Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Catching Up



I am going to try & catch up on the past weekend, at least what stands out about it :)

Amanda & I headed out for Calgary on Fri. after work to attend the Evelyn Kenny Dog Show. We had been invited to stay with friends at their house which was about a half hr outside of Calgary. What a great place they have!, first off it has a huge property & it is all fenced, whoo hoo!! After being in the car for 2 hrs we were able to let the dogs out to run around & play. They were quickly joined by Jan & Dave's 4 Shelties & a small Chihuahua/Dacshund X.
One of the things that is difficult for me when I travel to dog shows is not being able to exercise my dogs properly. When staying at hotels there isn't alot of greenspace around so you end up walking along sidewalks, usually with busy traffic near by.

Perkins is in my care right now so he got to tag along & play "show dog " He was sooo good! I was worried that he would find it all too much to handle. There is alot of nervous energy at shows & trials. I set up my ex-pen, put his bed in it & he & Kort shared the space. Perkins got to socialize with all kinds of people & dogs & took it like he had done this everyday :)

I had pulled Kort from the trials to re train his high jump, so all he had to do was Scenthurdle on Sat. night. I was nervous he might not run, especially after he wouldn't here in Lethbridge 2 weeks ago. I did not have to worry, he was awesome !!! All the team was, we won a few heats as well.
All my team mates, as well as Kort, came home with their Scenthurdle Dog titles ( SHD ) & points toward our Scenthurdle Excellent (SHDX ) title as well !!!! We were there to 9 pm though as Scenthurdle is always after Best In Show, I wish they would change that.
Again it was so nice to come back to a house rather then a hotel, the dogs got to run around & blow off steam after being at the show all day.
We had our own suite in the house, with our own entrance, it was perfect. Jan & Dave have invited us to stay the weekend of the 29th too. We are attended another trial & doing Scenthurdle as well.

I have been practicing with Kort on the high jump. His main problem is he doesn't want to release when I say "over", so we are working with low jump heights & I am putting a food bowl on the other side of the jump. I have him sit & watch as I put some food in the dish, I come back & give him the release word. It is working very well, he flies over the jump to get to the food, then flies back over to get his reward for a nice "front" as well. The next step will be to have him bring his dumbbell back over the jump to me. Hopefully he will have a better understanding of what I want in the ring.
We will find out in 10 days :)

3 comments:

WigglyZack said...

Sounds like you had a great weekend last week, congrats on all the accomplishments.

Squishy said...

I want to stay at your friends house too!!!! That sounds really nice! Good job for Kort. I never heard of putting food on the other side of the high jump. That will be interesting to see how he does. Good luck!!! No cute photos of Perkins?????

onecollie said...

no photos of Perkins , I know!!! I took one of him on my phone today, I will try to get it up on the blog for you :)