I could have got deep fried butter on a stick! A Twinkie was practically health food by comparison! My cardiologist would be so proud.

It was actually pretty good, providing you like Twinkies to start with. I do. They're a guilty pleasure. My grandma used to have them at her house and we'd eat them together when I was a little girl. The fried version is dipped in a sweet batter, kind of like pancake batter, and fried, then served with powdered sugar. It ends up tasting like a extra doughy version of the original spongecake.