I've been planning on breeding Spryte to the very handsome and highly driven Flash (aka Heartstrings Rhythm and Blues AGDC AADC) for some time now. The only thing we have been waiting on are the health tests. A little while back Flash was xrayed for hips and this weekend he had his eyes CERF tested. I am happy to report his eyes came back normal and OFA rates his hips as "good". He is cleared by parentage for Von Willebrand's disease. So now he is ready to be a father :)
I haven't had a chance to post recent pics from Spryte's first litter with Ace. Here are a few photos of the puppies around 7 & 8 months of age.
Breeanne with "Izzy", and "Izzy" at Easter. Bree and Izzy are such a wonderful team already. Izzy is a little spitfire with tons of attitude. She just wants to go FAST! Forget those start line stays, it's way more fun to just RUN! This little dog cracks me up every time I see her. She wants to do things her way and she has no problem telling Bree what she thinks. She is one feisty little dog!
Cricket at 8 months. I haven't seen her in months, but she looks beautiful in her pictures. I will get a chance to see her this month at our agility trial. Her owners tell me she is doing great and just loving all her training and play time. I've seen several videos of her out walking in the coulees in Lethbridge . She is a lucky girl to have so many walks out with her buddies, and plenty of time learning fun things like agility too. I'm looking forward to seeing her in a few weeks.
Quinn at 8 months. This guy is a total lover! Every time I see him he wants to give me a big hug. He is cuddly and outgoing and he just wants to have fun. I don't think Quinn has a serious bone in his body. He is all about playing and socialising and loving life. He is busy too. With multiple classes a week in agility and obedience. Which is great for him because he has energy to burn.
My most recent pics of Snap are the ones in an earlier post from the Camrose Dog show. Snap is so much like her mother its scary. She looks the most like her and her personality is all Spryte. She is very serious and loves to work. She has great focus and drive. She is also a bit talkative like her mother. She likes to bark with glee during her rally runs. She takes direction really well in agility and loves the work. She will be out there tearing up the rings in no time.
I took the dogs out to the Sandy McNabb area of the Kananaskis today. It is just west of Turner Valley and has camping, hiking and day use areas. I haven't been out that way in many years. But today the sun was shining and it just felt like the right thing to do.
Here are some pics of the dogs from our walk:
Yesterday we attended our first sporting detection training workshop with Stacey Shaw and Karin Apfel. The workshop consisted of two groups, beginners who had basically never done any scent work before and then the advanced group who have started their dog on odour and are no longer pairing with food.
The beginner group mostly worked on building the drive to search. Food was placed in open containers and the dogs were encouraged to go "find" it. Once the dog had found the food the owner was to continually feed for several seconds to encourage the dog to stay at the box and to increase drive for the game. Once they had that figured out, odour (wintergreen) was placed in the box along with the food. The big tips for the beginners where to stay behind the dog while they search, feed multiple times and NEVER pull your dog off the box. Pulling the dog off can be interpreted as a correction to the dog, and you never want to correct them for sniffing. Handlers were told to verbally encourage their dog away from the box or use a food lure.
The advanced group worked on container searches with odour only in the box. The searches started with boxes in rows, and moved to scattered boxes, boxes on chairs, under chairs and against the walls. This taught the dog to expand their search area and to really start using their noses, instead of visually spotting the hides. One tip I likes was having two boxes side by side, one with odour and one without. If the dog comes across the blank box first they are likely to skip past the box next to it instead of searching it (probably thinking it is the same box, not two separate boxes). This exercise teaches the dog to be a little more methodical in their searches.
After the workshop the Designated Odour Tests took place. The test is a blind search with 12 boxes set up in rows, with one box containing the odour being tested. The handler takes the dog into the room, past the start line (the time then starts) and then has 3 minutes to find the box with the odour in it. When the handler thinks their dog has found the correct box the handler calls "Alert" and then the tester lets you know if you were right or not.
Wintergreen was done first with 10 teams entered. The DOTs started at 7:30pm and the dogs were obviously tired after a long day at the seminar. Only two teams passed the test. I am happy to say Strider was one of them. The picture to the left was my "wahoo" when the tester said "yes" we were successful! I'm just a little happy ;)
Spryte however did not pass. She was pretty frantic with her searching and ended up jumping over the correct box and indicating on the one beside it.
Pine was next with 6 teams entered. 4 dogs passed Pine, both Strider and Spryte were among the dogs who passed.
I then tested Strider and Spryte on Thyme. Strider passed and Spryte did not.
I came away with a few insights into my dogs. First off that Strider is way better at this game than I thought. I almost quite it with him because he seemed to be struggling. I thought he might be too old and his scenting ability diminished. He sure proved me wrong! I will definitely continue this game with him.
Spryte was a bit of a mystery at first. She is usually the dog who excels at it in training, and she had been doing really well at the workshop. But she just got more frantic by the end and was really not sniffing all that much during the DOTs. She was over aroused and it really impeded her scenting ability. On the drive home I was trying to figure out what had happened. After some thought my conclusion was she was just too hungry and could not focus on the task at hand.
She is the type of dog who needs to eat her meals on time. Sometimes we will wake up to Spryte dry heaving in the morning because she is hungry. She normally eats supper at 5pm but that was right in the middle of the workshop. So she didn't get supper. She had lots of treats, it's not like she had an empty stomach. But I think the anticipation of supper was getting her more and more anxious as the night went on. And by the time we did the DOT's she could no longer focus.
I know plenty of people who withhold meals before trials to build a bit of food drive before their runs. The idea being if the dog is hungry it will try harder. And sure that works for lots of dogs. But it does not work for Spryte. I've learnt that if it is meal time, it doesn't matter how many runs we might have left or if we are going into the ring soon, she needs to be fed. The food calms her down and lets her focus on her work. The lack of food makes her anxious, barky and more frantic. It's something I've noticed before in her, but it only just solidified for me after yesterday's workshop. I will not make this mistake again,
I am so thrilled to announce that Spryte finished her Companion Dog Excellent (CDX) title on Friday at the Red Deer Show. She finished with a score of 196. We lost a point for barking, which knocked us out of the ribbons. Oh well, the perils of running a Sheltie in Obedience!
I'm just happy to have it done. There were so many times over the winter were I thought it would never happen. Her dumbbell issues always seemed to be getting in the way. She didn't want to hold it, she would throw her head back, roll it around in her mouth while slinking back on her hind end, or she would just stand over it and not pick it up. We had a whole plethora of dumbbell issues. And it's not that she has ever had a bad experience with the dumbbell, I have used positive methods from day one with her. It's just she is not a natural retriever and the whole idea of fetching and HOLDING something in her mouth was her idea of sheltie torture.
We slowly worked through the issues with tons and tons of positive reinforcement for dumbbell work. The two biggest training tools I used to improve the exercise (I can't really say fixed, because it is not perfect and will take a lifetime of work to maintain it) was resistance work and placement of reinforcement.
The resistance work involved trying to gently pull the dumbbell out of her mouth, if I could pull it out then no reward for Spryte. If she held on to it and resisted my pressure then she got a "yes" and a cookie. This taught her to hold it tighter in her mouth and not roll it, otherwise I could pop it out and Spryte would miss out on a reward. Very upsetting for a dog that loves food so much!
The other tool I used was to always pull the dumbbell low and towards me, so that she was holding it almost against my leg and then I would reward in the same position. This taught her to keep her head forward and low, which directly interfered with her natural preference to hold her head up and back to roll the dumbbell around in her mouth. Simple training theory: Teach a desired behaviour that directly conflicts with the unwanted behaviour and suddenly the problem is fixed! (ie teach the dog to sit for petting and you no longer have a jumping on people problem).
So now we can get back to training multiple skills again without the stress of an upcoming trial. We will get back to training for Utility, definitely continue with our Nosework training, but mostly we can focus on agility again. I really haven't done too much agility this winter with my obedience goals taking center stage. I enjoyed the break from the sport and now I'm feeling refreshed and excited to get back at it.
Infact we had our first serious agility practise this morning, working on the skills from the Justine Davenport foundation course. It went well and I got some great work from Spryte. Backsides of jumps with me leaving, multiple wraps around jumps, threadles and some really nice flappy tappy (running dog past obstacles). I'll have to record one of our training sessions soon and post it on here.
Now off to do some nosework!
This weekend Wendy and I took Spryte and Snap up to Camrose for their CKC dog show. I was showing both shelties in the conformation ring and Spryte was showing in Open B in obedience.
This was Spryte's very first time in the Open ring and I was nervous! We have had some pretty rocky moments with her dumbbell retrieve over the last few months and there have been several times were I really wondered if she would compete in Open at all this year. I was worried that she might not be ready. But since our practises lately have been going really well I decided to go for it and see how she does.
Well I couldn't be happier with the results from this weekend. Spryte qualified in both her Open rounds with very nice scores of 198 and 197 and a third and fourth place finish. Spryte showed like a super star! She was confident and happy throughout her runs. I didn't have any issues with her dumbbell retrieves and we didn't loose any points for mouthing. I was so pleased! Wendy videoed the runs, I'll post the link on here when they are on line.
Unfortunately conformation was not kind to us this weekend. Neither dogs won anything and both got dumbed both days. Frustrating but that's how it goes. Spryte showed well. She amazed me with her versatility. One minute she was in the conformation ring gaiting beautifully and perfectly stacked, and the next minute we are racing to the obedience ring were she gives me a stellar performance. This is a dog that knows her job!
Snap handled her first show very well. She patiently stood on the table and endured all the fluffing and primping only requiring the occasional cookie to keep her spirits up. The ring was a little more intimidating to her and she was reluctant to gait out for the go arounds. However when it came time for the table she stood beautifully, and she stacked very nicely during the lineups. For such a young puppy she handled her first show very well.
After each day we took the girls out back to the field to run and play. Here are some pics of them just "being dogs"
There is this great agility group in Edmonton called Blast agility. They are a group headed by Justine Davenport, an amazing agility handler that has been on the world team too many times to count! The club prides themselves on their ability to handle the hardest of the international courses. They live for threadles, backsides and all sorts of tricky handling moves.
I'm up in Edmonton this weekend with the Shelties for a CKC agility trial. While up here I decided it would be great to get a training session in with one of these ladies. I booked a lesson with Jessica Patterson, a very talented agility handler and a member of this years world team. I wanted to work on international skills, the type of stuff you don't normally see in our AAC or CKC agility courses. But they are fun skills, challenging and worth learning how to execute properly.
It came down to 4 skills that the dogs need to be able to do independently:
Wraps, from any angle, with minimal support from me. I should be able to send my dogs and run away. Luckily wraps are something that we do work a lot. The only difference is that I need to work more on the multiple wraps that Sylvia Trkman does around a pole. My dogs need to keep on wrapping until I stop cueing it. This should tighten up my turns and teach Spryte how to bend her body.
Backsides of jumps. Again this is a skill we have been working on, and Spryte made me proud showing off her awesome backside abilities. I need to work more on having her do it across the face of the jump, and I need to be able to leave and have her complete the job no matter what my body position or motion is saying.
Running past obstacles while I call her name. Wow is that a hard skill! As a lot of you know, snooker is not our game! Having Spryte run past an obstacle and not take it is just not in her nature. But it is a skill that we are just going to have to learn. So from now on if I want her to take an obstacle I am actually going to have to name it on course ("over"). Where up until now I only speak if I need to get her attention and call her off an obstacle. The international style handling is almost the opposite. If I name the obstacle she can take it, if I'm calling her name, run past it too me. This will need work. LOTS of work.
Lastly I need to work on my threadle skills. I don't enjoy threadles. I would rather push my dog through a gap than pull her. It just works better for both of us. But now I need to work harder on those threadles. And to top it off I am supposed to do it all on one hand! Yikes, that will take some adjusting to as well.
We did some blind cross stuff too. But I was surprised at how little they use it. I was expecting most of the lesson to be on blind cross skills as that seems to be the rage right now. In their system they will use blind crosses when an obstacle is turning the dog already, otherwise they just stick to front crosses. The theory being that the dog notices it sooner and isn't caught off guard. Ensuring that tight turn and confidence from the dog. I was fine with that, as I still prefer front crosses on most turns.
Oh the other difference was that they avoid rear crosses whenever possible. I'm ok with this too as I prefer to be in front of my dog and have my dog follow me around the course. Their theory being that the dog should chase you around the course. This leads to faster dogs and more efficient handling.
So all in all it was a great lesson with lots of information, drills to practise and skills to perfect. Justine and Jessica are planning on coming down to Calgary for some lessons in the near future. I will definitely have to get in on those and try out my new skills on some tricky courses.
