Day 42 - Canine Sports Zone Run-Throughs

We didn't get to have a lazy Saturday morning, but our house guests are not to blame. Everyone was actually nice and quiet until the alarm went off this morning. It wasn't a trial day, but I saw on Facebook that Canine Sports Zone was offering run-throughs at 10:30. With Kizzy's recently resurfaced teeter issue, I figured we'd take any ring time we can get.

Feeding seven dogs is a little insane, but we have a system (basically it's business as usual with the visitors in the x-pen to stay out of the way). We worked on more pivots and pivots to the leg during breakfast. We also worked on sit pretty and spent some time trying to get Jedi to use his right paw to touch the target. Silvia suggested to work it from a sit and hold the target way far off to that side so that he practically has no choice. I think part of my problem is that I'm holding the target in my right hand and crossing his body with it. This is due to the mechanics of holding the target and clicker together, and holding the food in my left hand. It would probably help if I would switch this around. Jedi is doing better about offering the other paw, but it's always kind of a "two for one" deal because he always does the left first, then the right.

We hit the road at 8:00. Have I mentioned lately how thankful I am for Jedi being such a good little traveler? He is getting a little sassy when we stop and will bark a couple of times because he thinks surely it is time to get out to play, but it's brief and he doesn't keep it up if I don't get any dogs out. Once we get moving again he crashes and goes back to sleep.

We got to Canine Sports Zone at 10:00, so I had plenty of time to get everyone out to go potty. Jedi even got to come in before the runs started and we played some crate games and did some restrained toy retrieves. I introduced a fun fur ring toy that I bought the weekend I picked Jedi up and he thought that was pretty cool.

I put Jedi back in the van for the first set of turns, but I brought him in with Secret for her second go. I figure with summer coming we aren't going to be able to continue living out of the van, so he's going to have to be introduced to the idea of crating around all the hubbub of a trial. He was fine, until I took Secret into the ring to run. Oh the screaming! Secret actually stopped running and was looking around trying to figure out what was going on and who was trying to kill her puppy. I attempted to work through part of Jedi's lunch before taking them back out to the van, but he'd gotten himself so worked up that he wasn't that interested in food (he likely wanted to go out and drink a gallon of water, knowing him).

I had time to take Kizzy back outside before running Kaiser the second time, so I elected to bring Jedi back in with me to sit in the crate for Kaiser's turn. I did a brief pivot session with him before I had to get Kaiser out of the crate and he did well; his brain had come back. Jedi did worlds better during Kaiser's run. I heard him a couple of times, but it was absolutely nothing like how he'd carried on during Secret's runs. It will be interesting to see how he does next weekend, as I'm planning to crate inside at the NADAC trial. That crating area should be far enough away from the ring that he doesn't get so worked up.

After Kaiser was done with his turn I took him back out to the van and then brought Jedi back in to work through the rest of his lunch. We did more pivots, played on the balance disc that was sitting out, and when and did some bottoms on the raised plank that was sitting up by the ring. Jedi got to meet a bunch of new people, including the people who will be teaching the agility foundations class that we start on Tuesday. We're going to have so much fun with that! After lunch was gone I grabbed the long furry tail and we ran a couple of laps around the big ring. I really need to put more work into Jedi's wait so that I can get ahead of him a bit. We have less of a "chase the toy" and end up more with a "hold the toy as he runs alongside me."

It was a quiet ride home, which was long enough for Jedi to recharge his batteries. He might have gotten in a short nap this afternoon, but for the most part he's been going nonstop. There are too many dogs here to play with -- When one of them gets tired, he just moves on to the next one. I think he's been outside pretty much all day. I've closed the gate to the big yard to at least limit the trouble they can get into -- like the pools. He was absolutely soaked again one of the times I went out to check on him this afternoon. I thought puppies needed to sleep? Apparently not this one! We worked for dinner on the treadmill tonight since we haven't touched it for weeks. Jedi had no problems starting right where he left off and we made it up to 1.5 mph tonight.